London a hotbed of angry young Muslims

Ali sat in his car waving at the girls in the Bury district of Luton yesterday, dressed in tracksuit bottoms and expensive sunglasses.

He may have looked like a picture of the well-integrated second-generation Asian, but Ali, a Luton-born Muslim of Pakistani parents, is an angry young man.

"We are all drawn to Islam down here. I'm angry at the West. They're grieving for 52 people in London, but I've been grieving for thousands of children in Palestine, in Chechnya, in Kashmir, in Iraq, since I was 15.

"When Fallujah happened, no one asked Muslim youths what they felt. But now that London's happened, you are asking us."

Ali believes it is not just Luton's youth who have become politicised over the past decade but young men across the country, through a growing Muslim consciousness.

"Our parents came here as servants with a Raj mentality. We're not like them," he said.

"The world has become a village. If something happens to innocent people in Iraq, the Muslims of Luton will know about it and feel that grief."

Ali dismissed British Prime Minister Tony Blair's summit meeting with the country's most prominent members of the Muslim community as a "PR exercise" and said he believed these "elders" were out of touch with disenchanted Muslim youth.

About 15 per cent of Luton's 185,000 citizens are Muslim and it has acquired a tag as a hotbed of radicalism, not least because of its links with hardline Islamic group al-Muharijoun. It carved out a heartland in the town before it was banned by the town's mosques six months ago.

One high-profile radical who mainstream Muslims have disowned is Sayful Islam, a 24-year-old accountant formerly known as Ishtiaq Alamgir.

The Luton leader of al-Muhajiroun, he has claimed to be the "mouth, eyes and ears of [Osama] bin Laden", has called Britain a "legitimate target" for terror attacks.

Many others acknowledged that they felt anger at not being heard or represented and admitted to feeling less pride in being British than Muslim, with a strong emotional bond to the concept of Ummah, or the Muslim community, that extends across geographic and nationalistic boundaries.

Abu Zulfiqer, 24, a Bangladeshi-British Muslim, said that while he disagreed with the killing of innocent people, there were some who felt it was legitimate to defend the "brotherhood".

But shop-owner Hafi Jameel, 50, said: "Blowing up a bomb in London is not jihad. We are British Muslims. If Germany or Holland or France were to attack us, we should defend our country and die of it. This is jihad.

"We left our homes, parents, everything, for the future of our children."

- INDEPENDENT