There were only a handful of black kids in his year at school – mostly third-generation Somalis like himself – and bigotry had been rife. Incidents, scattered through his school days, were seared on his memory. Like the day after a 9/11 anniversary when he had been punched by a boy two years above him without provocation, yet he had ended up in front of the head of year. Or the time when he had been asked by a teacher to take a note to the head in the middle of lessons, and the caretaker had challenged him in the playground with a mask of sarcasm that barely concealed hatred, not because of who he was, but hatred because of what he represented, a black, strong Muslim teenage boy, whose very existence seemed to threaten the old white man’s world. Sometimes he had reacted: with words, with fists. But often, too often, he had let it go unchallenged. ‘It’s part of life,’ his father had said. He had come to accept his parents’ disappointment. He considered himself a dutiful son, and let their scolding and rebukes go unanswered. But he struggled to respect their views – he felt they were out of touch and compromised.

He had arrived at university from Cardiff blazing with a desire to break free from his home and find people like the YOI. But the ISoc at Islington was safe and relentlessly worthy and its speakers often warned patronisingly about the dangers of looking outside classical Islam. He had joined the Brothers’ football team, attended the Ramadan iftars and been a regular at Friday prayers. But when he had talked politics and prejudice, and shared his experiences as a British Somali, he had felt he was not being taken seriously.

So he had looked elsewhere. The Somali Society had seemed an obvious group, but it was full of first- or second- generation Somalis, the children of refugees who’d arrived in London in the 1990s. They regarded him as an outsider and he realised he knew little about Somalia other than the stories his grandma had told him, and the food his mother sometimes remembered to dish up.

And then he’d been invited by Mirza to the Group. Together, the members read books on jihad and watched sermons by inspirational preachers and discussed the plight of Muslims in the UK and across the world. The study circles empowered and energised Asad. He felt reborn with a confidence and clarity about his identity and his life’s purpose that he had never felt before. At Group, Mirza and the brothers talked about fighting back. Asad had listened to that kind of bragging in Cardiff. Most of those people in the YOI had been full of bravado and bullshit, talking the talk about joining the struggle in Syria, or signing up with al-Shabaab and taking the fight to Mogadishu, but unlikely ever to do anything.

But there was something different about Mirza and the others in the Group. Their righteous anger, and their willingness to go further, to commit to direct action, had shocked Asad in those early meetings. But that same clarity of vision had transfixed him too. His own anger was more like a forest fire, leaping from branch to branch, out of control, spreading in every direction, impossible to contain, impossible to predict. Mirza and the others seemed more focused, more determined.