Personal Encounter Cancels the Quest

5.6.2 Personal Encounter Cancels the Quest

Besides the casual familiarity one has with the religion, this study also finds that the inclination to see Islam as a viable religious alternative is detected in the conversion experience of the informants who were constantly engaged in personal encounters within their immediate network, as exemplified in the following interview excerpts:

[E40.Muslim Dusun.I5]

I was not really pulled towards Islam until my son converted ten years ago. As he still lived with us at that time, I watched how he slowly changed his way of life according to Islam. At the same time, respecting his new religion, my wife and I also arranged our daily life

around my son‟s religious requirements, especially in terms of cooking, serving the right foods and so on. It was after some time I realised that it was not that difficult to live a life as a Muslim...

[Trans.]

A 58-year old former civil servant also gained meaningful information on Islam through his personal encounter:

[E41.Muslim Dusun.I29]

I had been watching my brother fasting and performing prayer long before I converted to Islam. He did not face any problems in carrying out fasting during Ramadhan or waking up before dawn to perform the prayer. So I knew that I would be okay if I converted... [Trans.]

The following interview excerpt is another representation of the familiarity with Islam gained from personal encounter experience:

[E42.Muslim Dusun.I6]

[Q: once you had the intention, where did you go to learn about Islam?]

I did not seek for more information on Islam because at that time, living together with my Muslim son was enough to convince me that

I had made the right decision to convert. Only after I converted that I sought proper guidance from the Islamic Da’wah Centre... [Trans.]

The above excerpts thus validate the key argument for question 5A that the majority- religion context influences the characters of the stages in the conversion process of the Dusun Muslim converts. The prevailing encounters and borderless social interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims generated an abundant amount of knowledge that consequently prevented the quest stage from occurring. As has been shown above, the The above excerpts thus validate the key argument for question 5A that the majority- religion context influences the characters of the stages in the conversion process of the Dusun Muslim converts. The prevailing encounters and borderless social interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims generated an abundant amount of knowledge that consequently prevented the quest stage from occurring. As has been shown above, the

encounter, the informants‟ religious preference was even further swayed towards the religion, causing them to fall short of experiencing the quest stage.

The following discussion will move to the examination of the interaction stage, which this study argues as the next stage to occur after the crisis stage in the conversion process of the Dusun Muslim converts. Similar to the earlier examination of other conversion stages, the following examination will demonstrate that the essentially different and distinctive characters and definition of the interaction stage is mainly due to the majority-religion context within which the conversion process of the Dusun Muslim converts took place.