In subsequent meetings, identity markers harden: some girls who attended the first meeting in hijab have now "upgraded to burkhas" (279); discussions center on whether certain types of behavior are "Islamic" or not; and personal rivalry leads to deep disagreements over policy and approach. The Bengal Tigers' agenda threatens to become more sectarian and international, marked by concern for suffering Muslims around the world and sympathy for violent direct action but also characterized by a kind of Muslim exceptionalism that the novel is clearly critical of. Even the heady sense of power Nazneen experiences by attending their meetings and feeling she can at last act to influence world affairs is offset by the omniscient narrator's insistence that this sense of power is in fact simply a compensation for unfulfilled personal longings. Of Nazneen's sense of sympathy for the Muslim victims of violence in Chechnya and Palestine, we are told that "she mistook the sad weight of longing in her stomach for sorrow" (244).

XREF: Connects to the novel's broader critique of ideological commitment as compensation for personal emptiness.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 193