Dutch former anti-Muslim politician recounts his journey to Islam

By Gulcin Kazan Doger

ISTANBUL (AA) - A former Dutch far-right MP and right-hand man to Islamophobic politician Geert Wilders recounted his somewhat unlikely journey to converting to the Islamic faith.

Speaking to Anadolu, Joram Van Klaveren said that he was born in 1979 in Amsterdam to a devout Calvinist family and has been interested in different belief systems since his youth.

“As a youngster, I had some doubts about the Christian theology, for example about the Trinity, because sometimes I was kind of confused. If you were praying, are we praying to Jesus Christ? Are we praying to God the father? Are we praying to the Holy Spirit? I didn't know in a way,” Klaveren said.

Noting that he started university while seeking answers to his questions about Christianity, Klaveren said it was then that the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks happened.

“So that confirmed my ideas and later on (2004) Theo Van Gogh, the famous filmmaker here, he was killed by a guy who called himself a jihadi. So I thought, okay, all these people are crazy, I have to do something and that's why I joined the (Wilders’ Islamophobic) Freedom Party.”

He decided to write a book in 2014 to “warn people” about Muslims, he explained.

“So I wanted to explain to the people who voted for us but also other people, why we as the Freedom Party or me as a person. I thought that Islam was the biggest danger in the Netherlands and also in Europe and actually the whole wide world.”

But then he left the party, Klaveren said, due to arguments about Moroccan people in the Netherlands. “Well, I did, I think everything I could to fight Islam. But in 2014 I left the party because there was this argument about Moroccan people.”

“He (Wilders) said during a rally that he wanted less Moroccan people in the Netherlands. And he asked the crowds, do you want more or less? And everybody starts screaming less, less, less, less.”

He and Wilder argued about that and he left the party, he said, because “I was very anti-Islam back then still but I wasn't per se anti-Belgium or anti-Congo or anti-Moroccan.”

- The ‘real deal’ Islam

After leaving the party, while writing his anti-Islam book in 2014, some questions about Christianity popped up again.

“I thought, well, I have to reread the things that I thought I knew about Christianity as well, because I made a comparison between the concept of God in Christianity and in Islam. And in the end I thought, well, it's a little bit more logical what Muslims believe than what Christians believe on this concept of God.”

While doing research on Islam, he asked for help from English academic Abdal Hakim Murad, who was formerly known as Timothy John but changed his name after converting to Islam.

Underlining that previously he only read Western writers on Islam, Klaveren said that on the contrary Murad advised him to only read Islamic sources, and there was a large contrast.

“Then in the end I got like almost 2 Islams. Of course there’s just one Islam, but I got the Islam from the Orientalists, the Westerners, the people who were not Muslim, and (then later) the ‘real deal’ Islam as it (really) is.”

Klaveren also said he realized after a while that Islam was not a "lie" but he still had difficulty accepting it.

People around him did not respond well to his conversion to Islam.

“They were really shocked. They said ‘I can't believe it. It's unbelievable what happened.’ And some people thought I was sick and some people really thought I became crazy,” he said.

On rising anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe in recent years, Klaveren said one of the things that fuels Islamophobia is mass culture, mentioning how Arabs and Muslims are constantly shown as terrorists, especially in Hollywood movies.

“I think that's the biggest problem nowadays, you have media. And the media portrays (this) because negative news sells.”

“So the negative things like terrorist attacks and stuff like that, that's constantly repeating, repeating and that's of course shapes the mind of a lot of people who are already biased.”​​​​​​​