Lifestyle Conversions to Islam and the Attraction of the Political Exotic.

Andrew Brown writes on Lauren Booth's conversion to Islam that,

There is quite a lot that could be said about anyone who converts to Islam in Iran under the impression that it is less inhumane than New Labour, but as a piece of theatre, Lauren Booth's conversion could hardly be beaten.

Conversion....is also always a political and social act, a statement about where you fit into the world. To convert is to announce your allegiance to a new tribe, or a new idea of humanity.

Lauren Booth is not "nutty" but neither is this act of conversion much to do with religion but as more of a lifestyle option. As Booth put it in A Daily Mail interview, after she spoke of her "holy experience” whilst visiting the Fatima al-Masumeh shrine in the city of Qom, something that hit her like a “shot of spiritual morphine”,

‘Now I don’t eat pork and I read the Koran every day. I’m on page 60. I also haven’t had a drink in 45 days, the longest period in 25 years,' she said.

'The strange thing is that since I decided to convert I haven’t wanted to touch alcohol, and I was someone who craved a glass of wine or two at the end of a day.’

The move is partly political and more based on a rejection of what she does not like as opposed to what she does.

Booth converted as part of the usual pathetic quest for some form of identity which Islam obviously offers in a bleak, atomised and deracinated Britain that depends for its consumer lifestyle, it is thought, on the subjugation of Muslims. Its a spiritual quest perverted into self indulgent identity politics.

By conflating all Islamist causes into one global form of revolutionary and emancipatory kitsch, the attraction of middle class women like Booth to Islam is really more to do to with a fetish for the political exotic, the sort that pulled in women to extol Cuba and handsome guerillas as Che Guevara in the 1960s.

Booth was given a Palestinian diplomatic status by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in 2008 claims that she now covers her head with a hijab when she leaves the house and prays five times daily. Booth did not exclude the possibility of wearing a burka, even though its not part of Islam itself.

Booth was already a member of the "political religion" that is the Islamo-Trotskyist hybrid Respect, but with the split with the SWP, Booth has moved more to the more ostensibly Islamist wing as did that other halfwit Yvonne Ridley after being captured by the Taliban back in 2001.

The conversion is due to the usual mixture of careerist motives ( she works as does Galloway for Iran's state network Press TV ) and as an act of repudiating her civilisation and culture more than through any real acceptance of Islam. It makes for good propaganda for Iran, which is what Press TV is about.

Both Ridley and Booth work for Press TV and are prominent in RESPECT. This is the party that Ridley claimed was “Zionist-free” in 2006 and who described Israel as “that disgusting little watchdog of America that is festering in the Middle East”. She could have said satellite or client without using this lurid language.

Ridley opined “If there was any Zionists in the Respect Party they would be hunted down and kicked out. We have no time for Zionists”.

There is no reason why both US foreign policy and Israel's actions cannot be condemned whilst at the same time condemning the inhumanity of the repressive aspects of Iran's regime. The reason Booth and Ridley do not is due to the mental vice defined by Orwell as "transferred nationalism".