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Muslims, by contrast, are more akin to Christians in their converting zeal, though, oddly enough, no exact equivalent for the English word "conversion" exists in Arabic. Most Muslims do not believe that formal declaration of the shahada ("there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger") is in itself a sufficient mark of authentic submission; one must also live according to the dictates of Allah and His Messenger in everyday terms, that is, according to the Prophet's sunna (normative practices), including the famous Five Pillars of Islam. Revitalized commitment to Islam among young Muslims in Great Britain, however, is not as likely to feature such a well defined path of conversion. Rather, as nominal belief gives way to a deliberate quest for "Truth," a variety of personal transformations take place as devotees immerse themselves in religious communities of support and friendship—enclaves not unlike the transplanted biraderi (kinship networks) of more senior first-generation immigrants. In a world of contradiction, multiplicity, and innovation, new identities are formed according to a complex interplay of social and religious forces and, only gradually, does an all-encompassing, clearly marked way of life emerge.
Throughout this vast survey of religions, it is the personal experience of the convert that preoccupies the contributors to Lamb and Bryant's volume. The editors promise to venture beyond William James' classic psychological description of conversion into the wider social and cultural arenas—contextualization, or "thick description," is a recurring theme—but the phenomenology of conversion provides the most vivid and, at times, baffling comparisons. Here scholars find themselves confronted with the irreducible nature of religious experience—irreducible despite the mediation of that experience by formative communities.
In the second half of the book, a number of biographical and autobiographical accounts of conversion, ranging from a charismatic Christian's take on Augustine's Confessions to the more open-ended quest of contemporary "Paganism" (or nature religion), are examined, each disclosing what Lewis R. Rambo calls a "deep-level learning" with its own rituals, language of transformation, and system of interpretation. The editors leave it up to the reader to make sense of all this, providing little integration with the theoretical essays located at the beginning of the volume. Rambo's seven-stage model of religious change, for example, is applied only haphazardly by authors who are busy privileging the voices of religious actors in a dizzying array of case-studies. The collection of essays, as a whole, is fragmented and uneven in quality—akin, say, to a session at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion—yet it satisfies the editors' desire to portray conversion as a widely varying phenomenon that is becoming more problematic in the context of emergent global pluralism.
To get a handle on just how complex the experience of conversion can be—and in a tradition where it is supposed to be definitive—Richard V. Peace's Conversion in the New Testament: Paul and the Twelve, Scot McKnight's Turning to Jesus: The Sociology of Conversion in the Gospels, and Gordon T. Smith's Beginning Well: Christian Conversion and Authentic Transformation provide especially satisfying reads. All of the authors are steeped in the subculture of North American evangelicalism, profess an evangelical faith, but are dissatisfied with evangelical definitions and practices of conversion. Peace thinks the church is muddled in its theology of conversion and, consequently, handicapped in its ability to make genuine disciples. As both a career evangelist and a professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary he is uniquely positioned to weigh experience against theory. McKnight, a New Testament scholar at North Park University in Chicago, objects to the way church-reared adolescents, including many of his students, are pressured to undergo a crisis conversion, ignoring prior faith and personality development. Smith, president of Overseas Council Canada, theologian, and part-time academic, expresses a similar concern in his theological critique of the Wesleyan-Holiness and Pentecostal paradigms and their excessively formal distinctions between conversion, sanctification, and the gift of the Spirit.
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