Introduction

Abstract

Hassan Butt, a twenty-five-year-old man from Manchester, helped recruit Muslims to fight in Afghanistan. Just like most of the [July 2005] London bombers, he is a British Pakistani who journeyed from rootlessness to radical Islam: “I grew up in a very open-minded family; there are only four of us. My parents never made us pray, never sent us to the mosque, which was very different from the average Pakistani family who would make sure that the child learned something. I learned absolutely nothing.”

There is no happiness in the world comparable to that of the experience known as conversion.

(Robert Hugh Benson, an Anglican convert to Catholicism, 1903).¹