I can imagine going to Hasib Hussain's home for dinner. I would have sat with Hasib's father in the living room after dinner, drinking Indian masala tea-sweet with sugar, spicy with cinnamon, fragrant with cardamom. We would have made the obligatory comments about global politics, wondering when India and Pakistan would finally work out the issue of Kashmir. Perhaps his father, his Muslim solidarity flaring for an instant, would have told me how angry he was at America for ignoring the plight of the Palestinians for so long and for believing that you can bomb countries into democracy. Then he would have hurriedly said, "But I love the American people. It is the government that does all the bombing."

Inevitably, we would have settled on the subject of life in the West. He would have shaken his head and said that England is hard. You can make a living, yes, but the culture is a stranger to you, and then it takes your son and makes him a stranger, too. Then his voice would have fallen a little, and he would have confessed the problems that Hasib had had at school- the falling grades, the truancy, the fights. Where was the famed education and social mobility of the West? And then he would have spoken about how sending Hasib abroad had straightened him out. He now wore a Muslim cap and prayed regularly, and he no longer went around with those boys who, rumor had it, were into alcohol and worse things.

The only problem was that Hasib didn't want to go to the local mosque anymore. His new friends had started praying at the Iqra Learning Center. Now, when he made offhand comments about the plight of Muslims elsewhere, Hasib grew furious and spit out angry words about the West and the importance of returning Islam to power. Hasib's father would have asked me, a few years older than Hasib and also a second-generation South Asian Muslim in the West, if I understood what his son was going through.

I would have swallowed hard.

I know his son's anger in a dangerous way. I remember feigning illness so I could stay home from school as a teenager, afraid to tell my mother the truth: that a group of white kids in gym class had taken to cornering me in the locker room, tearing off my shorts, and hitting me with wet towels, all the while shouting "sand nigger" and "curry maker."

My parents, as loving as they were, simply could not relate to my reality. My mother was convinced that if I would only raise my math grade, the other kids would respect me. "Say your tasbih," she would add, referring to the Muslim prayer beads. It made me feel worse to tell her what happened in school, so I stopped.

My father had always been knowledgeable about world affairs but never active in them. He is a profoundly decent man with a strong personal spirituality, but he was never a ritualistic Muslim, and certainly not one inclined to side with his coreligionists over the country he felt indebted to. But when my father felt that a part of his identity was under fire, however secondary it might have been in his overall makeup under normal circumstances, that part flared and rose to the surface and began dominating his personality.