Sinead O’Connor: Her life as a Muslim in Ireland

Two weeks after her death in London on July 26, Sinead O’Connor’s casket was covered with big blobs of blue hydrangea. The Irish singer’s best songs blared as the hearse passed through Bray, the seaside village south of Dublin where she had lived for 15 years. Hundreds of mourning fans gathered to say their last goodbye.

Raised a Catholic, O’Connor courted controversy in 1992 after tearing a photo of Pope John Paul II on a Saturday Night Live show as a protest against child sexual abuse in the church. She converted to Islam in 2018. It was no surprise O’Connor’s eulogy at her funeral gathering was delivered by a Muslim imam.

This encapsulated not just O’Connor’s colourful life, but also the evolution of Islam in Ireland through its many stages, says Professor Yafa Shanneik, a visiting professor of History of Religions and Religious Behavioural Science at Lund University.

In the past few years, O’Connor had taken to wearing hijab during public appearances. But after her death almost all photos that circulated the internet as well as those displayed across pubs in Ireland were from her younger years - of a young woman with a shaved head and big piercing eyes. This prompted some of her fans to suggest that her Muslim identity—and her new name Shuhada Sadaqat—were deliberately omitted from tributes.

Her life as a Muslim woman has received a mixed response in Ireland. But what Shaykh Dr Umar Al-Qadri—the Islamic scholar and the Chief Imam at the Islamic Centre of Ireland, who delivered the eulogy at O'Connor's funeral—remembers most, is O’Connor’s probing questions about the religion.

The curious Shuhada

In 2018, O’Connor reached out to Qadri saying that she had questions about Islam, which he thought were of a very deep nature.

“She did not judge a book by its cover. She wanted to know the position of women in Islam and the need for an intermediary with God. She was curious about the place of music in Islam,” Qadri told TRT World recently over the phone from Lahore, where he was visiting his extended family.

The 40-year-old Dutch-Pakistani imam did not know much about the singer when he first met her: “I grew up in the Netherlands and I am a generation younger than her.” Only when he looked her up on Google did he realise who she was.

Within less than a week, they had met again for dinner at a restaurant, and by then she had decided to “revert” to Islam.

“She wanted to proclaim the taqbeer and shahada, and say the azaan (call to prayer) to express her emotion at that moment in her life. Even though the azaan is only said by men, I allowed it,” Qadri says, adding that she already knew quite a bit about Sufi music and the late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Over the years, Qadri was frequently in touch with O’Connor when she would seek out religious and spiritual guidance, especially after the tragic death of her teenage son Shane in 2022.

“She seemed more at peace with herself after her conversion to Islam, and those who were close to her, understood her motives.”

When asked if she was a practicing Muslim and performed usual rituals other than wearing the hijab, he said that one’s practice of religion is a personal matter. “It is strange to ask if she fasted during Ramadan… the journey with Islam takes time.”

A different side

Yameema Mitha—an Irish teacher who comes from Pakistan —says that O’Connor’s conversion was not significant for most Muslim women and it might have been a bigger deal for non-Muslim Irish people.

“Many Muslims saw it as yet another of her maverick moves. I don’t think she was a hero that they really admired, perhaps because they would not have sympathised with her actions when she was young, except maybe when she gave a stick to the Catholic church."

When Mitha came to Ireland in the late 1980s, she came across many people who were interested to learn about her background, especially because of their shared history of British colonialism.

She says that while people were generally curious and welcoming, she was exhausted by their ignorance.

In the early 2000s, she gave a note to her neighbours, inviting them for an Eid al-Adha party, telling them that the day was celebrated to commemorate Abraham’s sacrifice of his son for God. When her neighbours turned up, they asked her how was the day related to Abraham. “Muslims are more aware of Abraham in other Abrahamic faiths, than they are about Islam,” she says.

There are other instances where Mitha has been hit by general ignorance about Islam.

Mitha’s daughter went to a Catholic school in Dublin, where Mitha had offered to talk to students about Islam during their religion class, but her offer was not taken up.

