How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"There are no words. The one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white-suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green-bow-tie-wearing fundamentalist terrorist. I sometimes wonder why I bother," said Samad bitterly. (15.193)
Why does he bother? It seems he can't stop bothering, so there must be a reason.
Quote #8
Their eagerness and enthusiasm was so remarkable (extraordinary, outstanding, unprecedented) that almost before the Brother emerged from his confinement and announced it himself, the idea of KEVIN had been born within the black and Asian community. A radical new movement where politics and religion were two sides of the same coin. A group that took freely from Garveyism, the American Civil Rights movement, and the thought of Elijah Muhammad, yet remained within the letter of the Qur'an. The Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. By 1992 they were a small but widespread body, with limbs as far-flung as Edinburgh and Land's End, a heart in Selly Oak and a soul in the Kilburn High Road. KEVIN: an extremist faction dedicated to direct, often violent action, a splinter group frowned on by the rest of the Islamic community; popular with the sixteen-to-twenty-five age group; feared and ridiculed in the press; and gathered tonight in the Kilburn Hall, standing on chairs and packed to the rafters, listening to the speech of their founder. (18.6)
This is one of the clearest descriptions of KEVIN we can find in the novel, and sometimes KEVIN is pretty darn hard to figure out. What real-life groups does KEVIN remind you of, if any?
Quote #9
They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers—judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors, and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at—there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers of the Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. (12.8)
Chalfenism is in the religion section because, while the Chalfens are atheists, their belief in their way of life over all others (and, really, separate from all others) borders on religious faith. The Chalfens follow Chalfenism much like another family might follow Christianity.