The John Walker Lindh Connection
By Katharine Grayson
When former library staff member Joshua Mortensen read the name "John Walker Lindh" in the newspapers, he recognized the man not only as an American supporter of the Taliban, but also as the "California Islamic Chic" convert he had met four years before.
Mortensen, who worked as a Library Communications intern for a year while attending graduate school, met Lindh when he traveled to Sana'a, Yemen, in the summer of 1998 to study Arabic at the Yemen Language School.
When Mortensen began to read about a young American caught and charged with fighting for the Taliban, he soon realized that Lindh was the former classmate he had known better by the "cynical nickname" of Yusuf Islam (the adopted name of American singer songwriter turned Muslim radical Cat Stevens).
Following this discovery, Mortensen wrote a story published Jan. 10 on the Salon.com web site describing his observations of the "naive and arrogant" Islamic convert. Mortensen was subsequently quoted in an Associated Press article printed Jan. 15 in the Wisconsin State journal, contacted by Good Morning America and requested to appear on CNN with Paula Zahn.
Mortensen's article details how Lindh repeatedly accused his fellow students of lacking religious devotion.
"He quickly became disillusioned with the other Muslims in our language school and with Yemen in general," Mortensen says. "I watched Walker get exasperated one afternoon, trying to rouse Muslim students at prayer call, only to hear most of them say they were going to take a nap instead. He was incredulous. Muttering how he couldn't believe Muslims would forgo their duty to pray, he left the room in disgust."
Mortensen also says he is not surprised to hear that Lindh went to Afghanistan to seek a more radical form of Islam.
"If Yemen isn't Islamic enough for you, there are very few choices," he said. "[Lindh's] dim view of Shias precluded Iran. Saudi Arabia's worldwide fame as a kingdom of hypocrites probably removed it from the list. This left only one place as home of the self-declared most pure Islamic government on earth, Afghanistan."
Mortensen does say, however, that he did not expect to discover that Lindh turned to violence.
"That Walker would take up arms in order to foist fundamentalist Islam on the world couldn't have been predicted -- I saw no evidence of violence in the convert," Mortensen said. "But likewise, I saw no evidence that Walker was brainwashed by anyone but himself."
In 1999, Mortensen moved with is wife, who was also an intern, to Cairo, Egypt to work for the United Nations World Food Organization. He now works as a freelance writer in Cairo.