LONDON — He was just 12, the son of a former Conservative Party organizer in a neat suburban neighborhood of single-family homes and duplexes, when the father he adored died. He started drinking, neighbors say. Getting in fights.
But six months ago, Don Stewart-Whyte stopped drinking and smoking, and became calmer and more polite, those who know him say.
The 21-year-old had converted to Islam, the currency of some of the toughest and hippest young Asian students in his High Wycombe neighborhood.
"Islam answered all his questions, so he became a Muslim," said Abid Zaman, a Muslim habitue of the neighborhood west of London.
Today, Stewart-Whyte is being held with 21 other suspects in an alleged plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners over the Atlantic. Stewart-Whyte, who became Abdul Waheed, and two other suspects were converts to Islam, reinforcing what many security experts and clerics already knew: The fervor and inexperience of new converts provides fertile soil for the allure of radical theology.
"The converts are seen as the most extreme, and they're seen as the most extreme even by other Muslims who may not come from the U.K. Which is really worrying," said Anthony Glees, director of the Brunel University Center for Intelligence and Security Studies in West London.
The growing number of homegrown converts in the ranks of militant Islam in Britain is raising troubling new questions not only about what it means to be British, but whether new Muslims must choose between family and faith across what many see as a yawning divide between civilizations.
Britain now has perhaps 50,000 Muslim converts, ranging from fair-haired homemakers in Yorkshire who have adopted the hijab to former Catholic priests, Afro-Caribbean street gang members and upper-middle-class university students.
At meetings attended by many new converts, Glees said, "people are brainwashed with certain ideas. Such as, there was no Holocaust. Such as, the London [transport] bombers killed far fewer people than the number of Muslims killed over hundreds of years by the British. These things are said, and they become increasingly accepted by these people as their ideological currency."
"Of course, we have noticed this," said Abdurahman Anderson, who has worked extensively with new Muslims at South London's Brixton mosque. The congregation there, about 60% converts, has included Richard Reid, the British-born would-be "shoe bomber" who was himself a convert, and Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, now serving a life sentence in the U.S.
"A lot of youth ... have had a kind of intellectual revolution," Anderson said. "And with the world events, they've decided to get a fervor in themselves. We call it hamas. This excitement can come to a new convert, or someone who's turning away from the old, traditional Islam.
"What we find is that extremists have used this enthusiasm to try and teach them their erroneous ideas. And these individuals, who have a quest for knowledge, and an excitement, they're susceptible to it."
Friends say that after his conversion, Stewart-Whyte grew a beard, wore baggy trousers or sometimes the \o7shalwar kameez\f7, a loose-fitting tunic and pants, and frequented a local Islamic studies center with two other young Muslims also arrested in the alleged plot.
A few weeks before the arrests, he married a Moroccan woman who had moved into the house he shared with his mother, a physical education teacher. Neighbors said the young bride never emerged from the house without a full black burka, leaving only slits for her eyes.
Neighbor Zaman, who says he worked for a year as a driver for radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza, defended the young convert. "Don's a nice guy," he said. "He never talks about jihad. Just basic Islamic principles, love your neighbor and all that. You know, 'Hi brother, how you doing?' Nothing to do with terrorism.
"Of course he was upset, like everybody is. You've got the U.S. selling these bunker-busting bombs to Israel, and they use those weapons to kill Lebanese men, women and children -- this is state-sponsored terrorism, you know what I mean?" he said. "But Don and all these Muslims that are in Britain, they're working, they've got their wives, they've got their families."
The purported plot to blow up liquid explosives on board aircraft "just doesn't make sense to any of us," he added. "OK, a hole blows in the fuselage and the plane starts going down, and you're there with the rest of them, you're bloody yelling and dying for five minutes? It's crazy! Who would do that?"
Another High Wycombe resident arrested was Brian Young, 28, a former Rastafarian who became Umar Islam when he converted to Islam about three years ago. Young, married to a Muslim woman and a recent father, apparently worked as a city bus inspector. The Sun reported he was on duty the day of the London transport explosions in July 2005, and searched buses for other possible bombs.
