📉 New British Study Shows Your Wars on Muslims Are Making Your Own People Embrace Islam
A new British study admits what Gaza already showed: young people who see injustice and media lies are turning toward Islam, not away from it.
Family,
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They Thought Gaza Would Scare People Away From Islam. It Did the Opposite.
For two straight years now, the governments of the United States, Britain, and Europe have helped Israel unleash hell on Gaza. They’ve armed it, defended it, and lied for it.
At the same time, their media has told you, over and over again, that Islam is the problem. That Muslims are dangerous. That “radicalization” is just one TikTok away. That if anything, the horrors in Gaza might make people hate Islam more.
But something else has been happening under their feet.
A new report out of Britain has quietly admitted what many of us have already been seeing with our own eyes: the more unjust and hypocritical the world looks, the more Islam starts to make sense to people who care about truth.
Researchers at the Institute for the Impact of Faith in Life (IIFL) surveyed 2,774 people in Britain who had experienced some kind of shift in their faith — coming to religion, leaving it, or changing it. They wanted to understand who is converting, why, and to what.
What they found is stunning if you’ve been listening only to the headlines, and obvious if you’ve actually been listening to people.
For those who converted to Islam, global conflict was the single most common trigger. Not partying. Not marriage. Not “they met a Muslim at work.”
Global war. Global injustice. Watching what is being done to Muslim communities, especially in places like Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and seeing through the propaganda.
The report’s author said that converts to Islam are especially likely to see the world as increasingly unfair, to be deeply skeptical of the media, and to be drawn to ritual and structure. In their words, Islam offers “a framework that offers discipline, moral clarity, and a sense of meaning in a world perceived as unfair.”
You don’t need a Ph.D. to understand that. You just need to be alive right now.
“The World Is Unfair. The Media Lies. I Need Something Real.”
Let me put this in plain language.
Imagine that you’re a young person in Britain today.
You watched the Iraq war lies. You see how Afghans were used and discarded. You’re watching Gaza live on your phone — kids pulled out of rubble, hospitals bombed, families starved — and then you flip on the BBC or Sky and hear the words “clashes,” “complex conflict,” “disputed death tolls.”
You hear politicians talk about “Israel’s right to defend itself” while thousands of children are buried with U.S. and UK weapons. You read about “Western values” and democracy and human rights… and then you see how those values evaporate the second the victims are Palestinian.
Something in you breaks. Or maybe something in you, that was already cracking, finally snaps into clarity.
You start to think: this system is rotten. The people preaching Christian civilization are blessing genocides. The media I was taught to trust is gaslighting me. The world feels unjust — not just a little bit, but at the core.
What do you do with that?
Some people shut down. Some drift into atheism: “If this is what religion produces, I’m done.” The report shows that Christianity in Britain has taken the biggest hit — not just losing people to other religions, but losing them into no religion at all. The Church of England is bleeding members. Christians are now less than half of the population for the first time in census history.
But some people — and this report says it out loud — don’t just walk away from faith. They start asking: “Is there a faith that actually matches what my conscience is screaming?”
And over and over, especially since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, that question has led people in Britain to the very faith they were taught to fear: Islam.
Islam Is Not Growing Because We Soft-Pedaled It. It’s Growing Because It Works.
According to the IIFL, for people who adopted Islam, two kinds of life events show up again and again: global conflict, and mental health struggles. They’re watching war and injustice, and they’re wrestling with anxiety, depression, and a sense that life as they were told it should be just… doesn’t hold.
They are also, the researchers say, significantly more likely than people converting to Christianity to:
Distrust mainstream media
Feel that the world is increasingly unfair
Want ritual, discipline, and a clear moral framework
None of that surprises me.
Islam gives you a daily structure — five prayers pulled out of the chaos, a way to center your life around something other than your feed. It gives you a clear, unapologetic stance on justice. It names oppression as oppression. It doesn’t pretend the world is OK when it obviously is not.
And when you actually believe that Allah is watching, that there will be an accounting, that the people who drop bombs and the people under those bombs will both stand before the same Judge, it changes how you see everything.
To young people who feel like the world is a rigged game, that combination — of ritual, discipline, and a God of justice — is not scary. It’s a lifeline.
That’s not theoretical for me. That’s my life.
I Know Exactly What These New Converts Are Feeling
A few days ago, I wrote something from my heart — pain meds and all — about how embracing Islam is the best thing I’ve ever done. Better than the day I met my wife. Better than the day we got married. Better than having kids. Better than the biggest wins of my career.
I knew when I said that out loud that some people would think I was out of my mind. But I also knew some people would feel a tug in their chest, like, “Wait… if he’s this deep in the fight for justice and still saying that, maybe something is going on here that I don’t understand yet.”
I came to Islam through years and years of seeing how brutal this world is — to Black people here, to Palestinians and Afghans and Iraqis there. The more I saw, the more I needed something that wasn’t soft, that wasn’t vague, that wasn’t a chaplain to empire.
Islam gave me that.
So when I read that British converts to Islam are two and a half times more likely to be drawn to ritual, media-skeptical, and justice-minded, I feel a sense of recognition. These are my people. They are coming to this from the same direction I did: not because everything is fine, but because everything is not fine, and they want a faith that doesn’t lie about that.
Britain Isn’t Becoming “Secular.” It’s Reaching for Something True.
The British press loves to talk about “secularization,” about how the country is moving past religion. But the IIFL’s own conclusion gives away the game. Britain isn’t just losing religion. It’s recomposing it.
People are moving away from inherited, institutional, cultural religion and toward forms of faith they actively choose because those faiths do something in their lives. They are drawn to practices and communities that help their mental health, give them structure, and make moral sense in a collapsing world.
The largest single shift in their survey was away from religion altogether — 39 percent became atheists. Christianity, in particular, recorded the heaviest outflow; nearly half of all those who left a faith left Christianity, usually into no faith rather than another religion.
At the very same time, Islam is pulling in people who are paying attention, who see through the spin, who are looking at Gaza and saying, “If this is what the people in charge of my society defend, I need something else.”
The study’s author was careful, academic, diplomatic. But if you read between the lines, they are basically admitting that a lot of people in Britain now see Islam as the only serious moral alternative on the table.
Family, if my trying to make sense of this moment in clear, honest language helps you — whether you are Muslim or not, whether you are in Britain or not — I’m asking you to help me keep doing this work. Please click here to become a member so that The North Star can stay free to the people who need it most, and so that we can keep talking about faith, justice, and truth without asking permission from anybody’s institution. And if you’re able to support this more deeply, please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
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I have been following you since I was Christian, and this truly resonates with me. Morality has always been core to my faith. My Christian faith led me to leftist politics. My leftism led me to Islam.