Wacademic 9/11 conspiracy huckster Kevin Barrett is the subject of a glowing portrait in the Madison Capital Times: What makes Kevin Barrett tick? (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

Barrett, of course, is an Islamic convert and will be teaching a course on Islam at UW, liberally sprinkled with conspiratorial lunacy. His “theories” about 9/11 are the same old anti-rational crapthink we see all over the left wing these days.

His account of his conversion to Islam is a little more interesting.

During his time in San Francisco, Barrett was exploring mysticism. He recalled accidentally wandering into a lecture on Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, by Jacob Needleman, a professor of philosophy. That got him thinking more critically about the nature of God.

In 1993, he took a train from San Francisco to New York with a friend. He was reading Gore Vidal’s “Live From Golgotha,” a book portraying biblical events as if they were on television, which inspired him to entertain passengers in the lounge car with a stand-up comedy routine about religion.

The night they arrived, in a cafe in Brooklyn, he met his future wife, a Moroccan-born woman who practiced Islam. The next day, a friend in New York gave him a copy of “TAZ,” by Hakim Bey, which Barrett describes as an “anarchist manifesto” inspired by Islamic ideas. The book “was so poetic, it had this poetry that strips away veils. There was just a whiff of that, it was pointing toward Islamic mysticism.” He had to learn more.

Later that day, he and his future wife met up to chat again, this time at a train station below the World Trade Center. Just a month later, the complex would be bombed for the first time, piquing his attention.

A few months later, Barrett and his beloved were married, first in a formal Islamic wedding, and later at City Hall. Several days before they tied the knot, he said the Shahada, or Muslim declaration of the oneness of God, in front of some Moroccan Muslims there, making his conversion official.

“I was walking on Cloud Nine,” he said in a recent interview. “I’d found something I’d been looking for. It’s indescribable, it’s a step back to God.” What resonated so much, he said, was the Islamic approach to God.

“The Christians seemed to imagine God as an old guy with a beard, a patriarch,” he said, noting that he does not identify with a particular sect of the faith. “In Islam, God is much more transcendental, much less anthropomorphic. The first tangible quality of God is mercy and compassion.”

From there, it was a short step to this:

Barrett eventually concluded that the attacks were intended as a spark to rally the support of the American people behind war in the Middle East.

UPDATE at 7/25/06 2:49:50 pm:

Sixty-one members of the Wisconsin state legislature have signed a letter demanding that UW fire Barrett: Wisconsin Lawmakers Want Islam Teacher Booted. (Hat tip: hans ze beeman. Link goes to Google News, because if you click it there you can read the LA Times article without registering.)