Conversion Narratives Research Articles

A History of Christian Conversion and Other Conversion Models: a Review Essay

The review essay starts out with an overview and brief evaluation of A History of Christian Conversion by David W. Kling. It then focuses on a few examples of conversion narratives depicted in this volume and examines these conversion stories in light of contributing factors discussed by Kling as well as in the author’s own model, also touching on Lewis R. Rambo’s work. The essay concludes with a few general thoughts on how Kling’s work could be extended.

Conversion to Islam: Competing Themes in Early Islamic Historiography by Ayman S. Ibrahim

Reviewed by: Conversion to Islam: Competing Themes in Early Islamic Historiography by Ayman S. Ibrahim Mohammad H. Faghfoory Ayman S. Ibrahim, Conversion to Islam: Competing Themes in Early Islamic Historiography Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, Table of Contents viii–ix, acknowledgments xi, Note on transliteration xiii, Conversion topoi xv, Muslim Historians under the Abbasids xvii, Glossary xix+246 pages, Primary Sources Authors 247-253, Works Cited and Index 265–291. In this thought provoking, meticulously researched, and clearly written book, Ayman Ibrahim demonstrates the interplay between history and historiography. He analyzes different aspects of conversions during the first three centuries of Islam, as represented in historiographical accounts. As such, the book contains research on conversions, not necessarily as they occurred but how Muslim historians understood and described the process of conversions. Naturally, conversion meant different thing to different people and social groups. In a long introduction, Ibrahim describes the framework of his approach where he also gives a detailed analysis of previous studies on conversion. He challenges the views of scholars who underestimate the significance of historiographical sources, and instead relied on non-historiographical sources such as biographical dictionaries, geographies, belle letters, and legal texts or addressed a specific region. The fact is that those earlier studies are unique in their own ways. If there is an issue with their approach it is not because those engaged used non-historiographical or “wrong sources” as Richard Bulliet wrote, but in their treatment of the vast world of Islam as a monolithic and homogenous region, rather than a world comprised of diverse peoples, cultures, languages, historical experiences, and ethnic or linguistic identities. To complement those studies, Ibrahim states that his book “is the first scholarly inquiry to trace, identify, and analyze conversion themes in Islamic historiography during the first three centuries of Islam.” Ibrahim regards Islamic historiography in general and that of conversions in particular as the product of the mind of the historians whose ability to record the events of their time was subject to political, religious, and social considerations. Therefore, rather than recording the events as they unfolded, historiography became “a tool devised to form the historical memory of the [End Page 88] faithful rather than as a precise sketch of the past.” As a result, narrating conversions reflects more than simply change of religion by some, but “the interaction between the historian’s agenda and the vibrant political and sectarian contexts at the time of writing.”1 In this feature lies the weakness as well as the strength of the historiographical narratives of conversion. There are some important questions to ask regarding early conversions. Who were the earliest converts to Islam and why did they convert to this new religion? What were the motivations of different people to convert? What was the role of social, political, and economic factors in conversions? How different and/or similar were conversions of people in different geographical regions? What part faith in Islamic doctrine that inspired a desire for piety among people played in the process of conversions? Ibrahim provides answers to these questions by classifying the converts into six groups in accordance with the time and circumstances of their conversion, their motivations, and the degree of sincerity or lack thereof among converts. The groups include the earliest coverts (awa’il), notables and chiefs (wujaha), those who performed a good deed after embracing Islam (hausn islam), those who accepted Islam after they were defeated in 8/629 when the Prophet conquered Mecca (tulaqa), and finally those who negotiated conversion in return for financial incentives from the Prophet (mu’allafa qulubuhum), and the People of the Book.2 These narratives enabled the community to construct a value system and develop criteria to judge the quality of the faith of the converts. Hence, as Ibrahim states, the new converts’ faith was assessed by virtue of their intentions, sincerity, deeds, material expectations, and political compromise.3 These themes can be identified in all phases of the period under investigation during the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates even though the emphasis on each theme shifted from one theme to another at each phase. It is safe to assume that during the time of the Prophet and the period...

Defoe’s Unchristian Colonel: Captivity Narratives and Resistance to Conversion

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this text Defoe deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia.

