Tall and lanky, Hasib Hussain tried hard to fade into the background at Matthew Murray High School, but the white toughs picked on him anyway. The sermons at the local mosque rarely addressed this reality. His parents' advice was to pray more and do better in school. He started running with a group of Pakistani Muslims who fought back, a crowd that provided him with support and identity but was estranged from the pious Muslim community of his household and mosque. Scared that their son was losing his way, his parents sent him abroad, thinking that religious influence from the Muslim world would straighten him out.

A cousin observed that Hasib returned not only more devout but also more political and strident in his views. Hasib began spending more time with Mohammad Sidique Khan. Khan had recently rejected Leeds's mosques for practicing what he claimed was a diluted and false form of Islam and had become part of the inner circle at the Iqra Learning Center.

When radical Muslims traveled through Leeds to spread their message of proper Muslim behavior plus hatred for the West, they held their meetings at the Iqra Learning Center. In addition to traditional Islamic literature like the Qur'an, the Hadith, and books on Muslim law, the store carried materials on Western conspiracy theories against Islam. Part of the collection included DVDs showing scenes of Muslims being maimed and murdered in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Chechnya juxtaposed against President George Bush saying the word "crusade." ... First came the proper way to do Muslim prayers, then the lectures about injustice against Muslims around the world, and next the DVDs. "You could see how it could turn someone to raw hate...I know it was propaganda and was made to make you feel this way. But what about young guys who see this material as a call to do something?"

That is exactly what Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad wants. He helped establish Hizb ut-Tahrir, whose mission is to reestablish the Islamic caliphate. In its study circles, Hizb recruits learn that Muslim identity is necessarily opposed to the West...Sheikh Omar left Hizb, or was asked to leave, after he stated that British Prime Minister John Major should be assassinated and beheaded for his role in the Gulf War of 1990-1991.

Unable to preach violence through Hizb, Sheikh Omar went on to organize a radical Muslim youth organization that he called Al-Muhajiroun in the early 1990s. He used this platform to preach sermons and post web messages calling young British Muslims to wage jihad against the West in Iraq, Israel, and Chechnya. He referred to the September 11 hijackers as the Magnificent 19.

Sheikh Omar is a master institution builder and youth organizer. He understands precisely what buttons to push to harden a young Muslim's fluid religious identity into a terrorist commitment. The itinerant Muslim preachers who inspired the radical study circle at the Iqra Learning Center and the locals who organized it likely learned their trade through Sheikh Omar's networks.

How did awkward, shy Hasib Hussain become a suicide bomber? Sheikh Omar's people got to him before we did.

In my life, religious violence has always existed in the gray area between reality and imagination. In November 1999, I left late for an appointment at a waterfront cafÇ in Cape Town, South Africa. As I approached, I started noticing glass shards strewn around, and then I heard the wailing sirens. "What's going on?" I asked a cop. "A bomb went off at a pizza parlor," he responded. It was next door to the cafe where I was supposed to meet a friend.

An eerie feeling crept over me as I stared at the faces of the London bombers, especially the three who traced their history back to the subcontinent. Their travails in school, their relationships with their parents, their indifference to Islam as adolescents followed by an intense reengagement-it all felt familiar. I sensed a flicker of recognition from a deep place. A piece of their story was a part of me.