The Hunger to Matter

People do not kill for a doctrine because they have studied it. They kill because they are starving for significance, and the doctrine is the first thing that offers to feed them. Poverty does not make the fanatic, nor does madness. What makes him is the feeling of being no one, joined to a story in which he can become someone by a single act.

The Teaching Assistant

The children at Hillside Primary School in Leeds called him Mr. Khan, and by every account they loved him. He was a learning mentor, which meant that the difficult cases were sent to him: the boys who fought, the new arrivals with no English, the children whose homes were falling apart. He was patient with them. He took them on trips. Parents stopped him in the street to thank him.

Mohammad Sidique Khan had been born in that city in 1974, the son of immigrants from Pakistan. As a teenager he went by Sid and showed little interest in religion. He took a business degree. He married for love, against his family's wishes, a woman he met at university. In 2004 they had a daughter, and he filmed himself holding her and talking to her softly.

On the morning of July 7, 2005, he boarded a train on the London Underground with a rucksack on his back and, between two stations, blew himself up. Three friends did the same elsewhere in the city. Fifty-two people died.

Weeks later a video appeared. In it Khan sits in front of a patterned cloth, wearing a headscarf, and speaks to the camera in a broad Yorkshire accent. He does not sound mad or even angry. He sounds like a man explaining a decision at a staff meeting. He and thousands like him, he says, have forsaken everything for what they believe. Their motivation does not come from the tangible goods this world has to offer. We are at war, he says, and I am a soldier.

Britain could not make sense of it. He had not been poor, uneducated, or abused. He had a job that mattered and a child he adored. Every explanation that the country reached for slid off him.