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17 January 2008.
I have recently added Islam in Europe as another link to my blog roll. A recent post from there caught my attention, in view of the convert stories I have written about here and here.
Belgian converts are having a hard time following the Arabic in the cities' mosques, and have decided to open their own mosque with Flemish as the principal language.
Rates of converts are pretty high, with the Antwerp Imam seeing to one to two converts every day. Now this could be an exaggeration by the Imam, but even one to two every week is pretty high.
According to Islam in Europe, there are 150 Muslim converts in Flanders (seems a little low). But numbers are growing, and these dedicated new Muslims want to get into the business of worshiping as fast as possible.
What is more interesting, though, is that more than half of the citizens of this Antwerp suburb, where the mosque is being established, are Muslim.
My argument all along has been that with more Muslims in a certain location, the more likely the non-Muslim population is going to get influenced by them. You cannot get a sufficient number of converts to build their own mosque without this influential presence in the first place.
