John Walker's Curious Quest

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Raised until age 10 in Maryland, Walker in his early life barely hinted at the conversion to come.

He was baptized Catholic. The family appeared to be middle-of-the- road, neighbors said. His father, Frank Lindh, was a federal lawyer who baked holiday brownies for the neighborhood, and his mother, Marilyn Walker, stayed at home to watch her son, his younger sister and their older brother.

It was when they moved to Marin County that the spiritual divergence began. By his teens, Walker had abandoned Sunday Mass at the Catholic church. His mother introduced him to American Indian and Buddhist spirituality, but Walker was still searching.

"He wanted something pure, and he was definitely questing at an early age," Lindh said. "We encouraged him to look."

At the same time, Walker was just another American teenager. He immersed himself in hip-hop music--buying up CDs from LL Cool J and Cypress Hill, becoming a regular on hip-hop Internet chat groups--and immersed himself in black culture. His e-mail name was "Doodoo."

He was searching for an identity, one friend recalled, a theory confirmed by some of Walker's old e-mail messages. He posed online as an African American and got into philosophical debates.

"Our blackness does not make white people hate us, it is THEIR racism that causes the hate," 14-year-old Walker said in one dispatch.

Already proficient at the flute, he began buying drum equipment and, according to friends, toyed with becoming a professional musician.

Then, at age 16, he read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," and the frivolity of youth disappeared.

He veered toward Malcolm X's Muslim faith and soon cast aside his hip-hop ways, selling the drum gear and searching for a mosque. His e-mails began to reflect a new fervency, asking for help in studying the Koran.

Walker found the direction he was looking for at the Mill Valley mosque. He embraced the trappings of devotion, taking the name "Suleyman al-Faris" and wearing a traditional Muslim hat and robes.

His parents, at first wary, encouraged him after they concluded that the mosque was moderate.

They were separating as he was exploring. Walker converted six months after his father moved out of the house. And for Lindh, Catholicism and Islam were both monotheistic religions "with strong traditions of scholarship and deep history."

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