Entering the mosque was Michael Henning, a Londoner in his early 30s who had been caught in the morning's first bomb blast between Aldgate East (just a few hundred yards away from the mosque) and Moorgate. The right side of his face was a mass of fierce red welts from flying glass. His right eye was covered with thick gauze. "It happened so quickly," he said, in shock. "We travelled out into the tunnel. Not long after we set out all I saw was yellow light and silver lines in front of my eyes - which turned out to be glass - and I was being twisted and thrown to the ground. Luckily I was in the next carriage over from the bomb."
I was standing outside, not knowing if I'd be welcome, as a woman. I needn't have worried. I was quickly invited into the Muslim Centre by smiling faces. "We want to give some feedback," said one slightly anxious young man as I went in. "You'll have noticed. All the bomb blasts were where Muslims live - round here, near the Edgware Road. We don't want people to make the mistake of thinking the wrong thing about the people here."
He wasn't altogether wrong to worry.
By five or six o'clock, the stunned office workers who'd been penned up in cordoned-off buildings around the City all day finally were streaming home, on foot or by bicycle. But most of the Muslim men, who usually man the textile shops of the down-at-heel eastern districts where London's most recent and poorest immigrants have always settled, were nowhere to be seen. Their shops had metal shutters up. Petticoat Lane market was closed, and, just east of Aldgate East tube station, Whitechapel Market - usually a dirty, cheerful, rat-infested, fruit-selling free-for-all - was closing early, unusually tidy after police swoops on unattended garbage bags. A group of Muslim women and children edged nervously past a white East-Ender of about 20 displaying biceps in a cut-off T-shirt, who was shouting belligerently into his cell phone, "yeah mate, well, where I am everyone looks like a f**king al-Qaeda terrorist".
So might the Muslims of many ethnic backgrounds who attend this mosque face a backlash from angry Londoners thinking they have ties with terrorists? Dr Abdul Bari, head of the Muslim Centre, a tall, slim man with a greying beard and a mobile that never stopped ringing with offers of help or requests for coordinating responses to London's crisis, hoped not. "We hope we can withstand that. I cannot guarantee it, but in our community we are hopeful. The community should be vigilant so that anyone wanting to cause pain and loss from any community should be marginalized. With calm, dignity and a little bit of wisdom we can find a way."
He was doing his best to keep things calm, to stop the Muslims and non-Muslims of Tower Hamlets splintering away from each other. He'd had the Bishop of Stepney down earlier in the day and made a joint statement with him condemning the attacks. And now he and other faith leaders in Tower Hamlets, the most deprived borough in London, were drafting a joint statement of solidarity.
One of them was Reverend Alan Green, a dog-collared Anglican clergyman who's been in Tower Hamlets for seven years, and for the last three has been running the area's inter-faith forum. "It can be easy to make divisions between communities," Green said. "Although there's goodwill here, a terrible tragedy like this can make these links very fragile."
Britain's two-million Muslim community - a group that makes up nearly four per cent of the British population - prides itself on being more integrated than those of other European countries. Lord Ahmed, one of four Muslim peers, once told The Economist that Britain's establishment is "more welcoming to Islam than in any other country in Europe". He was given permission, on becoming a lord, to swear his oath of allegiance on the Koran; the House of Lords has since set aside a room under its spindly Gothic towers for Muslim prayers. Scotland Yard has a prayer room. The Defence Ministry has a Muslim faith adviser. And Eton, according to the Economist, has a Muslim clergyman.
Whatever cracks have appeared in that relationship since 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whatever the lunatic fringe of plotting, scheming activists might be getting up to, London's Muslim mainstream doesn't want to lose its friendship with the powers that be - or the goodwill of other Londoners.
After giggling at the oddness of the wealthier, more Arab, Edgware Road Muslims - "let's face it, they're not integrated at all!" - and sniffing at the people "down east", who are a bit rough for their taste - the youths lurking around the edge of the mosque say, more seriously, they've heard that tomorrow, after Friday prayers, the faithful at Regent's Park and at the East London Mosque will process to honour the dead. The Regent's Park congregation will go to Edgware Road Tube, pray, light candles for the dead, meditate a bit. The East Londoners will do Aldgate East.
That would be a small gesture, but a gentle one. But will it be enough to stop the youth on his phone seeing al-Qaeda terrorists in every Muslim mother he sees?
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