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The Dividing Lines Quotes
The Dividing Lines
by
Kirk Houghton2 ratings, 4.50 average rating, 0 reviews
The Dividing Lines Quotes
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“She didn’t dare say it in today’s seminar, but her guilt at causing an innocent man’s death was never far from her thoughts on that hotel balcony in Indonesia. The sight of the faithful answering the call to prayer looked like a graceful attempt to escape from the torment of life and seek fulfilment in God. She never expected to find a merciful God in the Holy Qur’an that would give her a new start in life. Taking the Shahada in that Birmingham Islamic Community Centre in 2002 was a literal cleansing of her past life, and she emerged from it as a person in need of a new identity and ego.”
― The Dividing Lines
― The Dividing Lines
“So he can’t deny it, then? Judge, jury and executioner would be right to string him up. I’d fuck her, he concedes, imagining he’s on the stand. Paedophile, unconscious anti-Semite, adulterer, betrayer of the working class – it’s not an edifying list of charges. And what does he have in his defence? Latin-speaker, first from Oxford, economist, former PPS to the Minister for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – nobody will give him a medal for these things.”
― The Dividing Lines
― The Dividing Lines
“The Muslim fundamentalists in there seemed to accept he was a person of the book, even if, in their eyes, he was following an erroneous interpretation of Jesus as the Christ. Instead, they reserved their elitist disdain for the Godless majority – those people beyond rehabilitation and destined for Hell.
Nevertheless, the Muslims organised themselves into thuggish gangs and made it clear their own brethren were off limits. Nobody bothered with them, whether through mutual resentment or out of respect for the unwritten code of maintaining gang autonomy – perhaps a bit of both. And maybe the ‘Mullah Boys’ saw no need to exact revenge on him because Miranda Yilmaz was a white convert and not one of their own. Most of these bearded zealots were Pakistani or Afro-Caribbean. One or two Albanians also identified with the faith, although they resented the Asians and didn’t strike Ed as particularly religious.”
― The Dividing Lines
Nevertheless, the Muslims organised themselves into thuggish gangs and made it clear their own brethren were off limits. Nobody bothered with them, whether through mutual resentment or out of respect for the unwritten code of maintaining gang autonomy – perhaps a bit of both. And maybe the ‘Mullah Boys’ saw no need to exact revenge on him because Miranda Yilmaz was a white convert and not one of their own. Most of these bearded zealots were Pakistani or Afro-Caribbean. One or two Albanians also identified with the faith, although they resented the Asians and didn’t strike Ed as particularly religious.”
― The Dividing Lines
“Somewhere in between is the ‘undecided’, a place that reminds us there might not be an ‘either/or’ choice. It seems we are now defending this ambiguity and have invented any number of words – democracy, liberty, secularism – to persuade ourselves that suffering, however offensive in the age of medical science and technology, still has meaning. So we now tell ourselves we live on this earth as temporary custodians of progress, and it’s our job to leave it in a better state than we found it for the unborn generations to come. Whatever it is, you can’t call it heroic.”
― The Dividing Lines
― The Dividing Lines
