British Bombers' Rage Formed in a Caldron of Discontent
By AMY WALDMAN
Published: July 31, 2005
LEEDS, England, July 30 - Mohammad Sidique Khan was never on the corner, a detail friends offer as a compliment. In a neighborhood where many young South Asian men had lost their way, or foundered into drug dealing, Mr. Khan's peers admired his focus on family, work, working out, and Islam.
The discipline of Mr. Khan, 30, was shared, and not just with his friends Shehzad Tanweer, 22, and Hasib Mir Hussain, 18, who joined him on a murderous assignation in London on July 7. The three men and Germaine Lindsay, 19, detonated four bombs that killed 56 people, including themselves.
Mr. Khan, Mr. Tanweer and Mr. Hussain were part of a larger clique of young British-raised South Asian men in Beeston, a neighborhood of Leeds, who turned their backs on what they came to see as a decadent, demoralizing Western culture. Instead, the group embraced an Islam whose practice was often far more fundamentalist than their fathers', and always more political, focused passionately on Muslim suffering at Western hands.
In many ways, the transformation has had positive elements: the men live healthier and more constructive lives than many of their peers here, Asian or white, who have fallen prey to drugs, alcohol or petty crime. Why Mr. Khan, Mr. Tanweer and Mr. Hussain in particular crossed a line that no one had before, how they and Mr. Lindsay linked up, or whether their plot was homegrown or steered from outside, remain mysteries, at least to the public.
But the question asked since their identities were revealed after the bombings continues to resonate: what motivated men reared thousands of miles from the oppression that outraged them to bomb fellow Britons, ushering in a new chapter of terrorism?
Many here see answers in the sense of injustice at events both at home and abroad that is far more widespread among Muslims than many Westerners recognize; in the rigid and deeply political form of Islam that increasing numbers of educated European Muslims are gravitating to; in the difficulty some children of Muslim immigrants in Europe have had in finding their place or direction.
It is a broader narrative being played out by such immigrants across Britain, and Western Europe. The young men here grew up brown-skinned in white Britain, in a blighted pocket of Leeds straddling their parents' traditional values and the working-class culture around them. They have been reared shoulder to shoulder with old stone churches and young hooligans, and face to face with attitudes toward family and morality different from those taught by their parents.
"They don't know whether they're Muslim or British or both," said Martin McDaid, a former antiterrorist operative who converted to Islam, taking the name Abdullah, and worked in the neighborhood.
They are alienated from their parents' rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward. Reared in an often racist milieu, they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has. They have come of age in an era marked by conflicts between Muslims and better armed powers - India, Serbia, Russia, Israel, America and Britain - and the rise of an ideology that sanctifies terrorist attacks against the West in response.
So some young men have solved the "don't know" riddle by discovering a new assertive and transnational identity as Muslims. The change has played out within families in the small, brick "back-to-back" terraced houses of little Beeston's lattice of down-at-the-heels streets.
In one corner shop sits Ejaz Hussain, 54, who came from a Pakistani village in his teens, and has reared eight children in Britain. The bombers' fathers and he worshiped at the same mosque; their sons left, rejecting the mosque's form of Islam as incorrect and its determination to keep politics outside the mosque as unjust.
Walk down Stratford Street, past another mosque of the elders the bombers and their cohort rejected, to the store of Mohammad Jaheer, a burly Bangladesh-born shopkeeper who went "religious," as young men here say, 10 years ago at 16. Islam has saved him from what he calls an animal-like life as a Western businessman spending time at clubs, he said. He helped form the Iqra Learning Center, an Islamic bookshop, five years ago, to educate Muslims and non-Muslims about the faith.
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