Gultasab told me that his brother had found that the traditional, community-run mosque on Hardy Street had nothing to offer him. The people who ran the mosque had no idea how to connect with the second generation, said Gultasab. They spoke and wrote in Urdu, and the only time they interacted with the younger Muslims was when they taught them to recite the Koran by rote—in Arabic.
The Wahhabis did things differently. They delivered sermons and printed publications in English. Sidique's Urdu was poor, so the only things on Islam he could read were Wahhabi-approved publications. Gultasab said that Sidique's progression to Wahhabism was reinforced by the fact that some of his friends, and future Mullah boys, were converting too.
(The government's official account of Sidique's radicalisation runs to a few paragraphs, and states: "after an incident in a nightclub, [Sidique] said that he turned to religion and it changed his life." Gultasab said that this was "bullshit." It was, he told me, a "gradual change," which happened over years.)
A second source of friction between Sidique and his family was his determination to marry for love. During the years of his conversion to Wahhabism, Sidique fell in love with his future wife, Hasina Patel. The pair met at Leeds Metropolitan University in 1997; Sidique was taking a one-year course to convert a business diploma from a local college into a degree, while Hasina was studying for a three-year sociology degree. Her family was from India, and she was a Deobandi Muslim—a South Asian Wahhabi-linked movement directly opposed to the Khan family's traditionalist Barelvi convictions.