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None of the San Francisco Bay Area's many other Muslim converts followed his same ill-fated path. But is there something about their religious experience that estranges them from their own country?
Dec 21, 2001 | Last Friday, shortly before the end of Ramadan, Zakariyya Twist took the day off from his job in the office of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, and headed to the Masjid al-Iman mosque, near the city's working-class border with Berkeley. Inside was an impressive ethnic and racial cross-section of the San Francisco Bay Area: African-Americans, Afghans and Pakistanis; worshipers from the Middle East, and white American converts like Twist, many with dreadlocks running down their backs.
After the Friday prayers concluded, Twist, 28, waited outside the mosque "to talk to some brothers I haven't seen in a while." He wore a long, flowing robe draped over his tall, narrow frame. He and his friends, a mixture of other whites and African-Americans, greeted each other with hugs and salutations -- "a salaam alaikum" -- as they checked their pagers and made plans for the upcoming Eid-ul-Fitr celebration to mark the end of Islam's holiest season.
It is impossible to talk to Twist without thinking about John Walker Lindh and the road not taken. Like Walker, this white Muslim convert was raised in a liberal family in the Bay Area -- Twist in the heart of San Francisco, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from the Walker-Lindh family in Marin. Like Walker, he had roots in Catholicism, attending Catholic school in San Francisco where he says he was "kind of a know-it-all."
And like Walker, Twist was drawn to Islam in part by his love of hip-hop music and his reading of the "Autobiography of Malcolm X." Twist's parents encouraged their son's spiritual and intellectual exploration, buying a Quran for his birthday while he was still in high school. And just like Walker, Twist's initial curiosity about Islam seems rooted in an affinity for the politically contrarian.
"I remember reading an article about the time of the Gulf War saying now that Communism is over, the next big evil is going to be Islamic fundamentalism," he says. "So that kind of drew me to it right away. I wanted to find out everything I could about it."
Unlike Walker, of course, Twist stayed tethered to his American life after his conversion -- including his job, family and many of his old friends -- and he did not take up arms against his country. But he says he feels sympathy, sadness and befuddlement about the young Muslim convert whose path took him to Afghanistan.
The Bay Area Muslim convert community is so diverse it's almost impossible to generalize about it. But since Walker's capture nearly three weeks ago, it has been scrutinized by people looking for clues to what made the young product of Marin County privilege take up arms with the Taliban. The widely publicized story has also made the local Muslim community scrutinize itself. Is there something in their religious experience that estranges these young converts from their own country?
Like many Americans, Twist is fascinated by the Walker case. He is aware of how similar their life trajectories have been, with the important difference that, for all his searching, he never wound up in Afghanistan fighting against his country. And he is just as puzzled as anyone else about why Walker ended up there.
"I think John Walker probably got tripped out when he was in Yemen. Maybe he linked up with some people who said 'Come to Pakistan,' and maybe those people had a political agenda. But maybe not. There are good scholars in Pakistan. The media makes it sound like those schools are just a bunch of jihad training camps. Maybe he ended up there with good intentions and just got caught up."
After weeks of interviews with Twist and other white Bay Area converts, it's clear that anyone examining this community with preconceived notions about what produced John Walker will find exactly what they are looking for. Those who blame California liberalism run amok -- like conservative social commentator Shelby Steele, who blamed "wispy relativism," "post-'60s cultural liberalism" and "White American guilt" for Walker's fall -- will find left-wing America-hating misfits raised by permissive parents, a collection of confused potential traitors, if not John Walkers-in-waiting. Defensive California liberals will find peaceful, spiritual multiculturalists engaged in a search for meaning that is quintessentially American, evidence that Walker was a tragic, freakish anomaly.
But even before Walker was discovered in a squalid Mazar-e-Sharif prison three weeks ago, the federal government was scrutinizing Bay Area Muslim converts. Shortly after Sept. 11, FBI agents appeared at the door of Hamza Yusuf, founder of the Zaytuna Institute in Hayward, to talk to with the Islamic scholar about a controversial speech he made on Sept. 9 in which he said America faced "a great, great tribulation," which seemed to foreshadow the bloody attacks two days later.
But Yusuf, a white convert who was born Mark Hanson, was not around to take the FBI's questions; he was meeting with President Bush at the White House.
Yusuf, a guru to many converts, was one of a handful of American Muslim leaders picked by the administration to meet with the president and condemn the Sept. 11 attacks as against their religion. "Islam was hijacked on that Sept. 11, 2001, on that plane as an innocent victim," Yusuf said at the White House. When he returned home from his trip, he dismissed his Sept. 9 remarks as "tragic timing" having nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, and authorities believed him.
But Yusuf's moment in the spotlight also illuminated contradictions and tensions within the Muslim convert community, in the Bay Area and nationally. While their attachment to Islam is spiritual, for many it is also political, and it often leads them to take stands that put them at odds with American policy and opinion, especially post-Sept. 11.
Yusuf, for instance, straddles the world of Islam and America, too soft on the West for many Muslims, and too hard on America for many Americans. While his Sept. 9 speech in no way predicted or condoned the coming terror attack, it did warn that America "is facing a very terrible fate" because "this country stands condemned. It stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did. And lest people forget that Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands." While Yusuf identifies with the plight of the Palestinian people, and understands why there is so much anger in the Arab world directed at the United States, he has come out aggressively against the attacks, and is adamant that two wrongs don't make a right.
Some critics of Islamic leadership say anti-Americanism and anti-Israel passions are too often entwined with clerics' religious teaching, so Muslim converts have a hard time separating the political from the spiritual. "Many converts to Islam find their politics are affected by their conversion and many get swept up in politics," says Daniel Pipes, director of the pro-Israel Middle East Forum.
Certainly Walker is an example of someone who got swept up in those politics. As he is held prisoner inside a shipping container on board the USS Peleliu off the coast of Pakistan, he has become a political Rorschach test for commentators back home. Liberal San Francisco Chronicle columnist Louis Freedberg wrote that Walker's biggest crime was that "his search for identity intersected precisely with the World Trade Center attacks." The president, he advised, should allow Walker to come home "and let him get his life back on track. We'd want nothing less for our own children, who could easily have found themselves in a similar mess."
Surprisingly, former Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, scourge of moral laxity, takes a similar, sympathetic line. Starr told the New York Times on Thursday that he saw Walker as "a young kid with misplaced idealism" who appeared to have wandered off into the Islamic world in search of enlightenment, not to wage war on his native land.
But former President George Bush and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have suggested that Walker should be tried for treason and executed -- or thrown to the mercies of an angry American public. "I thought of a unique penalty," the former president told ABC. "Make him leave his hair the way it is and his face as dirty as it is and let him go wandering around this country and see what kind of sympathy he would get."
The current President Bush is apparently inclined to be more forgiving, calling Walker a "poor fellow" and suggesting he may be treated with some leniency. Prosecutors are reportedly preparing to charge Walker with violating a new anti-terrorism law, shying away from a treason case, which could have carried the death penalty.
But while the government ponders his fate, the questions remain: What made Walker take up arms against his own country? Is there anything in the Islamic conversion experience of Walker that helps explain his extreme response?
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