Excerpt from my current reading

[This is a memoir of Agatha Christie's time in Syria with her archaeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan.]

"Michel [the Armenian chauffeur], swerving across the road with diabolical intentions, steps heavily on the accelerator and charges a party of Arabs -- two old women and a man with a donkey.

They scatter, screaming, and Max surpasses himself in swearing angrily at Michel. What the hell does he think he's doing? He might have killed them!

That, apparently, was more or less Michel's intention.

'What would it have mattered?' he asks, flinging both hands in the air and allowing the car to take its own course. 'They are Mohammedans, are they not?'

After enunciating this, according to his views, highly Christian sentiment, he relapses into the martyred silence of one misunderstood. What kind of Christians are these, he seems to be saying to himself, weak and irresolute in the faith!

Max lays it down as a positive rule that no attempted murder of Mohammedans is to be permitted."

--from Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan, published 1946