Perhaps, conversion is not the right word for what I have in mind; it has more to do with a notion of plural identities. But conversion does help me attack the intransigent border between religions.Maybe my choice of the word is also partly to protest V.S. Naipaul’s dismissal, in Beyond Belief, of all Muslims who are not Arabs as "converts". He writes that Muslims in a country like India, because they are converts to Islam, have an unreal sense of who they are. Their condition, Naipaul writes, has "an element of neurosis and nihilism". This implies that Muslims have no local histories, they’re only tied to an elsewhere in Arabia. It erases the centuries of adaptation and growth of Islam in places like India; it also plays into the hands of the bigots in India who don’t tire of calling present-day Muslims "outsiders" or "invaders". Against Naipaul’s idea of purity and fixity in religion, it’s necessary to see how communities have grown historically in dialogue with each other. Their influences are mixed and shared. If you go far back in time, surely all of us are converts.