Translation and Polemics in the Anti-Jewish Literature of the Muslims of Christian Iberia: The “Conversion of Kaʿb al-Aḥbār” or the “Lines of the Torah”

Abstract Muslim anti-Christian and anti-Jewish polemics from Christian Iberia often include references and quotations from the Qurʾān, the Torah, and the Gospels. Even when they are composed in Romance, the script used in their writing is often Arabic. This article discusses the conversion narrative of “the lines of the Torah,” in which translation is halfway between the faithful rendering of the original and its interpretation by its Muslim scribe. I show in this paper that the ability to convey, or so to speak, to “unveil,” new meanings makes translation a powerful means to convert the opponent and to strengthen the faith in Islam. The analysis aims to shed light on the intellectual and social milieus of “the lines of the Torah,” and deals with translation in other anti-Jewish Muslim writings from the Christian territories: the “Jewish Confession,” or Ashamnu; the chronology in Seder Olam; and the lengthy Muslim anti-Jewish polemic of Taʾyīd al-milla (The Fortification of the Faith or Community).

Rediscovery of Older Adults’ Life Wisdom: Application of Narrative Therapy Using a Tree-of-Life Metaphor

Using narrative therapy with a “Tree of Life” metaphor, practitioners facilitated 144 Hong Kong Chinese older adults through 24 4-session groups to rediscover their preferred identity and celebrate their lives. Thematic analysis of their ‘Tree of Life’ drawings revealed five themes: 1) Insights about their abilities, intentions and problem-solving capabilities; 2) A sense of purpose and commitment to their preferred identities; 3) Realization of personal values and beliefs; 4) Reconnecting sense of agency and hope; and 5) Cherishing life as a journey to celebrate their wealth of wisdom for common good. Despite confronting life challenges, participants re-author their sense of self consistent to their preferred identity, and renew purpose of life through drawing and dialectic narrative conversations. These findings depict a deeper understanding of older adults’ lives, and have significant theoretical and practical implications for health and social care professions to advance a constructive perspective to late life development.

What dialog is absent from constructed dialog?

Abstract This paper is concerned with constructed dialog in conversational storytelling. Based on Clark & Gerrig’s (1990) demonstration theory, its focus is on what is absent from constructed dialog. To determine what is absent, a comparison is made between constructed dialog tokens and utterances in conversation. The inquiry uses both quantitative and qualitative methods. It is based on the Narrative Corpus (NC; Rühlemann & O’Donnell 2012), a corpus of conversational narratives extracted from the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC), and its systematic annotation of constructed dialog (that is, direct speech introduced by a quotative and free direct speech without any introducer). The quantitative comparison of verbalizations used in constructed dialog as opposed to verbalizations used in conversational utterances demonstrates that a particular utterance type is significantly missing from constructed dialog: the continuer utterance, whose basic function is to exhibit an understanding that a form of ‘telling’ by another speaker is going on. The qualitative analysis, based on a subset of storytellings from the NC that were re-analyzed acoustically and re-transcribed using Jeffersonian conventions based on the Audio BNC (Coleman et al. 2012), reveals a stark mismatch between the commonness of tellings in talk-in-interaction and their uncommonness in constructed dialog. The absence of continuers from constructed dialog is discussed against the backdrop of indexicality. I argue that continuers share the key properties of indexicals – semantic vacuity and an existential relationship with the ‘thing’ indicated – and can therefore be seen as indexicals themselves. As indexicals, intrinsically connected to the speech situation of their utterance, continuers cannot be included in constructed dialog, which typically occurs in a different speech situation with different interactional parameters. Finally, I offer initial thoughts on the underrepresentation of telling sequences in constructed dialog.

Narrative as a Radial Category

Abstract Narrative is a complex and elusive category of cognition, culture, communication and language. An attempt has been made in this article with a large enough theoretical scope to consider the possibility of treating narrative as a radial category. To this end, the definition and characterisation of radiality is provided together with explanation of what it might mean to apply this term to the complex language-discourse unit of narrative. The prototype of this category involves features, functions, and ICMs. It has multiple representations with only family resemblance, involves more obvious exemplars and variable abstract knowledge structures. In particular, section one looks at the radiality question and what it might mean to think of the meaning of narrative in general. Section two focuses on centrality. Sections three to five deal with schematic representations of narrative and provide examples of extending the most subsuming schema of the Action Chain Model from cognitive linguistics and Labov’s Narrative Schema to various other types of conversational narrative, children’s dramatic plays, tactical narratives, story rounds, jokes, poems, current news articles on the Internet, images, and advertisements.

