It is not hard to imagine what the Leeds suburb of Beeston was like before it became known that three of London’s Tube bombers worked or lived there. For someone like me — a Punjabi with parents from each side of the India-Pakistan border — the streets here reveal a pre-partition mixture of Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs.

Men in shalwar kurta (traditional dress from the subcontinent) stand on street corners chatting as if in a bazaar in Lahore. They oppose Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war, they “hate” America, they might even think the West has united in a fight against Muslims; but these are not the faces of extremism. Their involvement in 7/7 is a generational one: they have raised the young men who are the genus most susceptible to Islamic extremism in this country — the second- generation British Pakistanis.

One appears next to his father on a street corner. Unlike his father there is nothing about his appearance that indicates he is a Punjabi Muslim. An Arabisation has occurred: he is wearing long Arab robes and keeps a beard cut to Islamic specification. I ask him why he is dressed that way.

“It’s my traditional dress,” he says in English.

“Isn’t your father in traditional dress?” I ask.

“Yes, but this is Islamic dress,” he clarifies. His father looks embarrassed. A man standing next to me jokes of how he complained to his neighbour that his son never did any work and the neighbour said: “You think that’s bad, mine’s grown a beard and become a bloody maulvi (priest).”

As a half-Indian, half-Pakistani with British citizenship, I have observed the gulf between what it means to be British Pakistani and British Indian. To be Indian is to come from a safe, ancient country and, more recently, from an emerging power. In contrast, to be Pakistani is to begin with a depleted idea of nationhood. In the almost 58 years that Pakistan has been a country, it has been a dangerous, violent place defined by hatred of the other — India. Its national image has been tarnished.

For young British Muslims, if Pakistan was not the place to look for an identity, being second-generation British was less inspiring. While their parents were pioneers, leaving Pakistan in search of economic opportunities, the second generation’s experience has been one of drudgery and confusion.

The owner of a convenience store on Stratford Street in Beeston, who knew the bombers, said: “They were born and raised here, we did the work and these kids grew up and they haven’t had a day’s worry. They’re bored, they don’t do any work, they have no sense of honour or belonging.”

While their parents’ generation was consumed with the challenge of building a life from scratch in Britain, they had far more time to consider and eventually doubt its purpose.

When our Tube bombers were growing up, any notion that an idea of Britishness should be imposed on minorities was seen as offensive. Unlike in America, where minorities wear their acquired national identity with great pride, Britons were having a hard time believing in Britishness.

If you denigrate your culture you face the risk of your newer arrivals looking for one elsewhere. So far afield in this case that for many second-generation British Pakistanis the desert culture of the Arabs held more appeal than either British or subcontinental culture. Three times removed from a durable sense of identity, the energised extra-national world view of radical Islam became one available identity for second-generation Pakistanis. The few who took it did so with the convert’s zeal.

The older generation of Beeston is mystified as to where some of their children found this identity. By all accounts it was not in the mosque. I met Maulana Munir of the Stratford Street mosque which, according to some newspapers, was attended by the London bombers. A small, soft-spoken man, he said he had never known them.