Another time, her daughter’s teacher said during a lecture that women in Muslim countries are forced to cut their nails. “Her classmates prodded her to tell the teacher that that was not true, but my daughter didn’t feel comfortable doing so.”

In recent years, Mitha says Ireland has gotten richer and hence identifies more strongly with mainland Europe, which also means taking on some of the European hostility towards Muslims. “The belief that ‘to be brothers, there must be others’ is now visible here,” she says.

Islam in Ireland

Muslims in Ireland come from diverse backgrounds without the predominance of any specific ethnic or cultural group.

Irish Census figures reveal that the number of those who identified as Muslims increased over the years. In 2011, around 40,000 people said they were Muslim. That number has doubled, according to the 2022 census, with 81,930 people registering themselves as Muslims. Of this, 54 percent are Irish citizens, either by birth or naturalised. Islam is currently the third-largest religion in Ireland and is projected to overtake the country’s Protestant population by 2040.

The first Muslims in Ireland were of Indian descent who migrated from the Apartheid-era South Africa right after World War II. The Dublin Islamic Society was created in 1959, while students from Libya, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq began arriving from the 1960s onwards, followed by those from other Arab countries. Between 1992 and 2010, thousands of asylum seekers predominantly from Muslim countries, also arrived in Ireland.

According to Dr Oliver Scharbrodt, Professor of Islamic Studies at Lund University in Sweden—who has researched Islam in Ireland—unlike other European countries where employment was the main driver of migration, the demographic of those coming to Ireland were educated and from the middle-class.

“The first mosque in Ireland was in the middle-class area of Clonskeagh in south Dublin, unlike in other countries where mosques are in more socially- and economically-deprived areas,” Scharbrodt says, adding that Ireland as a former colony of Britain and its overall pro-Palestinian stance strengthened its credentials.

Conversion for a structured way of life

Yafa Shanneik of Lund University has extensively researched Irish women who converted to Islam in the 80s after a strict Catholic childhood, followed by a hedonistic lifestyle in the 70s.

“They were experimenting with alcohol and drugs. They were attending festivals where they would encounter migrants, and found them exotic, and connected with them. They were attracted to that difference,” says Shanneik.

There were more conversions to Islam among women than men, probably because they were more curious to “rediscover their religious roots: the type of Islam that they were interested in was actually very similar to the type of structured Catholicism that they were raised with.”

In the past 20 years since he moved to Ireland, Qadri has alone helped 500 people convert to Islam, with the youngest being 14-years-old and the oldest being 85. “Muslims and Christians have the same prophets like Moses and Noah, and they have similar belief in the question of the afterlife, so it is natural for the Irish people to embrace Islam, especially when it does not have the pressures of celibacy. Islam is a reasonable and flexible religion, and they come to me because they know that I am a traditional Sunni scholar inclined towards Sufism and not Salafism,” he says.

Scharbrodt adds that for many, the Catholic Church had lost its social and cultural power within the society due to reasons ranging from creeping secularisation to the child abuse scandals involving the Church.

On the other hand, Shanneik found that Irish converts are very active in mobilising Muslim community to engage in the wider society, even though they are looked down as not being the “real Muslims”.

Religion is largely respected in Ireland, as compared to other countries like France. There is better understanding for religious needs, cultural sensitivities, and acceptance of public articulation of religious identities, Scharbrodt explains. “But there is a Catholic dominance, and anything that deviates from this is not properly Irish.”

Qadri understands the Irish Muslim identity as grounded in the Irish culture of being family-oriented and friendly towards all. “Ireland has been at the receiving end of oppression, and hence empathy is key within Irish culture. Islam is not alien to Irishness.”

Shanneik had found that the majority of the converts combined their Irishness with their Muslim-ness. “They are proud to be Irish, and Muslim. I have met women who are now in their 70s and they campaign for Sinn Fein [which advocates for a united Ireland, and was also associated with the Irish Republican Army] on their mopeds, wearing tattoos and a niqaab… Sinead embodied that generation of Irish Muslims.”