Why Western Women Are Converting to Islam

It took Megan Rice just three weeks to go from first opening the Quran to professing her belief that Muhammad is the one true messenger of God.

It all started on October 20, when Rice, a black American millennial-aged activist, announced on TikTok that she was reading the holy book for the first time.

@megan_b_rice I’m enjoying the read so far. #islam #thequran

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Perched on her couch in a gray sweatshirt, she said to her then-400,000 followers in a video that has since been viewed more than 5.3 million times: “It just seems that Palestinians have this ironclad faith even in the face of losing quite literally everything.”

Three days later she founded the World Religion Book Club, a virtual community now boasting more than 13,000 members, where she conducts live readings of the Quran. Israel’s response to the Hamas attack on October 7 is where her journey toward the religion “all started,” she told her followers on November 2.

@megan_b_rice Drop your tips in the comments. Also before y’all jump at my throat, the coffee is from Biggby. 😂

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By November 10, she first appeared on TikTok in a hijab, and the number of her followers had doubled. (It currently stands at 865,000.) The next day, Rice took her shahada, the Islamic ceremonial profession of faith, officially converting to Islam.

Rice is among a new swath of TikTok users—typically non-Arab, left-leaning Western women—who consider themselves “reverts” to Islam, based on the belief that all people are born on a natural path to Islam and therefore revert, rather than convert, to the religion.

There are currently scores of TikTok hashtags that include the word revert, including #WhiteRevert (1.6 million views), #BlackRevert (174K views), #JewishRevert (131K views), and #JapaneseRevert (278K). Biggest of all is the simple hashtag #revert, with 2.9 billion views, followed by #RevertMuslim (1.4 billion), and #MuslimRevert (525 million). At the same time, Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America, in which the terrorist justifies Al Qaeda’s hatred of the West and its attack on the Twin Towers, went viral this week on TikTok as young Americans declared admiration for his ideas.

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May 19, 2021

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