The Muslim Moderator.(Hamza Yusuf)(Brief Article)

When Sheik Hamza Yusuf was summoned to the White House after the World Trade Center attack, he brought President George W. Bush two books. The first was a Qur'an, bristling with Post-It notes marking key verses. The second was "Thunder in the Sky," a book on the art of war by a first-century Chinese Taoist.

These two gifts--Islam's holy book and a tract on the humanistic use of power--suggest the two poles orienting the California-based Islamic scholar. He speaks to Americans as a Muslim, and to Muslims abroad as a member of that most powerful tribe on earth: Americans. Since September 11, the 43-year-old Muslim convert has taken up a post at the cultural crossroads between the Islamic world and the United States. Among young Western progressive Muslims, he's fast becoming the most prominent Islamic cleric of his generation. His speeches at home draw standing- room-only crowds. Moreover, says Fuad Nahdi, publisher of the British Muslim periodical Q News, "he can fill a hall anywhere in the Muslim world."

Born Mark Hanson, the son of California intellectuals, Yusuf was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church and raised on a '70s diet of surfing and spiritual eclecticism. At 18, having narrowly survived a car crash, he started reading intently about Islamic spirituality. Over the next 10 years, he studied classical Islamic law and theology in Algeria, Mauritania and Morocco. Today he is as comfortable speaking Arabic on Al-Jazeera as he is expounding on American TV. His dazzling dexterity with Qur'anic knowledge and thinkers from Aristophanes to Mark Twain has made him a great popularizer of the faith.

Until the 1990s, American Muslim immigrants tended to follow intellectuals from the Old World; they put their hearts into political struggles back in Egypt or Kashmir or Palestine. Yusuf is among a clutch of Muslim intellectuals stressing American concerns. After September 11 he was quick to condemn the terrorists, not as a humanist but as a Muslim scholar. Under Muslim law, he pointed out, any Muslim with a U.S. passport or green card had signed a treaty, effectively, to obey American laws, making support for acts of violence on American soil ...