I remember the year I moved to Walthamstow in east London. It was the early 90s and I was 16. I hailed from a white, middle-class Finchley in the north of the city. What a culture shock then to see black girls in brightly coloured jeans, cool young Asians in traditional dress and many mixed-race families. Having often lamented my physical oddness as the only African-Caribbean girl in school in Finchley, I welcomed the cultural diversity in Walthamstow. Over the years this diversity grew, with eastern Europeans and South Africans moving in for the cheap rent. There had been a significant flight further east into Essex by the white English. Today a white person’s accent heard on a Walthamstow bus is more likely to be Slovak than cockney.

With the rising number of Asians and eastern Europeans, many of whom are Muslim, Islam has had an increasingly visible profile in the area. On weekday mornings the play area is full of women in hijabs. But a noticeably high proportion of Muslim men in Walthamstow are white and Afro-Caribbean as well as Asian. So I reject the references over the past week to “Walthamstan” in the media, which seem to be painting east London as an isolationist Pakistani Muslim community and a haven for terrorists.

Before 9/11 Islam was a great influence on the area and reached out to all communities. East London is an area with problems. Drugs, low wages, poor education, high rates of violent crime and single parenthood have resulted in lost youth across all cultures. Sport, music and religion are the perceived escape routes from a life of inactivity or crime. Can the middle classes truly understand that a teenager without options in life — without stable family support and ambitions — might be as easily seduced by religion as by MTV’s sex and bling culture? Muslim preachers reached out to young people on the street. I often debated with them about everything from short skirts to female circumcision. They gave me a free Qur’an and offered contact with Muslim Sisters, who would set me straight and find me a husband.

I was lucky enough to receive government scholarship to a private girls’ school. But on the streets Islam offered answers to the feelings of worthlessness experienced by young men and women. Everything has its dark side though. Some of the tapes sold from those trestle tables crossed the line from simply preaching life-enhancing religion to preaching isolationism and a hatred of “non-believers”. After 9/11 the Muslim “evangelists” in effect went underground and the raids began in east London.

The British government has failed to understand what the community in east London is. The idea that a homogeneously Asian Muslim community of “Walthamstan” has taken over an area of London to pursue a culture of isolationism is erroneous. From ridiculous

ricin theories to fruitless raids in Forest Gate and a fatally flawed shooting, in the government’s war on home-grown terror there has been an abject failure to see the wood from the trees. — The Guardian