Quotes of the Day

Some places look more miserable under a blazing sun than on gloomy days. Tempest Road in Leeds, West Yorkshire, is one of them, a Victorian street built on the cheap for textile mill workers and on the slide, pretty much, ever since. On this mercilessly sunny day, a group of young British-Asian men are gathered outside the King Kebab, a takeaway joint on the end of a strip of budget shops that appear to be closed much of the time. Ali, Pav, Shy, Raja, Safi, Asif and Hasif are talking about their friend Kaki, another local boy, born nine miles from their Beeston neighborhood. "He was the best lad," says one, "everybody liked him." "He was gentle" and "he got on with everybody." Ameer, a younger boy in a nearby park, could "definitely not" believe it was Kaki.

The evidence suggests otherwise. From CCTV images captured at rail stations in Luton and London and personal documents found at the scenes of the London explosions, police have identified the amiable 22-year-old his contemporaries called Kaki as Shehzed Tanweer, who traveled from Leeds to London on July 7, boarded a Circle Line train on the London Underground in the direction of Aldgate station and, eight minutes into his journey, detonated an explosive charge in his rucksack. As the police investigation into the bombings continues, a conversation is taking place on streets and in cafés, mosques and church halls, playgrounds and council chambers. Its purpose: to try to fathom why Kaki and three other apparently happy, home-loving men turned to slaughter. The outcome of that debate will help shape how the whole of Britain copes with its future.

The conversation has a special urgency among British Muslims. Many feel implicated in the attacks carried out ostensibly in the name of their religion. Yet there is also anger — anger at the ignorance of some who view all Muslims as potential terrorists and, most bitter of all, at fellow Muslims who excuse or espouse terrorism. The London blasts exposed fault lines, not only between different ethnic identities but between generations and economic classes. In an effort to find a common front, 22 Muslim leaders and scholars issued a joint statement last week. They called the London attacks "utterly criminal, totally reprehensible, and absolutely un-Islamic." Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who heads the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella group with some 350 affiliated institutions, traveled to Leeds to talk to worshippers in one of the city's biggest mosques. Yet the visit, designed to heal wounds, was not a complete success. The Guardian reported that young men criticized Sacranie — who was recently knighted for "services to the Muslim community, to charity and to community relations" — for failing to seek them out during his visit. To be sure, the older generation has to find ways to reach out to kids who may otherwise fall prey to extremism, as the Muslim leaders' joint statement concluded. "The youth," it said, "need understanding, not bashing." But understanding is in short supply, even within families. Khaliq Ahmed, a taxi driver in Leeds, muses: "I'm British, you know. I live here. If I had to fight, I'd fight for my country. But my son, he's 18, and you know what he did? He had the word 'Pakistan' tattooed on his hand."

How can such young men be persuaded to identify with the place in which they live? The Muslim Association of Britain, which helped organize the "Don't Attack Iraq" antiwar marches in 2003, thinks that the more Muslim youth participate in the democratic process, the more they will display allegiance to Britain. The association has tried to mobilize Muslims to vote, an aim shared by Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding. Doyle thinks Muslims need to pool their resources — locally, regionally and nationally — to increase their clout. The Muslim community, he says, "is beginning to realize that they have a real part in the solution." Yet Muslim voter participation remains low, and there are only four Muslim Members of Parliament out of a total of 659 M.P.s. Prime Minister Tony Blair has done his best to ensure that the message from Britain's political leadership is positive. Last week, he described the 2.8% of the British population that is Islamic as "overwhelmingly law-abiding, decent members of our society." Blair told the House of Commons: "We are dealing not with an isolated criminal act but with an extreme and evil ideology, the roots of which lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of the religion of Islam." Muslims themselves, said Blair, had to take the lead in combating that ideology: "In the end, only the community itself can take on and defeat it, but we can all help and facilitate."

