As for the simplicity of Islam's doctrine being an attractive option, I agree. Even Christian theologians admit that the Trinity is not easy to understand - Islam just makes the theology all the more simpler. A lot of former Christians who come to Islam like the idea that they can keep Jesus in a stable religious structure without all the Trinitarian ideas.
This is one thing I have to disagree with, with nearly everyone.
First, I don't think most people except privileged folks care or understand anything approaching the theological within Islam or EO or JW or whatever.
Second, I don't think Islamic theology is simpler, easier to understand etc. And I think it borders on heresy to suggest it does if you are a Christian. The trinity isn't a problem to be overcome in understanding God, the Trinity the only way God can make sense, at least that should be the Christian take on the matter.
Frankly, Islamic theology and philosophy I find to be terribly confused and overly sophisticated. No matter whether one agrees that God is the only cause in the created world or if one allows for secondary causes as well, once you have a monadic God, then it is extremely hard to understand or explain how multiplicity comes from perfect unity.
It makes no sense. It doesn't make sense when the RCs say it, it makes no sense when EOs flirt with their unknown monadic God of perfection, how one arrives at the many from the one is just long and complicated story of a gross metaphysical prejudice.
When you have the Christian statement that divinity is the result of particular relationships between particular persons, then you are on the way to making a bit of sense o relationship between the many and the one and how one can beget the other.
In any case, almost no one cares about any of this. Even people here, since the consensus is that something like Islamic theology is somehow simpler shows many here haven't begun to even consider the implication of that statement.
Really the OP is meaningless as almost no one converts in the US. And the group which does at a rate greater than other is black folks. And within that group, women.
The reasons are clear and touched on a little by Gebre and I think Stanley. But here are the real reasons, after living among black folks nearly all my life and around Black Muslims and Muslims who are black: dignity and masculinity (and thus femininity).
It is a group where men have been stolen from their midst for nearly a half a millenium by now. A group whose brand of Christianity is dominated by women (look who the first women ministers were in this country en masse and remain such today) and is rather effeminate and delivers a message at odds with the world around them.
I know. Cause I felt the same way although I couldn't quite articulate that aspect clearly at age eight or ten.
To the effeminate nature of the black church, we are now beginning to see the role which gay men have played in leadership and most white people ain't aware of how close all the R&B garbage you hear on the radio goes right out of the Sunday service. Men with eye-liner. Men crooning about being in love with Jesus.
Then comes Islam, first of the Black variety, then gradually Sunni.
It give back to men (those who are still alive at least) a way to live as men. And it offers the women who bear such an incredible burden in the world a way to live as a woman.
I ain't into sexual coding too much, but you live in the broken black world as long as I have and I think we need some coding for a while before breaking it down a bit.
And IME, which I bet is more than anyone else on this board, of having watched how Islam, Black or otherwise, changes lives in ghetto, it is nearly always for the good. Always. Always.
And the reason why Blacks "reverts" remain committed to Islam longer than the other typical class of converts, white middle class angsty reactionary types, is that they have a strong sense of community. White people float in ethnic enclaves no EO convert could imagine.
Black folks? They have a built in community within every mosque in an urban center and that community stretches outside of the mosque. Whereas most white reverts in America probably spend time on something oc.net for their connections.
A rambling rant. Not much time.