Family Engagement and Latine Children’s Early Narrative Skills

The present study examined the concurrent relations between culture-specific dimensions of family engagement for low-income, Pan-Latine families and children’s narrative ability, a critical predictor of reading success. One hundred seventy-five children and their caregivers were recruited from seven Head Start centers in a large city in the northeastern region of the US. Family engagement was assessed through a culturally grounded instrument (McWayne et al. 2013; McWayne and Melzi 2014) that measures parental behavior along one school-based and three home-based engagement dimensions. Children’s spontaneous narrative productions were elicited through two tasks: a picture-elicited and a conversational narrative task. Findings showed that family engagement dimensions were differentially related to important aspects of children’s narrative production, even after accounting for child and parent demographic characteristics. Specifically, families’ efforts to provide stimulating experiences for their children beyond “the basics” (i.e., Supplemental Education) were significantly related to children’s ability to tell longer narratives during the picture-elicited narrative task. In addition, parents’ active school-based engagement (i.e., School Participation) was significantly associated with children’s ability to narrate independently in the conversational narrative task.

Children’s narrative interactions

Abstract This contribution traces which aspects of narrative acquisition have been emphasized in 30 years of Narrative Inquiry. It then uses this synopsis as a starting-point to present a theoretical and empirical framework which can be characterized by some of the aspects that have attracted less attention in the journal so far. The summary of this consistent interactive approach and some of the results of about 40 years of respective research, based on different corpora, should support the idea that taking up these aspects is worthwhile. Investigating a broad range of age-groups and comparing a variety of contexts, including peer-interaction and classrooms, as well as different genres such as conversational narratives of personal experience and fantasy stories, with a perspective on inter-individual differences, not only expand our knowledge about narrative acquisition, but lead to a new coherent resource-based explication of central concepts such as narration, competence and acquisition.

Unsettling the Self: the Paradoxes of Narrative Identity in Christian Testimonial Practice

AbstractBorn-again conversion offers the paradoxical promise of self-transcending self-transformation, which takes narrative form when converts attempt to recount their experiences: how to tell a story of self-transformation, in which oneself is neither the author nor the agent of change? Existing scholarship suggests that conversion narratives work insofar as they resolve underlying paradoxes and stitch together a sense of coherent selfhood. This paper tacks in the opposite direction: the analysis focuses on the tendencies of conversion narratives to blur, blend and double over categorical bounds of selfhood, highlighting paradoxes rather than looking for their resolution. The paper contends, therefore, that conversion narrative practices facilitate converts’ experience of conversion, not only insofar as they resolve paradox and stitch together coherent identity, but also insofar as they cultivate ephemeral experiences and explorations of narrative paradoxes that are inherent to—though often hidden from—most any attempt to find and feel identity.

“But what about the beginning?”

Abstract This mixed model study first implemented a quantitative approach to investigate the structural coherence of the narratives that 3- to 6-year old children construct with and without their mothers. We then employed qualitative analysis to identify and categorize strategies that mothers used to scaffold their children’s developing sequencing skill during narrative conversations. Analysis of 233 co-constructed and 209 independent past-event narratives from 65 mother-child dyads revealed that the children produced narratives with a range of structural coherence both independently and with maternal assistance. Chronological narratives were the most common structure produced with and without assistance, but leapfrog narratives persisted in the dyadic context. Five distinct patterns of maternal strategies that provided chronological structure to their children’s leapfrogs emerged. We discuss the ways in which the maternal strategies identified promote early literacy skills through scaffolding and modeling school-like literacy practices in everyday conversations.

