According to the British Home Office about 30% of Muslim inmates are converts. A report titled Muslim Prisoners’ Experiences (June 2010) from the Chief Inspector of Prisons revealed that many prisoners are converting to Islam because “Muslims are excused from work and education while attending Friday prayers … others to obtain support and protection in a group with a powerful identity and for material advantages.” The study’s author refers to these prison converts as “convenience Muslims.”

The Prison Officers’ Association is worried about this “upward trend” in conversion to Islam in British prisons, and so they should be.

The conversions may also be a factor in the way Islam is taught in U.K. prisons (and I suspect in Western prisons around the world”) which is bound to make many of these “convenience Muslims” into permanent, committed believers.

The pen is mightier than the sword is not only a cliché but a truism. It is not bombs that will decide the fate of Western Civilization but words. Words like those found in The Muslim 100, a well-written, deceptively amateurish, powerful convincing argument to convert to Islam by an Imam to Her Majesty’s Prison Service; words like those found in Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice.

The fact that the seductive The Muslim 100 - The Lives, Thoughts and Achievements of the Most Influential Muslims in History by Muhammad Mojlum Khan is an extremely biased, highly selective, misleading and sanitized argument is beside the point. If you don’t know any better it is a compelling argument to become and remain a believer.

The Imam to Her Majesty’s Prison Service has a degree, not in Islamic Studies, but in Business and Social Policy from the University of East Anglia. He found a publisher (Kube Publishing, Publisher and Distributor of Books on Islam and the Muslim World), it would appear, not based on his academic credentials or his pedigree but on his ability to publicize Islamic orthodoxy to a trusting audience.

In Canada, it would seem, publishers don't want to have anything to do with writers on religion unless they are recognized experts and therefore can be trusted not to be overly controversial or to have mass appeal.

This may explain why the vast majority of non-Muslim Canadians remain ignorant about the Islamic world view and how that view is diametrically opposed to the morals, values and ideals that we have come to associate with Western Civilization including what Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University calls “the fragile exception.”

After centuries of strife, the West has learned to separate religion and politics – to establish the legitimacy of its leaders without referring to divine command. There is little reason to expect the rest of the world – the Islamic world in particular – will follow.

We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that political theology died in 16th-century Europe. We were wrong. It's we who are the fragile exception.