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Last night it was asked, “There’s a big convert community in this town, isn’t there?”

I’m afraid my face may have looked a bit perturbed. “Um…” I began, only for my companion to reel off a few names.

That’s when I got what he meant. There are indeed quite a few converts amongst us, but to call us a community? No, we’re just isolated bodies really. We don’t have any kind of shared meeting space, where we collectively get together for coffee and conversation.

“What’s the correct way to refer to people like you?” they asked next, “Is it convert or revert?” Revert is just nonsensical to me. Convert will do, if you insist. But why not just call me a plain old Muslim?

I’ve been one more years than the one asking. By now, I’ve spent more of my life a Muslim than not. I’ve been practicing the faith longer than many of the so-called born-Muslims in my vicinity who rediscovered faith late in life. As for those other converts referred to? Some of those are pushing fifty years since their testimony of faith.

But my companions were already musing that the local Muslim community is overwhelmingly “IndoPak”, the large majority of whom hail from a single village subsumed under the waters of a major dam project in the 1970s.

I’ve heard this anecdote a few times now, but I’m not sure whether it’s completely true. It seems to me that the body of Muslims is growing ever more diverse. Most of the people of Pakistani descent I’ve interfaced with over the years have told me they’re not from that Mirpuri constituent either.

It’s strange that we compartmentalise one another this way. We’re both different and the same.