Islam may seem unstoppable, but a growing number of Muslims are converting to another religion - Colin Brazier

Those flyover billboards in London may suggest that Islam is a religious movement made unstoppable by demography, immigration and rigidity in a world of change.

And indeed, when many of us think of conversions between the two great monotheistic religions, it is Christians who adopt Islam who often come to mind. The boxer Muhammed Ali (Cassius Clay, as was), or perhaps the singer Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens).

But evidence, not from London - but Paris - should give us pause for thought. If last year is anything to go by, this Easter, three weeks from now, a fifth of all those being baptised as Catholic in the French capital will be converts from Islam.

That may not sound like a big number, but it’s a sign of a much larger (and under-reported) trend. In countries like Indonesia, the number of Muslims who are said to have renounced the Muslim faith of their birth is said to run into many hundreds of thousands.

In majority-Muslim countries, such as Indonesia, official figures are hard to come by. But according to research by the American missionary David Garrison, the global numbers are huge. In his book ‘A Wind in the House of Islam’, Garrison estimates that between 2 and 7 million Muslims have converted to Christianity worldwide since the beginning of the century. He describes it as “the greatest turning of Muslims to Christ in history”.

What happens to Muslims who abandon Islam? In relatively liberal Islamic nations, not very much. But in countries like Iran, apostasy is theoretically punishable by death, or - more likely - imprisonment and torture.

But that hard line may be counterproductive. A survey of 50,000 Iranians in 2020, carried out by a Dutch charity, found Iran probably has about 1.2 million converts from Islam to Christianity.

In a country of 90 million, that’s only a drop in the ocean. But, as a piece about Iran’s burgeoning Christian population in The Spectator this year made clear, it is happening quickly. Less clear is what impact, if any, this month’s military action against Teheran will have on the conversion pipeline.

In the 1990s, I visited an Armenian church in the Iranian city of Isfahan. Iran has long had a small Christian community. Thomas the Apostle is said to have converted the Persians in the 1st century AD before he was martyred in India. But it’s one thing to tolerate Christians who have only ever been Christians. Converts are a different matter.

And that is a dynamic with impacts far beyond the Persian Gulf. Prominent Christian voices have long argued that there is a quiet persecution - here in the UK - of Muslims who abandon Islam and adopt Christianity. Voices like that of the preacher Michael Nazir Ali, who was once destined to be Archbishop of Canterbury, until the Blair government reportedly decided otherwise.

I’ve been lucky enough to meet Bishop (now Monsignor) Michael several times. His Pakistani father was a Shia Muslim convert to Christianity.

That has made Michael sensitive to the treatment of Muslims, especially those of Pakistani heritage, now living in Britain. In the past, Michael has drawn attention to the abduction of women who convert to Christianity in Britain, only to be forcibly taken to Pakistan.

One charity estimates that there have been more than a thousand attacks each year in the UK committed against Muslims who have converted to Christianity.

Bishop Michael is not alone in pointing out that the blame lies with some Muslim leaders who, while happy to welcome converts to Islam, are less comfortable when confronted with a theological two-way street.

Which is why we ought to be nervous about the Government’s new plans this week to crack down on ‘anti-Muslim hostility’. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned before that any new legal protections for Islam risk a ‘chilling effect’ on freedom of expression.

Might any new legal interpretation of ‘Islamophobia’ make it more difficult to attract Muslim converts to Christianity? In a pluralistic democracy, citizens should be allowed to decide which faith they follow.

Whose God they choose. Under the new rules, what would happen to a Christian preacher who, in extolling the virtues of Christianity, openly considers the flaws of Islam?

For all that the Church of England revels in ‘inter-faith dialogue’, and seems happiest when the Islamic ‘call to prayer’ rings out in its cathedrals, both Christianity and Islam are proselytising creeds. They are in a global competition for souls, based on the conviction that only one faith offers a road to salvation. Both can’t be right.

As a Catholic, I respect other religions. But I don’t revere them. My reverence is reserved for the Christian faith. I would not actively seek to criticise Islam but, if pressed, would point to its inability to separate mosque and state as a systemic failing.

In Christianity, by contrast, there is a basic division between the temporal and spiritual based on the words of Jesus as reported in the Gospels: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God’s”.

The Government says it doesn’t want to hinder free speech. But it’s not beyond the wit of man to imagine a time when activist Islamist lawyers seek to bring prosecutions for hate crimes against anyone who shows insufficient respect for Islam.

As a Christian, I want a level playing field. I want Christian leaders to be able to state, loud and clear, that they want everyone to share the gifts of Christian belief - including Muslims. I accept that there will always be bad-faith actors. I know that not every Muslim conversion to Christianity is authentic. Some converts seek to game the asylum system: an Iranian who claims that, by adopting Christianity, they are more likely to face persecution in Iran, is not lying (even if their newfound faith is a deception).

As a Christian, I genuinely believe that ‘all men are my brothers’. And because of that equality before God, I also find it impossible to see why one faith should enjoy protections not enjoyed by my own.

The roadside billboards in London may suggest that Islam is in an inexorable growth stage in Britain. But the global traffic in Christian conversions tells a different (if rarely told) story of hope, love and fellowship.