LEEDS, England — Mohammad Sidique Khan was never on the corner. In a neighborhood where many young South Asian men had lost their way, or foundered into drug dealing, Khan's peers admired his focus on family, work, working out and Islam.
The discipline of 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.
Khan, Tanweer and Hussain were part of a larger clique of young British-raised South Asian men in Beeston, a neighborhood of Leeds, who rejected 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 Khan, Tanweer and Hussain crossed a line that no one had before, how they and Lindsay linked up, or whether their plot was homegrown or steered from outside, remain mysteries.
But the question asked since their identities were revealed after the bombings continues to resonate: What motivated men reared thousands of miles from the Muslim world or any direct experience of oppression themselves 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 immigrants in Europe have had in finding their place or direction.
Theirs is a broader narrative being played out by such children of immigrants across Britain, and Western Europe. The young men have grown 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 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. 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 worshipped at the same mosque; their sons left, rejecting both the mosque's form of Islam as incorrect and its determination to keep politics outside the mosque's doors as unjust.
Walk down Stratford Street, past another mosque of the elders that the bombers and their cohort rejected, to the store of Mohammad Jaheer, a burly Bangladesh-born shopkeeper who has adopted the dress of the Prophet since going "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. That bookshop was raided by the police because of its possible links to the bombers.
Hussain, who helped organize peace marches after the bombing, rejects the notion that an outsider from al-Qaida recruited the men, although others disagree. He pointed to his head and said in reference to the bombers, and other young Muslims, "al-Qaida is inside."
Beeston Hill, where Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were raised, and nearby Holbeck, where Hasib Mir Hussain grew up, have a dreary, dissolute air. The two neighborhoods are about 77 percent white and 18 percent "Asian or Asian British," according to the 2001 census. Almost half the population is under 30.
Many white residents of Beeston tend toward tattoos and pit bulls. The drinking starts early, and openly. Trash and furniture clot some streets. Faces have been ravaged by drugs, whose use peaked a few years ago when heroin addicts wandered the streets.
More than 10 percent of houses are vacant. Nearly a third of the population of about 16,000 receives "council-administered benefit," the British equivalent of welfare. Unemployment is nearly 8 percent, more than double the rate for the rest of Leeds.
Whites and Asians live politely, but distantly, adjacent. Both groups say that South Asians have prospered more than whites, which has generated some resentment. Plenty of British Muslims face staggering poverty and unemployment, but the bombers and their immediate circle were not among them. At least some youths seem more directionless than deprived.
In some ways, Hussain and other elders say, the young people have had it easy. At the age when their fathers worked like mules, the sons are playing cricket, studying, hanging out. Compared with their parents, they are well educated, literate, fluent in English and the Internet.
Some know family businesses are waiting for them to take over. Some go on "benefit" as soon as they reach adulthood. Some sell drugs. "They are getting lazy, getting spoiled from the government," said Abu Hanifa, 60, another shopkeeper.
And yet Hussain and others think the young have also had it harder. In an alien culture, work ballasted the migrants, as did the traditional values they had imported from home. The young have no such anchors; they sometimes seem to be living in rooms without walls.
Mohammad Sidique Khan's generation was the first to be educated entirely in Britain. The schools they attended made almost no accommodation to their presence. They learned almost nothing about Pakistan or Islam's history and traditions.
Instead, they were expected to become British, and many have tried. But in areas like Beeston, young men say, that has also meant learning how to drink and do or sell drugs at an early age, how to lose your virginity by 14. At local high schools, boys have regularly divided into white and Asian gangs.
In Stratford Street, a Bengali-British drug dealer with a gold tooth and a practiced air of menace sits on a stoop. Jaheer, the Bengali-British shopkeeper, passes him by. As Jaheer and his friends see it, the critical battle here has been between those who have succumbed to their milieu, dragging their community down, and those who have sought to rescue and uplift it.
In that effort to fight Beeston's addiction, violence and aimlessness, they say Islam has proved an invaluable ally. To those who say Islam turned the bombers against Britain, they answer that Islam also saved youngsters from Britain.
Jaheer was among the first to become religious, and others soon followed. One by one, young men who regularly slept through prayer times awakened. Khan was among them; so, later on, were his fellow bombers, Tanweer and Hussain.
The group was always a minority among Beeston's youths, but an influential one. The pioneers coached those who followed them in how to live as Muslims in the West, bringing a new social conservatism to bear.
The group of friends created a network of organizations to lure Asian youths off the streets through sports, nature outings and extra education. The Leeds City Council funneled grants to the organizations. Under the auspices of the South Leeds Asian Youth Association, Khan received two grants of about 2,000 pounds apiece for gym equipment at two locations.
The young men came at Islam like converts — questioning everything, accepting nothing. If they were going to practice, they wanted to do it in what they considered the right way. If they wanted to go to heaven, they felt, they had to find the purest form. They wanted evidence for whatever they did in the Quran.
All of the young men quickly rejected the Islam of their parents, who practice a Sufi-influenced strain of the subcontinent called Brelvi. Shaped partly by Hindu and folk customs, it believes in the power of holy men and their shrines. The youths, Khan the most vocal among them, labeled such beliefs the contamination of Islam by "innovation."
They stopped praying at their parents' mosque. The young men turned, instead, to the more rigid, orthodox Deoband school of Islam, which also had a mosque in town. The adherents of Deobandism include the Taliban of Afghanistan; they take what they see as a highly literal approach to the faith. In Britain, as in Pakistan, it is this school that is fast-growing — starting seminaries, producing English-speaking preachers, and drawing young people away from the more liberal Islam of their parents.
Eventually Khan and his friends left the Deoband mosque, too, saying its approach to outreach was too narrow, its focus too apolitical. And the young zealots felt frustration and contempt for the imams of the mosques, who were often brought from the subcontinent, spoke minimal English, knew nothing of the moral maze young British Muslims face, and abided by an injunction by mosque elders that politics or current events involving Muslims should stay outside the mosque. For the young, Islam was politics.
Educated children of Muslim immigrants are finding their way to an extreme form of Islam spreading not through mosques but through Islamic bookshops, the Internet and university societies, said Roger Ballard, an anthropologist who specializes in Pakistani Muslims in Britain.
The form is called Salafism, and it has helped inspire groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida. The Salafi demand for purity and rejection of any Islam except that of the faith's early years can lead to deep intolerance, even for fellow Muslims like Shiites.
For educated young European Muslims who learned nothing of their own history in school, Salafism is a natural fit, Ballard said. It provides unequivocal answers.