22.08.2013
Liberation
Following the riots in Trappes and the death of a French Muslim jihadist in Syria, the question of Muslim converts who are commonly associated with religious radicalism in mainstream media has been brought back to the forefront of the French media landscape. The research director of the CNRS France and expert in Islam, Franck Frégosi, was interviewed in a recent issue of the French daily Liberation to discuss the history of Muslim conversions in the West.
In the interview Frégosi explains that there have been conversions to Islam in the West ever since Islam came to exist. The means of conversions differed and were as plural as the types of Islam that were adhered by its devotees. He critiques that the media today acts reductively by solely being interested in the conversion of people to a fringe fraction of Islam, namely the kind that interprets Islam literally from the readings of the Quran.
