Moving in and out of Islam is an edited collection by Karin van Nieuwkerk, exploring the processes of moving toward and/or moving away from religion, in particular within Islam. This includes concepts such as conversion, deconversion, non-belief, apostasy, religious (dis)affiliation, and processes in-between. As the book title suggests, religious change is a process that is not always clear cut and has the possibility to be ongoing. Many of the chapters within the collection highlight that this may also be ambiguous, non-linear in its trajectory, and can be accompanied with doubt.
The collection is made up of sixteen chapters that are divided into five thematic sections. The introduction, written by the editor, and the first section “Conceptualizing Religious Change,” is a useful primer into the concepts and theoretical approaches within the field of conversion to Islam. It further gives an insight into concepts such as apostasy, deconversion, and disaffiliation. Other sections cover (de)conversion, race, culture, and ethnicity (section 2), transnational movements of people and organizations as well as intrareligious movements (section 3), narratives and experiences of moving out of Islam (section 4), and lastly, apostasy and deconversion (section 5).
While the majority of chapters are written from a Western context (including Western Europe, the United States and Canada, which are often the regions cited in the English-language literature on Islam and religious change), it is refreshing that some more underrepresented regional contexts are included in this volume. This includes Slovak and Czech converts to Islam (chapter 5), Tatar Muslims in Poland (chapter 7), trajectories of doubt among Egyptians (chapter 13), deconversion in Iran (chapter 14), and Lithuanian converts (chapter 15).
An important contribution of this book to the field of religious change is section 4 on “Narratives and Experiences of Moving Out of Islam,” which is a rather neglected area of research. The first chapter in this section is by Mona Alyedreessy and compares narratives of conversion with deconversion journeys of the same participants in the UK. The author considers “disaffiliation” to be part of the “consequences” stage of Rambo’s stage model of conversion, and further makes use of the role-exit stages of Ebaugh’s 1988 study of ex-nuns, to analyze the participants’ narratives (258). This chapter importantly links the concepts of conversion and deconversion, which often remain disconnected in the dominant literature on conversion.
Chapter 12 on ex-Muslims in Britain and Canada, provides us with an important alternative to the usual framing of ex-Muslims as “native informants” (282). Instead, Simon Cottee’s participants are “in the closet” (282) and their apostasy is not known to others, but for participants “Islam continues to be a central reference point” (290). The author also makes significant distinctions between terms such as apostasy, defection, and heresy, and importantly shows that there is a “possibility that one can be irreligious and yet belong to, or participate in, a religious organization” (301).
In chapter 13, van Nieuwkerk covers trajectories of doubt, skepticism, and nonbelief in Egypt, a Muslim majority country. Here, the author demonstrates that there is a range and flexibility within positions of disbelief and disaffiliation where atheism is not always a fixed state or even the final stage. This is contextualized through the author’s analysis of sociopolitical issues in Egypt, particularly the state media, and perceptions of atheism as grounds for moral panic in wider society.
The last chapter in section 4 stands out as the study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, in another Muslim majority context. The authors show that the deconversion narratives of their Iranian interlocutors have important similarities to narratives in Muslim minority contexts, and that “the rise of New Atheism is not merely a phenomenon of the Christian West; it has a more global effect” (356).
One significant oversight of the book is a lack of discussion on race in the context of moving in and out of Islam. The title of section 2 does include the word race, but while the included chapters mainly discuss ethnicity, culture, and religion, there is no explicit consideration of race, and studies do not include non-white participants. This is not to say that the contributions were not valuable. The chapter on Polish Tatar Muslims and the unique relationship of religion and ethnicity, as well as the chapter on white convert women and their negotiation of space within the Shia community, were particularly interesting. However, while the edited volume does not aim to represent all contexts or ethnic groups, it is surprising that there is no chapter on Black Muslim experiences, especially within the American context, considering the demographic makeup of the US Muslim community, and their extensive and rich history with Islam. Section 2 could have further provided a great opportunity to include contributions about religious transformation processes of people of color within a Muslim minority context.
Despite this critical suggestion, van Nieuwkerk has selected an interesting range of contributors who speak to the varied nature of “moving in” and “moving out” processes, which illustrates that these concepts are not fixed in how they are defined, experienced, and discussed in scholarly research. As suggested by the editor and the chosen book title, the use of “moving in” and “moving out” of Islam (as opposed to conversion and deconversion), emphasize the (ongoing) process and highlight the journey itself, rather than the people or a destination, not privileging one concept over the other. Moreover, the book fills an important gap by including non-belief and moving out of Islam to the academic study of religious transformation processes amongst Muslims.
This volume is of relevance to anyone interested in looking beyond the motivations for religious conversion to Islam and gaining a deeper insight into religious change over the course of people’s lives. It is a worthwhile read for academics, students, and non-experts, interested in the study of Muslims and contemporary Islam, religious studies, sociology, and anthropology.
Fatou Sambe is a PhD student in religious and theological studies at the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK, Cardiff University.
Fatou Sambe
Date Of Review:
August 11, 2021
