The conversion narratives recounted by Gaudeul make for an interesting meditation on the interaction between the interior movements and grace and the exterior ones. I’m reminded particularly of an Augustinian account of conversion as the interplay of God’s interior action upon the will and the simultaneous arrangement of environmental circumstances which allow what is worked in the will to be enacted. Gaudeul’s book unsurprisingly prioritizes the interior dimension: narrative after narrative contains dreams and vision, the unbearable desire to receive the sacraments, or the like. Gaudeul’s attention to “psychological mechanisms” aligns with this dimension of conversion.
At the same time, there is the matter of what a theology of grace dubs “environmental” graces. Paul Mehemet-Ali Mulla offers one window into this: his conversion included a strong desire for the Eucharist in circumstances where this was difficult to achieve; his deprivation of the sacraments for period in turn generated a vocation to the priesthood. Several of the accounts of the desire for baptism growing more and more intense echo this theme as well.
In light of this traditional twofold view of grace, I appreciated Gaudeul’s attention to the relationship between convert and community at the conclusion of chapter. The community, in Gaudeul’s telling, effectively confirms the calling of the convert or reveals it as deceptive. It seems that the dynamics of conversion as described in the excerpt are easily integrated with an Augustinian understanding of grace and conversion. On the other hand, while the lives of converts are not sources of dogmatic theology, I wonder how they might challenge or nuance such a theology of grace. Can the experience of conversion in settings largely hostile to Christianity be significant for Christian theology? How might it be integrated with or corrective of a theology of grace?
Christian-Muslim relations blog 
Those are some great questions you raise, Claude. I feel like in such a scenario, one in which Christianity is so sharply contrasted with the societal religion, that grace would stand out all the more.
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Thanks for these questions, Claude. What comes to my mind is that sometimes the “environmental” factors can be hostile and not seemingly “grace-filled” such that they do prompt a negative contrast experience against it that leads away from such an environment and towards grace. In that way, the hostility of an environment can itself be an occasion for grace. This would be more of a dramatic and dialectical portrait of grace. And yes, I’m thinking of Flannery O’Connor’s stories.
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Yes I agree that these questions raise the question of grace, not only in the nature of the visions which the converts report, but simply in the experience of having a vision at all. In the Kose reading, by contrast, we find that many converts to Islam had intellectual transformations.
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