"living in rooms without walls"

A very important article: New York Times: Seething Unease Shaped British Bombers' Newfound Zeal:

...At least some youth seem more directionless than deprived.

In some ways, Mr. Hussain and other elders say, the young people have had it easy. At the age when their fathers worked like mules, the sons are playing cricket, studying, hanging out. Compared with their parents, they are well educated, thoroughly literate, fluent in English and the Internet.

Some know family businesses are waiting for them to take over. Some go on welfare as soon as they reach adulthood. Some sell drugs. "They are getting lazy, getting spoiled from the government," said Abu Hanifa, 60, another shopkeeper who works around the clock.

And yet Mr. Hussain and others think the young have also had it harder. In an alien culture, work ballasted the migrants, as did the traditional values they had imported from home. The young have no such anchors; they sometimes seem to be living in rooms without walls.

...Religiously, the young men came at Islam like converts - questioning everything, accepting nothing. If they were going to practice, they wanted to do it in what they considered the right way. If they wanted to go to heaven, they felt, they had to find the purest form. They wanted evidence for whatever they did in the Koran.

All of the young men quickly rejected the Islam of their parents, who practice a Sufi-influenced strain of the subcontinent called Barelvi. Shaped partly by Hindu and folk customs, it believes in the power of pirs, or holy men, and their shrines.

The young men, Mr. Khan especially vehement among them, believed such "innovations" contaminated Islam.

They stopped praying at their parents' mosque, even as they used its basement gym to warn youth against the type of Islam their parents practiced upstairs.

They turned, instead, to the more rigid, orthodox Deobandi school of Islam, which also had a mosque in town. The adherents of Deobandism include the Taliban of Afghanistan; they take what they see as a literal approach to the faith. In Britain, as in Pakistan, this school is growing fast - starting seminaries, producing English-speaking preachers and drawing youths away from the more liberal Islam of their parents.

Eventually Mr. Khan and his friends left the Deobandi mosque, too, saying its approach to outreach was too narrow, its focus too apolitical. And the young zealots felt only frustration and contempt for the mosques' imams, who were often brought from the subcontinent, spoke minimal English, knew nothing of the moral maze young British Muslims face, and abided by an injunction by mosque elders that politics or current events involving Muslims should stay outside the mosque.

For the young, Islam was politics.