"When our parents would try to teach us to read the Koran, we treated it the same way kids treat homework: try anything to get out of it," Ahmad recalled.
At Wortley High School, and then Leeds Metropolitan University, where he studied sports science, Tanweer was popular and never experienced the racism that older Asians felt. "He felt completely integrated and never showed any signs of disaffection," Ahmad wrote.
Tanweer was never interested in foreign policy or politics, said Ahmad, adding that she never once saw him reading a newspaper or watching the news. Nor did she see him attend any protests against Britain's involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan, or against Israel.
But while he grew up with most everything he could ask for, the same was hardly true for many of his contemporaries.
Unemployment among Muslim youths is 22 percent at a time when overall joblessness is 5 percent, the lowest it has been in decades, according to Britain's Office for National Statistics. Muslims rank at the bottom in having school degrees and decent housing.
A common sight in Beeston is Pakistani youths hanging idly in clusters on street corners, chatting away in Punjabi slang. Others smoke marijuana and drink beer in Cross Flats Park, breaking sacred codes of their faith. At other times, the alienation turns violent: In 2001, young Pakistanis turned out on Bradford streets to battle the largely white police force.
Many British Muslim youths also feel like strangers in their parents' Pakistani culture. Drinking, dancing and dating women, especially white women, are frowned upon.
"We're not English, and we're not Pakistani," said Saeed Ahmed, Tanweer's friend. "In the last few years, we had to find our identity. A lot of people here have gone back towards their religion to find out where they come from."
Tanweer, friends say, was one of them.
"He was more British than Muslim up until he was 18," Whitley recalled. "He started going to mosque a lot more."
"We grew apart," he added.
Many of Tanweer's friends said in interviews that he became more religious after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
"Shehzad definitely opened his eyes because of September 11th," said Ashid, a friend who did not give his last name out of fear the police might question him. "That's when many young people got back into Islam around here."
In Beeston, Tanweer and two other bombers frequented a local Islamic bookstore, the Iqra Islamic Learning Center. As they learned about Islam, they found it impossible to ignore the mounting deaths of their Muslim brothers across the globe, Tanweer's friends recounted. Ashid said he once saw Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan, 30, one of the other bombers, watching a DVD that purported to show an Israeli soldier killing a Palestinian girl.
On a recent Wednesday, some of Tanweer's Muslim friends were playing soccer in Cross Flats Park. Others who said they had known him watched from a bench, some of them smoking marijuana.
In conversations with a reporter, they spoke about conspiracy theories they had downloaded from radical Web sites. There was no plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Nor did any bring the twin towers down. It was an American plot, they said.
"Why should we care about the London bombings when thousands of innocent Muslims are being killed in Iraq?" one friend demanded. Like the others, he refused to give a name. He said he understood Tanweer's anger. He paused, then added that he might have done the same.
It is unclear what finally possessed Tanweer to take that final step. By some theories, he was influenced by the older Khan, a popular primary-school teacher's assistant and youth worker. In the months before the bombings, they were often seen together.
Tanweer rarely brought friends home, said his cousin Ahmad, so all that his family knew about Khan was that Shehzad had a friend who worked at a local school. She added that "none of us know who was behind the plans."
In December, Tanweer went to the Pakistani city of Lahore to learn how to correctly pronounce readings from the Koran and stayed for two months, his relatives said. Khan accompanied him. Authorities are investigating whether they received terrorist training.
Tanweer's uncle, Tahir Pervaiz, was quoted in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn as saying: "Osama bin Laden was Shehzad's ideal and he used to discuss the man with his cousins and friends in the village."
When he came home, Tanweer was his usual, confident self. The week before the bombings, he was laughing and play-fighting with his young cousins, Ahmad said.
On July 7, Tanweer told his family that he was going to visit a friend.
They were expecting him back that day.
