I felt under God’s protection and guided by him.I met my husband in Morocco. I’d go into the library at college and look at books and feel physically sick because they were so many opinions.At this time I went to Morocco and liked what I saw in society there – people using their time to do purer things, such as praying and talking about constructive things There was a happiness and tranquillity there. I was going to Friends of the Earth and it was enlightening me that governments might pretend to be concerned but they sell arms and deal with terrorists and start wars and exploit the aftermath of wars with their banks and systems.That was the first stage of my wanting something for the whole planet that eventually led me to Islam Another thing my heart turned away from was opinions. In my four years at art college, I had listened to too many opinions and too many people saying what they thought life was about and what made art good I had become really sick of opinions. Their pasts, you sense, are something they wish to forget.The women converts I speak to will not come to the studio It isn’t their way, I’m told.

So I meet them in a jumbled Islamic bookshop in London’s Walthamstow where we talk in an upstairs room, always with a chaperone, and for most of the time with their own gazes averted. The photographs are a problem, even though they have been agreed in advance. There is much debate behind the counter and husbands have to be phoned to be consulted before the women finally cover their faces and allow a few snatched shots. But read their words, because these provide the clearest portraits.Sulayman KeelerKeeler, 32, is a publisher from east London. Married with three children, he embraced Islam in 1996My stepfather was in the RAF so we moved around the country a lot in my childhood My parents were not religious at all. I adopted their atheist line as far as my life was concerned. When I left school I did an engineering apprenticeship in Crawley and went to college part-time I met some Muslims but they were just like Western people They went to the same nightclubs and pubs as me.

Five years later, when I was 21 or 22, I met the same people again and they’d changed. They’d decide they were wasting their lives and so they had come back to their religion.They began to debate with me and challenge this idea of atheism and big-bang theory and evolution They pulled it apart They destroyed what I had. All of mankind needs an answer to the question of where we came from, where we’re going and what our purpose is. Some people think they come from amoebas in a primordial soup, the so-called scientific approach.

These Muslims showed me how you could prove there is an unlimited and independent creator.Then I went travelling for six months in Europe. I came back for my sister’s wedding and that is when I actually embraced Islam I was 24 It had been very gradual. I had been thinking about it for a year.My stepfather thought my conversion was a phase and I’d get over it He thought he could debate with me and destroy my belief. When he found my arguments were undefeatable, the subject was banned from discussion in the house. My mother didn’t argue so much, but the moment it sunk in for her was when I was looking to get married. I told her and she said, “Who to?” I said, “I don’t know yet I’m going to find someone.” This really upset her. She expected me to have a girlfriend first, then get engaged and married I asked Muslims I knew.