‘The words has been immigrate’: Chronotopes in context-shaping narrative co-construction about Taiwanese loanwords with Taiwanese Americans

AbstractThis study argues for the analytical validity of the chronotope in research on context by examining a conversational narrative between Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans. It offers an endogenous view of context in the sense that chronotopes are anchored by how participants invoke specific time-space representations relevant to the active shaping of context. Furthermore, it adds a historical dimension to the understanding of context as multi-layered in meaning. In the data, participants’ discussion of Taiwanese loanwords creates three connected chronotopes that draw on Taiwan's transnational history for the narrative co-construction. Finally, the chronotopic analysis demonstrates how identities emerge as time-space coordinates—seventeenth-century Dutch in Taiwan and twenty-first-century Taiwanese in the US—and are used as resources to map a shared background with a Taiwanese origin. The study applies the notion of the chronotope outside of the interview setting and contributes to a more laminated theorization of context in naturally occurring conversation. (Chronotope, context, narrative, historicity, Taiwanese American, identity)*

Conversion from British Hinduism to Christianity: an anthropological study

ABSTRACT This paper examines conversion from “Hinduism” to Christianity in India and in the UK. To date work in this area has focused upon Hindu–Christian conversion among Hindus in India largely focusing upon Dalits. It explores the experience of Hindu Christian conversion through five case studies and focuses upon antecedents and consequences of conversion. It stresses the central role of profound religious experiences in those converting and the resultant disharmony among families and the wider Hindu community. While structural factors may be important for some of these individuals, all have undergone a form of metaphysical and intellectual conversion. The conversion narratives cited suggest that conversion experiences are beneficial psychologically in terms of providing a new sense of meaning, facilitating coping and increasing contentment.

From Confusion to Conversion

Submission (2015), a novel in which a Muslim political party is elected to govern France, has been widely interpreted as part of a ubiquitous discourse of “declinism” in contemporary French intellectual culture. The novel has been accused of complicity with a reactionary politics favoring a return to strong patriarchal authority and national pride, while the narrative of the triumph of political Islam is frequently interpreted as a thinly veiled act of Islamophobia. This ideological interpretation is, however, complicated by the bad faith of the novel’s unreliable narrator, and by the ironic treatment of his narrative voice. By taking the elusiveness of this narration more fully into account, it becomes possible to read Submission as a tentative — if never unambiguous — narrative of religious conversion. To this extent, the treatment of Islam in Submission can be seen as consistent with the persistent but ambivalent role of religion in Houellebecq’s wider work.

Being a ‘White Muslima’ in the Netherlands Ethnicity, Friendships and Relationships—The Dutch Conversion Narrative

This article, which is part of a larger ongoing project, examines relationships, friendships and levels of belonging in Dutch society, as well as in the Dutch Muslim community in narratives of women converted to Islam. The ethnicity of these women is always visible as ‘native Dutch’ and shapes their conversion narratives. This ethnography raises a number of questions that form the basis for the analysis presented here: How do Dutch Muslim women shape their identity in a way that is both Dutch and Muslim? Do they incorporate Dutch parameters into their Muslim identity, while at the same time weaving Islamic principles into their Dutch sense of self? The findings show how the conversion narrative can be mobilized by Dutch Muslim women to serve identity formation, levels of belonging and personal (religious) choice in the Netherlands, where Islam is largely considered by the non-Muslim population to be a religion that is oppressive and discriminatory towards women and is associated with foreignness and being the Other. It is argued that, in the context of being Dutch and Muslim, these women express their freedom of choice, which is manifested through friendships, relationships and marriages (Islamic vs. civil), while their ethnicity and conversion experience is a visible component in their identity. In so doing, these women push the limits of the archetypal Dutch identity and are able to criticize Dutch society while simultaneously stretching the meaning of Islam and being critical of Dutch Muslim communities to craft their own hybrid identity.

Hagiography as Source: Gender and Conversion Narratives in The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church

Drawing on the work of Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, this essay proposes utilizing hagiographies from the The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church, a fifteenth-century Ethiopian collection of saints’ lives, to explore various aspects of conversion. Other scholars employ a similar approach when analyzing hagiographical literature found in medieval Europe. While acknowledging that these texts do not provide details about the historical experience of conversion, they can assist scholars in understanding the conception of conversion in the imagination of the culture that created them. This essay specifically focuses on the role of women in conversion throughout the text and argues that, although men and women were almost equally represented as agents of conversion, a closer examination reveals that their participation remained gendered. Women more frequently converted someone with whom they had a prior relationship, especially a member of their familial network. Significantly, these observations mirror the patterns uncovered by contemporary scholars such as Dana Robert, who notes how women contributed to the spread of Christianity primarily through human relationships. By integrating these representations of conversion from late medieval Ethiopia, scholarship will gain a more robust picture of conversion in Africa more broadly and widen its understanding of world Christianity.

