Early Life
Barrett was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1959 to Olympic sailor Peter Barrett and University of Wisconsin–Whitewater professor Laurie Barrett.
In the early 1990s, Barrett received master's degrees in both English literature and French from San Francisco State University and married a Moroccan-born Muslim woman. He converted to Islam in 1992, having been a former Unitarian.
Barrett returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1995. The United States State Department gave him a Fulbright Scholarship in 1999 to study a year in Morocco. He received a Ph.D. in African languages and literature with a minor in folklore from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2004, focusing his dissertation on the topic of Moroccan legend. He has taught English, French, Arabic, American Civilization, Humanities, African Literature, Folklore, and Islam at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin.
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