Stereotypes vs. Individuality

“Do you consider yourself British?” the man said.
“I am British.”
“But do you consider yourself British?”

“I’ve lived here all my life.” She meant there was no other country of which she could feel herself a part, but the words came out sounding evasive.

how completely it could swerve from her God to him in the time she took those few footsteps,

or her total lack of self-consciousness in everything she did—love and prayer, the covered head and the naked body.

There are still moments of stress when I’ll recite

Ayat al-Kursi as a kind of reflex.

I’d be nervous about a home secretary who’s spoken openly about his atheism but secretly recites

Muslim prayers. Wouldn’t you?

I thought if I learned the rules… but I can’t.

I can’t. I just want to come home.

but as yet have no information about why he was approaching the British consulate. A

terror attack has not been ruled out.

She hunted down the Home Secretary's son, Eamonn, 24, and used

sex to try and brainwash him into convincing his father to allow her terrorist brother back into England.

She’s going to look for justice in Pakistan?” That final word spoken with all the disgust of a child of migrants who understands how much his Parents gave up—family, context, language, familiarity—because

the nation to which they first belonged had proven itself inadequate to the task of allowing them to live with dignity.

wondered when he’d become the kind of man who reacted in this way to the sight of a woman

with a covered head who made no effort to look anything but plain.

She has been abused for the crime of daring to love while covering her head, vilified for

believing that she had the right to want a life with someone whose history is at odds with hers, denounced for wanting to bury her brother beside her mother