A young Muslim activist explains our critical need to counter youth recruitment by religious fundamentalists

by EBOO PATEL

Chapter I: The Crossroads of the Identity Crisis

Hasib Hussain, left hand hanging slightly out of the pocket of his jeans, shuffles into the Luton railway station just before 7:30 a.m. on July 7, 2005, wearing an indifferent expression on his face and a pack on his back. Three young men accompany him. They all wear indifferent expressions. They all wear packs on their backs.

But it is not water bottles and summer novels that they carry. Instead, each pack contains a carefully mixed concoction of hair bleach, food preservatives, and heating chemicals.

Hasib Hussain's pack is the last to blow. It detonates at 9:47 a.m. on a double-decker bus near Tavistock Square, peeling the top off and killing Hasib and thirteen others. Hasib was eighteen years old.

An hour earlier, at the Russell Square Tube station a few blocks away, Germaine Lindsay detonated his pack. Germaine was nineteen years old.

The other two blasts occurred within seconds of the Russell Square explosion. Mohammad Sidique Khan sat on Circle Line train 216. Seconds after it left Edgware Road, traveling west to Paddington, the explosives on his back tore apart his car like a can opener and impacted an oncoming eastbound train. Mohammad was thirty.

On the other side of central London, in the heavily Muslim East End, Shehzad Tanweer blew himself up on a westbound Circle Line train leaving Liverpool Street station for Aldgate. Seven people plus the bomber were killed. Shehzad was twenty-two.

Shahara Islam was the first of the dead to be buried...I cannot help but imagine her smiling at her murderer, the tall and endearingly awkward Hasib Hussain, when he climbed aboard weighed down by the death in his backpack... The world lives in London, and when bombs go off, it dies there...

Terry McDermott opens Perfect Soldiers, his book on the September 11 hijackers, with the image of Mohamed Atta, the suspected leader of the group, padding around his Hamburg, Germany, apartment in blue flip-flops. "We want our monsters to be outsized, monstrous," writes McDermott. "We expect them to be somehow equal to their crimes." But the world is a peculiar place, and McDermott, after conducting the definitive study into the lives of the nineteen hijackers, was forced to conclude, "The men of September 11 were, regrettably, I think, fairly ordinary men."

So were the men of July 7, 2005. "Suspects' Neighbors Say There Was No Hint of Evil" was the title of the story in the New York Times. Shehzad Tanweer, the twenty-two-year-old Aldgate bomber, loved Elvis Presley's version of Eddy Arnold's song "Make the World Go Away." Shehzad worked in his father's successful fish and chips shop and drove around town in the family's red Mercedes. Friends described him as infinitely likable, more apt to talk about sports and cars than anything else...

Mohammad Sidique Khan was a learning mentor at Hillside Primary School. He was universally appreciated by parents, students, and faculty for his commitment to assisting the newly immigrated children with everything from school lessons to athletics...Germaine Lindsay was described as one of the cool kids in school — smart, funny, and always smiling. Born in Jamaica, he converted to Islam at age fifteen. Germaine married a white British Muslim convert, and the two had a baby together. Neither his mother nor his wife could believe that he had become a suicide bomber. His mother remembered Germaine mourning the victims of September 11, and his wife would not accept that Germaine had left her and their baby behind.

Hasib Hussain was the youngest, the shyest, the least remarkable, the most impressionable. He went to primary school a block from his home, and he loved kicking a plastic soccer ball down the street where he lived. It was his mother's call to the police, reporting that Hasib had not returned home from his trip to London with friends and was not answering his cell phone, that broke the bombing case open.