When I was in college at a large midwestern university, over twenty years ago, I befriended a young woman student from France, "Jacqueline". We had an interest in foreign cultures in common: I had studied in Europe, had many friends from overseas; Jacqueline had come to America to experience its culture. While in school she had met a man from Iran. She giddily gave me the day-by-day installments of the advance of the relationship - serious enough that she had traveled to Iran to meet his family. This was around 1984, after the hostage crisis in Tehran, but before any of the West could understand the influence and influx Islam would represent in coming decades. Jacquie was liberal, free-thinking, pretty, not shy. In typical French fashion she owned her femininity, her sensuality, and I suspect her sexuality, all without hesitation or shame. Even as young as I was then, I wondered how she would make the relationship work, and as smitten as she seemed with Persian culture, I wondered if she would be sucked into something her youth hadn't prepared her to resist or survive. It was a gut feeling - I was too young myself to identify specifically my misgivings - and I bit my tongue. We lost touch before I finished school, but even now she crosses my mind. . . I wonder where she ended up.

Years later, I was on a fast train headed for Paris through the French countryside. It was right after Christmas, and the trains were crowded with holiday travelers. My French husband and I ended up standing in the compartment between cars, with other young passengers who felt more comfortable moving around. We spent some time chatting with a lovely girl from Paris, her eyes flashing as she talked about introducing her Middle-Eastern boyfriend to her parents over Christmas. We talked about holiday feasts and good food, the important family and social rituals to the French at Christmas, all inherited through years of Catholic Christianity. I wondered privately how long her boyfriend would be accepting of her customs - whether one year she would have to choose between the joy of her family's celebration, and his world of Islam. When we all exited the train at Paris, her beau was waiting on the platform for her, and beaming, she stopped us and introduced us. He was polite and reserved, good-looking, affectionate with her. I said a private prayer that he would be what she hoped - no less, and no more.

I ran into the following story at Lewis Loflin's blog. It tells of a European girl who left family, Christianity, and eventually Europe, and became a suicide bomber. It also tells, chillingly, of developing trends amongst European girls marrying Muslim men and becoming involved in Islamic fundamentalist activities, sometimes to their own demise. It's worth reading as a example, and as serious food for thought.


Muriel Degauque is believed to be the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack. She started out life as a good Roman Catholic girl, turned drug user, then Muslim convert. She ended her life in Iraq at age 38. She detonated an explosive vest amid an American military patrol in the town of Baquba on Nov. 9, wounding one American soldier.

Her life in violent Islam shocked Europe, but "her story supports fears among many law enforcement officials and academics that converts to Europe's fastest-growing religion could bring with them a disturbing new aspect in the war on terror: Caucasian women committed to one of the world's deadliest causes. European women who marry Muslim men are now the largest source of religious conversions in Europe."

But for those once attached to violent Marxism, Islam is now the choice. To quote, "conversion is a political act, not unlike the women who joined the ranks of South American Marxist rebels in the 1960's and 1970's." They are people rebelling against a society in which they feel they don't belong...They are people searching through a religion like Islam for a sense of solidarity...such women married to the first wave of Europe's militant Islamists a decade ago, and some of them followed their husbands to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But while they supported their husbands' militancy... See continued story at