Yet if a spirit of self-examination is to really take root among British Muslims, what happens in the arenas of high politics is less important than the everyday chats in mosques and youth clubs. "That atrocity broke our hearts," says Mohammed Kozbar, spokesman for the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park. "I've been shocked and surprised by the news that these young people are British Muslims." Until early 2003, the radical Egyptian-born cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam at Finsbury Park, reeling in enthusiastic young followers with his fiery sermons. Now Abu Hamza is awaiting trial on charges that include stirring racial hatred, and a gentler brand of Islam is drawing people back to the mosque. "We have a responsibility as a community," says Kozbar. "We have to ask ourselves how these people grew up in such an atmosphere, and from where they got this ideology that they can kill people. We have to educate young Muslims. Islam does not give the right to kill anyone." Kozbar ticks off a list of the possible causes of alienation that might make Muslims prey to the politics of hatred: discrimination, poverty and "foreign issues like Iraq and Palestine." Still, he continues, "these issues do not justify acting in this way."

It's easy to get British Muslims to agree on one thing; few seem to view U.S. foreign policy with anything but despair. High profile gaffes feed a sense that the U.S. is insensitive to Muslim views, as when the plane carrying Yusuf Islam, better known as the rock star Cat Stevens, was diverted to Bangor, Maine, on its way to Washington from London in September 2004 because his name turned up on a watch list of people with suspected ties to terrorists. Just last week, Zaki Badawi, an internationally renowned British Muslim scholar and the moderate head of London's Muslim College, was denied entry to the U.S. after his plane landed in New York.

Back at home, British Muslims have their grievances, and the list just got longer. In a development that was, perhaps, sadly inevitable, the London bombings ignited a spate of racist attacks. Several mosques were firebombed or had their windows smashed; there were incidents of abuse, threats and assaults. A 48-year-old Muslim man, Kamal Raza Butt, died, allegedly after being set upon by a mixedrace gang of youths in Nottingham. For the friends of Tanweer, such actions may just confirm their diagnosis of the ills of Western society. The boys on the street may be bewildered by his actions, but they are not slow to speculate what motivated him. One young man in Beeston thought that the roots of Tanweer's rage lay in "the persecution of Muslims worldwide" and the slaughter of innocents in Palestine and Iraq. "Wouldn't you want to fight if you saw your brotherhood, children and babies attacked?" he said.

That view is not limited to Leeds. In Southall Broadway, west London, Sarfraz Hussain, 24, helps his uncle run the Kashmir Karahi restaurant. "People here are getting angry because of what's happening in other countries," such as Afghanistan and Iraq, he says. "For years now, no one has been listening to the Muslims. They're trying to get out a message because they're suffering so much and no one is listening. And that's why [the bombers] probably thought, 'We've got no other way to get our message across.' Ordinary people just got caught up." But Hussain knows that anger isn't the answer. "You have to think, what has this bombing changed?' It hasn't driven the Israelis out of Palestine, it hasn't solved anything in Iraq. It's just made it worse for the British people," he says. "Now if I go and apply for a job, employers might think, 'We don't want this person, he's a terrorist.'"

That facile conclusion is one that Muslim organizations are determined to combat. Fadi Itani, executive director of the Muslim Welfare House in Finsbury Park, says adamantly: "[The bombers] acted on their own. They didn't ask us if they could do this. We condemned it before and we condemn it even more now. Every community has criminals. The question is, what can we all do? We have to be hard on terrorism and the roots of terrorism. When the I.R.A. was bombing London, no one was saying all Catholics were to blame." Says Doyle: "This is not a war between the West and Islam — it is between those who want to live normally and peacefully and those who don't." Yet no matter how many call for British Islam to rid itself of the ideologists of hate, the truth remains that few yet know why some of their youngsters feel the way they do. "There's definitely something about the younger generation," says Ahmed, the Leeds taxi driver. "They feel under attack, and I don't know why." And while that sense of victimization continues, there will always be those who are prepared to understand those who commit horrible acts of violence. In Luton, where the three bombers from Leeds met up with the fourth to continue their journey to London, a redbearded Swede stands outside the Central Mosque. A convert to Islam, he declares: "There's no way I'm going to condemn my brothers over this." The conversation within British Islam has a long way to go.

• MARYANN BIRD
• The hurt and the challenges for British Muslims