STRASBOURG, France — Abd al Malik rolled back into the projects with his crew on a sunny day, his voice blaring from car speakers.

It was a track from his latest compact disc about how the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had made him feel ashamed to be Muslim.

"Neither fundamentalism nor extremism," his voice chanted over a stark drumbeat. "Me, I don't mix politics and faith."

Malik nodded to the music in the back seat. His gaze lost itself in the landscape where it began: the Neuhof housing project.

Surrounded by vacant lots, shacks and farmland on the edge of Strasbourg, Neuhof sprawls in a maze of towers whose dreary design recalls a prison or a hospital.

More than 5,000 people live behind the blue-and-yellow facades streaked with graffiti and dotted with satellite dishes that are often tuned to Arabic- language TV networks.

Ties bring him back

Malik lives in Paris now, as befits an up-and-coming rapper and author who is equally at ease talking about Dr. Dre, Voltaire or Raymond Carver. But his family still lives in Neuhof.

So does most of his rap group, the New African Poets (N.A.P.). The founders include his older brother, Bilal, 33, who rode along with him during the visit, and Mohamed Achab, 34, who drove the compact Renault sedan.

Youths roared alongside on dust-churning motorcycles and three-wheel monster scooters, calling Malik's name and placing hands on hearts in a sign of respect. Hard-faced homeboys hanging out by a grocery hurried up to welcome him.

Malik got out and straightened to his full height: a rangy 30-year-old in an aviator jacket and crisp, low-slung jeans. His hair was close-cropped above the sleek, dark features of Congolese ancestors. He returned greetings and accolades with a smile and soft words of thanks, bestowing four ritualistic kisses on the cheek.

There was no swagger, no thuggish preening. Malik, Bilal and Achab looked more like streetwise graduate students than rap heroes.

But they are the real thing. With titles such as "Gothic Ghetto" and "The Rabble Cut a Record," their music has been forged by deprivation, crime and redemption.

Malik pointed out a spot where his friend Fouad had been stabbed to death in a brawl. He stopped outside a window where, as a boy, he watched heroin dealers fleeing police through syringe-filled gangways, junkies scratching, hustling and dying — a swirl of faces that would one day populate his lyrics.

He saw the ground-floor apartment that once housed a mosque where he worshipped after converting from Catholicism to Islam.

Malik, Bilal and Achab are now grands frères — big brothers — and use their prestige to set good examples. But they discussed the bad old days dispassionately, recalling how Neuhof homeboys had pioneered the tradition of torching cars en masse.

It started in the mid-1990s, when cars were burned during riots to avenge the deaths of two youths who had stolen a car, led police on a chase and crashed. Car burning grew into a New Year's Eve event and spread across France, Malik said.

"It was like a symbiotic relationship between the media and the kids," said Achab, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who, in addition to being N.A.P.'s technical ace has a job as a social worker.

France is full of tinderbox Neuhofs. Gloomy public-housing towers ring urban peripheries like modern-day versions of the walls of medieval cities. Known as cites, some projects resemble isolated city-states with their own laws, languages and cultures, products of a clash between France's stratified, secular mainstream and immigrant diasporas that are predominantly Arab, African and Muslim.

The French worry that the cites are bastions of the Islamic extremism that is spreading in Europe's biggest Muslim population. Militants from the cites have fought U.S. troops in Iraq, plotted terrorist attacks around the world and landed behind bars from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay U.S. Naval Base.

Rich culture flourishes

But the larger ethnic and religious ferment also generates some of the richest, most interesting cultural activity in the country. Islam has become a force in the flourishing rap and hip-hop scene in France. Even some gangster-style rappers brandish their Muslim identity. Other artists have become rigorously pious, shunning wind and string instruments that they believe are prohibited by the Quran.

Malik's chameleonic life story displays the tensions, contradictions and sheer energy of urban hinterlands that are France's future in the making. As a teenager, he was a scholarship honors student at a private school — and a thief and drug dealer. After converting to Islam, he walked a tightrope between a budding musical career and angry itinerant preaching for a fundamentalist sect spreading an anti-Western message. But then he broke ranks with hard-core Muslims.

"I realized that my Islam of the ghetto was just a ghetto of Islam," Malik said.

"There's a disconnect, a kind of phantasmagoria of Islam. The so-called reformers are trying to invent something in reaction to the West. ... We have to put things in another context. Otherwise, we would be in the Middle Ages."

Last year, Malik published an autobiography titled "Allah Bless France!" It resembles, to some extent, "The Autobiography of Malcom X," whose journey from crime to extremism to tolerance had a profound impact on Malik. The title offers a patriotic response to a notorious extremist pamphlet titled "Allah Curse France."

"I'm black, I'm from the neighborhood, but I am French," Malik said. "And this is the country I love."

His given name is Regis Fayette-Mikano. He was born in France but spent his first six years in the Republic of Congo, where his father was a well-connected government official.

Then his father ran into political misfortune and brought the family back to France to settle in a cramped apartment in Neuhof. The housing project's population included, in descending numbers, North Africans, Turks, Roma, Asians and recent immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

"Everybody got along, though," Malik recalled. "In Paris, you have more conflict among the races, especially black against Arab. But here you had harmony."

Malik's family and hometown remain anchors. He has a gruffly affectionate relationship with Bilal, who leads the way in both religion and music.

"He's always the one telling me to 'keep it real,' " Malik said, as Bilal rolled his eyes.