Only half of me is the person you think I am. When I was born in Somalia in 1967 my parents gave me an indigenous old Somali name, Rageh; but my mother wanted me to have an Islamic name too.

Somalia had not long been independent, but there is a part of her that belongs to something else, an idea of who she and her family are that is not fulfilled by loyalty to a nation, however proud she is of it. She feels part of a much wider Islamic identity and culture.

In Islamic tradition, God is said to have 99 names. The first of these is Allah. The second is Abdel Rahman, which means the Compassionate. This is the second name my mother chose for me. When I telephone her now in northern Somalia, where she returned after living in England for 32 years, she calls me not Rageh but Abdel Rahman.

Why is it so important to her? This is a question that is a fundamental part of what it is to be Muslim in the modern world — especially a Muslim living in the West. Does your Muslim identity and loyalty supersede loyalty to your nation? Do you feel Muslim first and Somali, British, French or Dutch second? Can the two identities really co-exist?

My second name also says something about the often hidden aspect of Muslim lives in this post September 11 world. Integration, at least as it is seen from the perspective of Muslims living in the West, is often about denying or even abandoning half of ourselves. But that other half of us is an indivisible part of our existence, wherever we live.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who want to believe that “I am Muslim and British” should not become a sentence that is ever harder to say, or at the very least that it should be a sentence that does not evoke a lingering sense of doubt in their non-Muslim fellow Britons.

I have spent the vast majority of my professional life so far reporting back to a British audience from the African and Islamic world. As a British Muslim in London after the bombings of July 7 last year, I do not recognise my life and the lives of my relatives in the newspapers or on television.

There have been interviews with firebrand young Muslims shouting their violent intentions into television microphones. Documentaries have set out to explain Islam and concepts such as jihad, martyrdom and paradise. They sought to define the “Islamic terrorist” or “Al-Qaeda operative” as types, relying heavily on sociological, police and intelligence profiling that aims to uncover the “mind of the suicide bomber” or the “global networks of Al-Qaeda”.

There have been genuine attempts to understand “why”. But I don’t see much that reflects the hopes and views of my nieces, uncles, cousins who have made their homes in Britain.

There is barely a glimpse of that often hidden part of British society that is undergoing significant and vital change that will come to have a lasting impact on this country.

As in every war, you have to know who your enemies are, why they are your enemies and what you need to do to defeat them. But you also have to realise who you friends are. Muslims like myself ask whether you know who among us are your allies? Are all of us suspect? If not, then who is on our side?

Remember that we are targets in the same war. The bombers hate me — as one of the many millions of Muslims who accommodate western ideas and values — more than you. So why are you not listening to us?

I LIVED in a street just off the Edgware Road in northwest London from the age of five until I was 25. My parents never believed we would stay. They had not come to Britain as exiles but to have their children educated in the skills that would help to build postcolonial Somalia.