What’s in a name?

A whole lot more, it seems, than William Shakespeare ever imagined.

For one, take a look at the UK National Statistics report on the most popular baby names in the UK this year. It reeks of a cover up. Don’t believe them when they tell you it's Oliver. Spell it any way you like it but Muhammad, Mohammed or Mohamed is now the most popular name in England.

Clearly all those nice, fearful voters mumbling about a Muslim takeover of the UK during the elections earlier this year were right. At the rate we’re multiplying, the Mohammeds, Ayeshas and Hussains are going to take over the Isles without any need for chapatti flour bombs. Whatever else you cannot rely on, you can always rely on Muslims to make babies.

You can also rely on them to get all excited about conversions. No, not the kind that involve converting a beautiful old building in Karachi into ugly, high-rise flats (though there are many who have made a happy career out of doing just that). I’m talking about ones that involve the sisters-in-law of famous men having religious epiphanies at a shrine in Qom. One British news report, thinking that Hinduism and Islam were reasonably interchangeable, mistakenly called it Om. It’s sort of like renaming the Babri Masjid the Ram Janabhoomi. It only works if you have a rioting crowd to go with it.

So Lauren Booth became a Muslim, so what? What’s all the excitement and exultation about? She’s still on page 60 of the Quran or thereabouts. She hasn’t chosen Islam because she thinks it’s a way of life that works better than any other. She doesn’t think it’s the answer to all her prayers. She just had, a moment. Well actually she called it “a shot of spiritual morphine.” Ironically not quite realising the deadening effect of the drug.

Yet yards of web space have been spent on welcoming Ms Booth to the fold.  “well com in islam dear sister!” says Nazim generously on the Tribune website. “nice! We have a mole in white house and now in 10 downing street!” enthuses Anonymous, who obviously hasn’t heard of Prime Ministers Brown and Cameron, let alone the death of New Labour and the rise of welfare cuts.

But it’s the name. Well, more Tony Blair’s than Lauren Booth’s. Somehow we like to see this as divine justice. A sweet revenge. The headline is telling: ‘Tony Blair's sister-in-law converts to Islam.’ Or less nicely: ‘Tony Blair's Shiite Sister-in-Law.’ Tit for tat, and all that.

To be honest, Ms Booth makes this equation easy with a history of frequently criticising her well-known brother-in-law in public, most famously after visiting the West bank cities of Rafah and Nablus: “Do you recognise these place names, Tony? As Middle East envoy, you really should. Israel has massacred children in all of these cities. Didn’t you know?” But she was chiding Mr Blair long before she became a Muslim. Didn’t seem to have much effect then either. In his recent memoirs, the war-mongering prime minister doesn’t really seem to regret his decision to spend billions of his country’s pounds in the war effort or indeed sending off ill-equipped teenage soldiers to hunt out imaginary weapons of mass destruction. It might be a bit much to expect him to cry crocodile tears over the immeasurable death, destruction and political destabilisation caused to Iraq by western occupation.  In any case, I doubt he’s thinking too much about Lauren Booth’s revelations right now. He’s probably wondering more about his wife’s eBay addiction. Taking a bit of the attention away from her newly converted sister, Cherie Blair got caught out trying to flog her husband’s signature for a profitable £10 this week on the popular auction website.

But back to Lauren Booth, who has been gainfully employed by Iran’s state-owned news channel Press TV for the past year and is currently busy attending to, well you know, the most important things about Islam. Apparently she has stopped eating pork and hasn’t had a drink in nearly two months. Plus she’s wearing a hijab and doesn’t think the burqa would be out of the question. Her estranged father Tony Booth (isn’t it interesting how that name keeps turning up?) doesn’t seem to think much of all this. “I honestly don’t know what her motivation is... Is she after a job with Al Jazeera?”

Unlike her father, I don’t question Lauren Booth’s sincerity. Maybe she did have a spiritual epiphany and she is within her rights as much as anyone else to become a Muslim. What I do have issue with is Ms Booth’s short-sighted (almost blind) view of Iranian politics and the limited interpretation of what being a Muslim woman entails. A quick adopting of the outward rules of the faith without a deeper study of varying, yes even liberal or feminist interpretations, will leave her unaware of the inner debates of her new religion. Plus I find it disappointing that while she deems it fit to applaud Iranians for their commitment to supporting the Palestinian cause, she noticeably ignores their own struggle against a repressive regime which has used the bullet almost as freely as the Israeli state to suppress dissent. If she must use her name, or rather Tony Blair’s, to be heard then she should speak out unanimously, not selectively, for freedom in the Muslim world.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 3^rd, 2010.