When my friend Nazia started flirting with Islam, I felt betrayed. Over the years, we had been clubbing together and got up to all sorts of mischief. Now she was abandoning me.

I wasn’t bothered that she’d started praying five times a day or by her obsessive consultation of the Koran. But when she started denigrating western culture, I felt that she’d betrayed me, herself and our entire Asian community.

I’d grown up in suburban Wembley in a strongly Asian area. My father, who had come to Britain from Pakistan as a political refugee in 1964, was ambitious for his family. So he encouraged my younger brother and sister and me to adopt the ways of the English.

We were banned, for example, from speaking Urdu to our mother: she could speak to us in our mother tongue, but we had to answer in English. Nor were we encouraged to practise Islam. In fact, my father bought me The Book of Common Prayer so I wouldn’t feel excluded during school assemblies.

Most of my friends were brought up in similar culturally ambiguous households. So when my friend Nazia started using racist terminology, stereotyping white people as cultureless drunks who don’t know how to look after their children, I was furious.

We had both gone to university; but while I flourished at Manchester and threw myself into the club scene, she was finding the normal excesses of university life unsettling. It was then that she started to feel that she would never be able to participate fully in English life. After graduating, she agreed to an arranged marriage - her way of reconnecting with the Asian community. But when the marriage failed, the community ostracised her.

This rejection was devastating. At that point, she started to take an interest in the more politicised version of Islam that had begun to filter through in the early 1990s.

Becoming a strict Muslim was her way of exacting revenge on the community that had deserted her when she needed it most.

She wasn’t the only one I knew to take that path. For so many of my Asian friends, radical Islam was not so much a matter of being anti-West as a way of wresting back some form of identity. In the early 1990s many of them had thrown themselves into the club and drug scene. Most, though, eventually started to suffer from a creeping form of cultural guilt.

Becoming a committed Muslim was a way of being born again, of wiping the slate clean. You could use your new identity to define yourself against the western way of life - and against your parents.

As many of us weren’t fluent in our mother tongue, and often discouraged from talking about our problems, we hadn’t ever had a meaningful dialogue with our parents. My own relationship with my mother suffered immeasurably as a result of this.

What it also meant was that my friends’ parents didn’t see the dangers when their westernised children started listening to the new radicalised imams who talked thrillingly about western excesses such as drugs, alcoholism and sexual promiscuity.

Most, in fact, were merely relieved that their child hadn’t gone off the rails. The truth is, most of my parents’ generation wouldn’t recognise a radical if he were standing in the front room with them - purely because they have not had the same cultural experience as their children.

At the heart of the disillusionment that many of my friends felt was not knowing how they fitted into British society. I wasn’t immune, either. At 19, I found myself becoming increasingly drawn to Islam. I was struck, when I visited Pakistan, by the confidence of the people, who seemed comfortable in their own skins in a way that my friends and I were not.

Here, the chasm that now exists between Asian generations has created a generation of vulnerable young people seeking direction and a sense of belonging. And that makes them more likely to turn to a fundamentalist ideology that professes to offer answers.

In my own case, I can date the start of my confusion back to the death of my father when I was 17. Suddenly, my traditionally Asian mother was alone, barely able to communicate with the children she found it hard to recognise as her own. Many of my friends’ fathers died at about the same time, either from heart disease or diabetes - two of the biggest killers of Asian men - leaving behind a whole community of mothers who didn’t understand their children.

We would discuss our feeling of emptiness. Some started going to religious meetings and found that “modern” Islam was helping them to make some sense of their lives. In my case, I started wearing traditional Asian clothes for the first time in my life.

Of my 10 closest Asian friends, half of them became born-again Muslims. However, for most of us, this focus on the new Islam was only a passing phase.

Those who are still committed Islamic radicals are now keeping their own children segregated from the mainstream. I wonder how they will react, in turn, when they grow up, living in the shadow of 9/11, only knowing an England where they’re a frightening “other”.

In my own case, I realised eventually that I didn’t have to force my life into a narrative that had been imposed on it by either British - or radical Islamic - conventional wisdoms. There was nothing wrong with being me.

Yasmin Hai, who was talking to Jessica Jonzen, is the author of The Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter, published by Virago at £14.99

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