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LONDON—
It is nearly 9 p.m. on a summer evening and the shadows are growing long at Spring Hill Park in the down-at-the-heels Hackney borough, but the young men of the North London Muslim Community Center are still hard at play.
Their sport is cricket, and these dark-haired teenagers, the children and grandchildren of Indian immigrants, are in the process of shutting down a team of peach-skinned blonds from the Highgate neighborhood.
As they do, they joke and banter, aping the posh accents of their opponents and laughing at the "geezers" — anyone older than 30 — who wander onto the neatly groomed lawn. The deep green of the grass sets off their white cricket outfits, just as their coltish spirits contrast with the strictly business play of the Highgate side.
It's typical teenage stuff, but in the wake of bombings in London this summer by working-class Muslims like these young men, even seemingly harmless fun is burdened with a nation's questions. Who are they, really? What do they want?
And do they even want to "belong" to Europe? Long before the deadly attacks, the continent's once-homogenous societies struggled with assimilating their large, and rapidly growing, Muslim populations. In turn, many new immigrants struggled with fitting in while quietly preserving their traditions.
Today, however, some young Muslims reject a pluralistic, secular continent, opting to retreat into the confines of what they feel is a purer, truer form of strict Islam as taught by radical clerics and websites.
The attack of July 7 and attempted reprise on the 21st, and similar bombings in Madrid last year, suggest that a small portion of Europe's new generation of Muslims may already be lost to extremist clerics and hate-filled Internet dogma.
But arrayed against fanaticism, there is a strong current of moderation within Europe's Muslim population that has become increasingly vocal in the wake of the London bombings.
Munaf Zeena, who runs the North London center, believes that if there is a solution to defeating extremism, it is a sense of community.
Like three of the July 7 bombers, Zeena is the Yorkshire-born son of immigrants. But far from attacking the country that bore him, the 45-year-old has embraced it. He is not only British, he says, but English — because England is the only home he has ever known, even if he is a Muslim and has an Indian name.
He is aware of the eerie parallels between his life and those of some of the bombers. As a young man, he faced racism from British nationalists. Like them, he sometimes felt a yawning gulf between his own, British-born generation and his parents' generation.
"What turned them into terrorists and what turned me into a man of peace?" he asked rhetorically. "That needs to be looked at so we can protect young people…. We need to look at it, we need to analyze it."
His center, Zeena believes, is an anchor in a confused and conflicted world. He is convinced that what sets his boys apart from the young bombers from Leeds is that they have a strong community around them, shaping them, grooming them, with supervisors and mentors who have taught them the correct meaning of Islam and citizenship.
He also believes the role of the mosque must be limited. "Mosques are places of worship," he said, insisting that they should not take the place of schools, community centers or other institutions. "Those that want to see mosques being used for the purposes that Prophet Muhammad used the Medina mosque should be aware that we live in a different age."
The center, in a pair of tawny brown Victorian row houses just off Stoke Newington High Street, looks out to an ethnic checkerboard of a neighborhood, the "new Britain" in microcosm.
Across the street is a Jewish primary school. One nearby restaurant, the Motherland, is African; another sells Middle Eastern kebabs. At the mosque next to the center, Muslim men in long robes, bushy beards and skullcaps chat on the sidewalk, while nearby walk Hasidic Jews with side locks and black broad-brimmed hats, coats, breeches and stockings.
Every day after school or work, the Muslim boys of the neighborhood congregate at the center, a few dozen of them at any one time, ranging in age from about 10 to 25. Inside, the place has an institutional feel, its bulletin board plastered with numbers to call for energy assistance, warnings about bowel disease and a note on the Islamic method for brushing teeth.
The youths rush past, upstairs to play pool and snooker in a game room, or down to the basement to surf the Internet or study Arabic or math. But for most, cricket and soccer are the mainstay of their lives, after religion. About 7 p.m., they dutifully go say their late-afternoon prayers at the mosque next door, then return to their sports in the park a few blocks away.
