My conversion to Islam has not been based on any extensive sutdy of the Quran nor of Islamic Literature, nor from any personal experience of Islamic countries, nor even from any such experience, mediated to me by relations or close friends of mine. As a child, I believed that Muhammed was a Prophet of God in the Old Testament tradition. Under what circumstances I first heard of Muhammad I do not remember. The Prophets and peoples of the Old Testament had build up a tradition of the true religion, and this was eventually given to the world by Jesus and Muhammad. But the history of Protestant Christianity since the time of Reformation is a history of division and of contempt for tradtion not its own. As for example, it seems always to have been extremely antagonistic to Islam and has never admitted Muhammad to have been genuine; in spite of the fact that Luther, the Keyman of the Reformaiton, the first to make Protestantism politically effective, almost certainly owed much to his studies of and contacts with Islam.

I had the feeling that not only Islmic religion but Islamic culture and civilization have been preferable to European Christian, and that many European public figures have looked on Islamic organisation as something superior, and have secretly sought to copy it. As for example, St. Thomas Aquinas, defender of the faith of the Catholice Church of Rome, who owed so much to the Arab philosophers Ibni Rushd and Al-Ghazali. Also, our own Charles II who with his (17th entury Englishmen) revolutionary policies of experimental science and religious toleration was certainly an Arabist and an admirer of the Empire of the Moguls as well as of that of the Bourbons. Since his time, Europe (and in that term I included both European America and European Russia) has developed the industrial revolution, the perfections of bourgeois civilization, and an unbroken tradition of metaphysical atheism, and in so doing has become the thing for the rest of the world to copy rather than itself the copier. What a pity! Most of it is better left uncopied. European Empires have sparwled themselves all over the globe, and have been almost invariably contemptuous and even brutal towards the cultures and tradtions of subjugated disastrously. Later European Empires, stupidly, have wished to copy it. Woe unto England if the British Empire is modelled on the Roman Empire! Protstant missionary effort has been associated with some of these Empires, and in the process seems itself to have grown not less divided but more so, not more magnanimous but narrower, and less adapted to current problems in its homelands.

During the years 1936-40, I met casually a few Muslims and was impressed with their confidence in their religion and its ability to stand up to all problems, old and new, social, intellectual, and scientific. I began to study Islam a little in 1942. I found that it is as I had always suspected; though distinct and definite. Islam is at the same time broad and magnanimous, a mighty tradition within which other traditions can survive and flourish; and which has always accepted Jesus as a Prophet and even allows him to be called "Kalimat Allah" or "Ruh Allah" "The Word of God" or "The Spirit of God" ~1(see below comment), Also, though Islam suffers divisions, those divisions are not like the divisions of Protestant Christianity. There is a unity in fundamentals and real brotherhood. So much was evident even from the outside.

In October 1943, I had the opportunity of meeting the Imam of the Mosque at Woking; three conversations with him made it clear to both of us that I should accept Islam. I did so on the occasion of the Eid-al-Adha festival on 8th December, 1943. I know that this is the most important step I have ever taken. I do not pretend to a scholarly knowledge of Islam. I have approached it by what might be called a study of compraative religion, in which I shall remain interested. But first I must learn to live as a good Muslim, and be able to recite at least a few Surah of the Quran by heart. And I believe that the chief problems of the British Empire remain quite insoluble without the religion of Islam.

Thomas S. Tufton
B.A.(Cantab.)




~1. The actual pharse in the Quran is "ruhum minhu" meaning 'a spirit from Him'. (Surah An-Nisa, 4:171). See also Surah Anbiya, 21:91--"min ruhina"
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