Between sacred and profane: pathographies as renewed conversion narratives

ABSTRACT Although nowadays autobiographical texts are not often embedded in religious frames, they still include some remarkable spiritual features, as pathographies in particular show. Literary criticism has interpreted these memoirs as a narrative response to changes in attitudes towards both spirituality and the illness experience. A fascinating hypothesis related to this context is that pathographies may have replaced the conversion accounts of the Christian tradition; they could be interpreted, in many ways, as their contemporary counterpart. However, even if religion no longer offers complete answers to the questions that arise when we are ill, its cultural influence is still recognisable. It can be latent, challenged, declared, or rejected, but its presence is undeniable, as the persistence of a certain dolorisme, which has religious roots, suggests. This essay aims to analyse the continuity between old and new paradigms by focusing on some autobiographical works about illness written by French authors. Starting from the plot structure, this textual inquiry will highlight patterns, variations, similarities, and original formulations in the narrative process of giving illness meaning within a religious framework.

Muslim Televangelists in the Making: Conversion Narratives and the Construction of Religious Authority

AbstractThe rapid proliferation of TV channels in Indonesia in the 1990s provided crucial opportunities for a new type of Muslim preacher to rise to national fame: relatively young men lacking substantial formal religious schooling but able to project charm on screen. Four of these young televangelists became true megastars, topping the national charts in the first decade of the twentieth century. Since they became nationally famous at a young age, without the conventional markers of authoritative knowledge of Islam, the question is, what kind of justification did they use to establish their authority as preachers? Analyzing the rise of four young preachers who achieved nationwide stardom in that period, Abdullah Gymnastiar, Arifin Ilham, Jeffri Al‐Bukhari, and Yusuf Mansur, this article shows that conversion narratives play a key role in building social acceptance of their status as preachers. These narratives take various forms with differing themes but all work to compensate for a lack of traditional markers of religious authority. Besides informally authorizing the transformation of these laymen into credible religious preachers, their narratives of miraculous spiritual transformation also shaped the specific themes of their evangelicalism. This article shows how transformation narratives authorize the four top television preachers of the first decade of the twentieth century, and demonstrate the power of those narratives to recast even youthful deviance into an asset in the youth religion market when woven into a story of divinely empowered personal change.

Capital, Conversion, and Settler Colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon

Abstract Viewing capitalism as emerging primarily from within the framework of empire rather than the nation state, this essay considers the relationship between capital, conversion, and settler colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872). It looks, first, at the novel’s critique of Wakefieldian organized settlement schemes as systems sustained by various forms of capital accumulation and free/unfree labour; and second, at its over-arching evangelical conversion narrative, which both frames and structures the main body of the text. The essay argues that, far from directing its satire wholly or even primarily towards metropolitan Britain, the novel enacts two circulating mid-nineteenth-century settler colonial anxieties: concerns about a perceived crisis of diminishing industriousness and economic exhaustion in colonial Australia and New Zealand, and concerns about the efficacy of British humanitarianism and missionary conversion. It considers the former in the context of the disruptions to settlement caused by the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s, and the latter in the context of missionary and humanitarian efforts to ameliorate conditions for Indigenous peoples from the 1830s onwards. The essay’s larger claim is that Erewhon presents capital and conversion as structurally interconnected mechanisms of an evolving Anglo-settler state in New Zealand. Radicalizing a tradition of economic critique of empire beginning with Adam Smith, Butler satirizes the idea of colonialism as an essentially liberal system by showing how much it is intertwined with exploitative practices of territorial expansion, dispossession, capital accumulation, unfree labour, missionary conversion, and racial assimilation.

The epistemics of narrative performance in conversation

Abstract This article investigates the flow of information in conversational narrative performance in light of research on the epistemics of talk in interaction and epistemic vigilance on the part of story recipients. Based on examples from a range of corpora, it reassesses the relationship between storytellers and recipients consistent with recipient design, and investigates cases of too little and too much information in narrative. Viewing narrative performance as sharing territories of knowledge provides new insights into the notions of telling rights and tellability as well as teller competence and credibility. The narrative performance may contain gaps and discrepancies along with clusters of copious information from which recipients must pick and choose to construct a dynamic narrative model to be tested against further information. In the communal presentation of family narratives, territories of knowledge merge, shared events are illuminated from separate perspectives, gaps in knowledge are filled, and evaluations are enriched.