In a sense, their lives mirror those of Shahzad Tanweer, Mohamed Sidique Khan and Hasib Hussain, the young men who blew themselves up this summer, killing dozens of commuters. But unlike them, the boys of the North London Muslim Community Center say they have not fallen under the spell of militant anti-Western preachers.
Their sport is cricket, and these dark-haired teenagers, the children and grandchildren of Indian immigrants, are in the process of shutting down a team of peach-skinned blonds from the Highgate neighborhood.
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It's typical teenage stuff, but in the wake of bombings in London this summer by working-class Muslims like these young men, even seemingly harmless fun is burdened with a nation's questions. Who are they, really? What do they want?
And do they even want to "belong" to Europe? Long before the deadly attacks, the continent's once-homogenous societies struggled with assimilating their large, and rapidly growing, Muslim populations. In turn, many new immigrants struggled with fitting in while quietly preserving their traditions.
Today, however, some young Muslims reject a pluralistic, secular continent, opting to retreat into the confines of what they feel is a purer, truer form of strict Islam as taught by radical clerics and websites.
The attack of July 7 and attempted reprise on the 21st, and similar bombings in Madrid last year, suggest that a small portion of Europe's new generation of Muslims may already be lost to extremist clerics and hate-filled Internet dogma.
But arrayed against fanaticism, there is a strong current of moderation within Europe's Muslim population that has become increasingly vocal in the wake of the London bombings.
Munaf Zeena, who runs the North London center, believes that if there is a solution to defeating extremism, it is a sense of community.
Like three of the July 7 bombers, Zeena is the Yorkshire-born son of immigrants. But far from attacking the country that bore him, the 45-year-old has embraced it. He is not only British, he says, but English — because England is the only home he has ever known, even if he is a Muslim and has an Indian name.
He is aware of the eerie parallels between his life and those of some of the bombers. As a young man, he faced racism from British nationalists. Like them, he sometimes felt a yawning gulf between his own, British-born generation and his parents' generation.
"What turned them into terrorists and what turned me into a man of peace?" he asked rhetorically. "That needs to be looked at so we can protect young people…. We need to look at it, we need to analyze it."
His center, Zeena believes, is an anchor in a confused and conflicted world. He is convinced that what sets his boys apart from the young bombers from Leeds is that they have a strong community around them, shaping them, grooming them, with supervisors and mentors who have taught them the correct meaning of Islam and citizenship.
He also believes the role of the mosque must be limited. "Mosques are places of worship," he said, insisting that they should not take the place of schools, community centers or other institutions. "Those that want to see mosques being used for the purposes that Prophet Muhammad used the Medina mosque should be aware that we live in a different age."
The center, in a pair of tawny brown Victorian row houses just off Stoke Newington High Street, looks out to an ethnic checkerboard of a neighborhood, the "new Britain" in microcosm.
Across the street is a Jewish primary school. One nearby restaurant, the Motherland, is African; another sells Middle Eastern kebabs. At the mosque next to the center, Muslim men in long robes, bushy beards and skullcaps chat on the sidewalk, while nearby walk Hasidic Jews with side locks and black broad-brimmed hats, coats, breeches and stockings.
Every day after school or work, the Muslim boys of the neighborhood congregate at the center, a few dozen of them at any one time, ranging in age from about 10 to 25. Inside, the place has an institutional feel, its bulletin board plastered with numbers to call for energy assistance, warnings about bowel disease and a note on the Islamic method for brushing teeth.
The youths rush past, upstairs to play pool and snooker in a game room, or down to the basement to surf the Internet or study Arabic or math. But for most, cricket and soccer are the mainstay of their lives, after religion. About 7 p.m., they dutifully go say their late-afternoon prayers at the mosque next door, then return to their sports in the park a few blocks away.
In a sense, their lives mirror those of Shahzad Tanweer, Mohamed Sidique Khan and Hasib Hussain, the young men who blew themselves up this summer, killing dozens of commuters. But unlike them, the boys of the North London Muslim Community Center say they have not fallen under the spell of militant anti-Western preachers.
