the making of a terrorist

There's a fascinating article in this month's issue of Prospect magazine, looking at what could have pushed the London bombers down the path of radical Islam.
It is extremely long but well worth reading in full. Journalist Shiv Malik spent months getting to know the community of Beeston, the rundown area of Leeds where three of the terrorists grew up. Among the people he got to know was actually the brother of ring-leader, Mohammed Siddique Khan.
The piece makes the case that their radicalisation may actually have had more to do with inter-generational tensions within the British Pakistani community than a lack of integration with the wider UK society.
A few interesting passages:

"Ali told me that the older generation didn't know how to deal with the drug problem. They were largely illiterate and didn't know the system, so they would sooner move out than try to fight the dealers. The only people who seemed to do anything about the drug-taking were a group of second-generation Pakistanis called the "Mullah boys."
"This was a fluid group of 15 to 20 members that formed in the mid-1990s, initially as a response to the drugs issue. Mohammad Sidique Khan was a leading member. Ali told me that on several occasions, the group kidnapped young Pakistani drug addicts and, with the consent of their families, held them in a flat near the Wahhabi-inclined mosque on Stratford Street—and forcibly cleansed them of their drug habits.
"What we learned from Ali was later corroborated by an ex-drug user called Asim Suleman. He had been cold-turkeyed by the Mullah boys in 1996, and Sidique Khan, Khan's friend Naveed Fiaz and Tafazal Mohammed, Khan's line manager in his youth worker job, had asked Suleman back to help with another round in 2001."

"Families that allow children to marry for love are considered to have lost their izzat, or honour. In most circumstances, the only way for the family to regain it is to kill the offending boy or girl. Pakistan has the highest number of honour killings in the world...
"So when the Mullah boys started conducting marriages from the premises of Iqra, the local Islamic bookshop on Bude road, it caused a stir. Ali says that when Sidique Khan's friend Naveed Fiaz and his brother married white girls, and a Bangladeshi girl married an Afro-Caribbean guy, the community elders became very worried.
"But the Mullah boys were armed with faith. As long as the marriages were between Muslims, they didn't care about tribal tradition. And since the outsiders all converted to Islam before the marriages, the older generation's insistence that their young marry their cousins was simply ignored. "

"I was sitting in his house for what would be the last time and we were going through the BBC script when Gultasab told me that he himself had become more religious over the last three years.
"For some reason, I translated my usual question of whether he thought what his brother had done was "good" or "bad"—he had said that it was a terrible thing several times—and instead asked him whether he thought 7/7 was halal (permitted) or haram (forbidden) in Islam.
"Only when a look of stunned surprise come over Gultasab's face did I realise that I must have been asking him an entirely different question. After a brief pause, he replied. "No comment."
"Here, it seemed, was the perfect example of the division between two worldviews—secular ethics and an embattled Islamic faith.
"How long had Gultasab managed to function with these two conflicting positions fighting within him?
"Everyday morality told him that his brother had committed a cold-blooded act of terror, while his own Islamic theology told him that there was no clear answer and maybe his brother was a hero. How many thousands of young British Muslims are similarly conflicted?"