British reporter Yvonne Ridley, having been held captive by the Taliban, converted to Islam after her release. Her explanation (conveyed via the BBC) has some odd sexual undercurrents to it:

Working as a reporter for the Sunday Express in September 2001, Ridley was smuggled from Pakistan across the Afghan border…. her cover was blown when she fell off her donkey in front of a Taleban soldier near Jalalabad… Her first thought as the furious young man came running towards her? “Wow – you’re gorgeous,” she says. “He had those amazing green eyes that are peculiar to that region of Afghanistan and a beard with a life of its own. “But fear quickly took over. I did see him again on my way to Pakistan after my release and he waved at me from his car.”

She wasn’t mistreated, but she was held captive for 10 days, and not allowed to call her daughter on her 9th birthday. She rejects the Stockhold Syndrome story, saying:

“I was horrible to my captors. I spat at them and was rude and refused to eat. It wasn’t until I was freed that I became interested in Islam.”

She further explains her decision by saying that once she returned to the UK, she started reading the Koran to figure out what was up with the Taliban [Ed: shouldn’t she have done this before she went? As part of her backgrounding on the subject?] She seems to like the feeling of togetherness that comes from being a Muslim:

“I have joined what I consider to be the biggest and best family in the world. When we stick together we are absolutely invincible.”

But sex keeps cropping up in her story. For example:

Indeed, the Taleban deputy foreign minister was called in when Ridley refused to take her underwear down from the prison washing line, which was in view of soldier’s quarters. “He said, ‘Look, if they see those things they will have impure thoughts’.” “Afghanistan was about to be bombed by the richest country in the world and all they were concerned about was my big, flappy, black knickers. “I realised the US doesn’t have to bomb the Taleban – just fly in a regiment of women waving their underwear and they will all run off.”

or

“How liberating is it to be judged for your mind and not the size of your bust or length of your legs.” A single mother who has been married three times, she says Islam has freed her from worry over her love life. “I no longer sit and wait by the phone for a man to ring and I haven’t been stood up for months. “I have no man stress. For the first time since my teens I don’t have that pressure to have a boyfriend or husband.”

Certainly, one can change religions for sincere reasons. But there’s something in this story which is … Freudian, and I don’t say that lightly. It sounds like something out of Ms. Cheney’s lesbian soft-porn western …