Looking back, I see flashes of the ingredients that prepared the ground for Hasib Hussain's suicide mission in my own life...

Like Hasib, I took a step down the path of adolescent risk taking. Unable to find my place in junior high, I started hanging out with kids who pushed their way to the back of the bus, smoked cigarettes across the street from school, stole wine coolers from their parents' refrigerators, and bragged loudly about touching their girlfriends' breasts, while the girls in question giggled within earshot.

Like Hasib, I needed a course correction. Perhaps in another place and time, I would have followed a Mohammad Sidique Khan into the back room of an Iqra Learning Center...Maybe I would have sought his discipline and approval and discovered my identity in the imagined community of the global jihad.

How does one ordinary young person's commitment to a religion turn into a suicide mission and another ordinary young person's commitment to that same faith become an organization devoted to pluralism? The answer, I believe, lies in the influences young people have, the programs and people who shape their religious identities.

Religious totalitarians like Sheikh Omar are exceptionally perceptive about the crisis facing second-generation immigrant Muslims in the West. They know that the identity we get from [our parents] feels irrelevant, that it is impossible to be a 1950s-era Pakistani or Egyptian or Moroccan Muslim in twenty-first-century Chicago or London or Madrid.

In many cases, our parents built bubbles for themselves when they moved to the West-little worlds where they could eat familiar food, speak their own language, and follow the old ways. And because they re-created a little piece of Karachi in Manchester, England, or a part of Bombay in Boston, Massachusetts, they assumed that their children would remain within the cocoon. But we second- and third-generation Muslims cannot separate ourselves from the societies we live in. Raised in pious Muslim homes, occasionally participating in the permissive aspects of Western culture, many of us come to believe that our two worlds, the two sides of ourselves, are necessarily antagonistic. This experience of "two-ness" is exacerbated by the deep burn of racism.

As we grow older and seek a unified Muslim way of being, it is too often Muslim extremists who meet us at the crossroads of our identity crisis. Where are the Muslim leaders who understand this complex challenge, who are helping young people develop a coherent, relevant Muslim identity in the West?

People such as Dr. Umar Abd-Allah, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Imam Zaid Shakir, and Professors Sherman Jackson and Amina McCloud in the United States are the exceptions. They understand that the American project and the continuity of Muslim identity are symbiotic, not opposed to each other. They are some of the leading intellectuals in contemporary Islam, and they spend an enormous amount of time running seminars for Muslim college students and retreats for young Muslim leaders. One of their counterparts in Britain, Zaki Badawi (who died in January 2006), spent a lifetime trying to address the challenge of nurturing Muslim identity in the West but knew only too well that the type of leadership he exemplified was all too rare in Britain. When Tony Blair asked him and a group of other senior Muslim leaders why radicals such as Sheikh Omar were so effective with young people, Badawi said, "The young people who believe in him, we do not have access to them." The truth is, not enough Muslim leaders are trying.