Religious conversion and terrorism

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A study by the Washington-based Nixon Center examined the backgrounds of 373 terrorists in Europe and the U.S., it found 35 of them (9%) were converts to Islam ^[1].

Some of the prominent converts include Dhiren Barot, Adam Gadahn, Muriel Degauque, Richard Reid, Bob Denard, Aukai Collins and some of the The Portland Seven.

Olivier Roy, a Paris-based authority on Islamic radicalism, believes that the common factor among violent Islamists — converts and non-converts — is that all are "born again." He writes:

"They broke with the religion of their parents to fervently embrace a new one, or a more fundamentalist stream of Islam, such as Saudi Arabian-based Wahhabism. He describes converts turning to jihad as following the well-established path of European rebels embracing an extremist cause.

"The people going to Al Qaeda today, a good part of them would have gone to the extreme left 30 years ago," said Roy, research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

Harvard sociologist Marc Sageman, author of "Understanding Terror Networks", disagrees ^[2]:

"If you look at the history of converts, they usually converted because their friends became Muslims, and when the group radicalized they radicalized along with the group," said Sageman, who studied the profile of 172 known terrorists.