The Excruciating Dilemma

Another human tragedy, another personal family dilemma culminating in the death of a child by her father's hands. Literally, since Muhammad Parvez throttled his 16-year-old daughter Aqsa Parvez to death with all the rage at his command in his zeal to protect family honour and to do homage to what he perceived Islam demanded of him.

This is a tragedy for his community as well, although his maniacal destruction of his child's life was meant to expunge the stain of shame he felt she had brought to that community.

Yet another child of immigrants eager to become as one with her communal peers in the larger society, while the other members of her family clung tenaciously and with full fervour to the fundamentalist belief they share as good Muslims in the edicts and practises of Islam.

There is nothing particularly new and different in the anguish Muslim immigrant parents feel when faced with the reality of their children eschewing traditional religious mores in favour of adopting newer social mores reflecting the society around them.

Immigrant families in Canada originally from Italy, Portugal, Ukraine, Poland, China, Japan, VietNam and anywhere else in the world that Canada's mosaic derives from have suffered the insecurity and pain of watching their children willingly depart from their perceived need to recognize and respect their original culture and religion.

Social services devoted to the needs of children in Canada report that fully 50% of young people turning to them in distress and need are from immigrant stock. There are familial estrangements, resentments, disowning due to betrayals of expectations that time will heal, or not, as both parents and children go on their own self-determined way.

But rarely are there incidents as decisively final in their violence as the murder of a child by a parent. Abuse, battering, disavowals, abandonment perhaps, and these are sufficiently serious in and of themselves to destroy lives. But that is another story.

We see it on occasion - and hope it to be a rare occasion, but it is never rare enough - in reality. Daughters who resent having marriages arranged for them, who chafe against the strictures imposed upon them by their religiously-rigid-minded parents' demands upon them break free, and then are relentlessly hunted down by relatives determined to restore family honour by murder.

This truly was a family affair, this death of a 16-year-old rebellious child who sought to live her life in what she considered to be a normal way, like that of her school chums. She had experimented with various ways of wearing the hijab, and finally abandoned it altogether, to the detriment of her future as a child of Islam. As though the mere wearing of a distinguishing piece of cloth is the defining signal of faith.

She had chafed long enough, feared too often, deciding to no longer face the wrath of her family, and went to live at the home of a friend. Where, one must ask, was the mother, the child's mother in this drama, this intrigue that was to take her daughter's life? She informed her friends of the constant threats her father and her two brothers levelled at her, should she continue to defy strict religious convention.

Trusting child, she ventured one last time into her home to retrieve some of her clothing, and came face to face with her father's unappeasable fury. "There should be zero tolerance for violence of any kind against women or girls", according to Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association. Yes.

Yet according to the legal counsel for the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, this tragedy represents domestic violence, common enough across every level of society. No.

This needless and miserable end to a young girl's life was informed by a seething hatred of rebellion against religious fundamentalist belief. A belief not even supported by the Koran which exhorts women to be modest in dress and demeanor. It does not prescribe the wearing of the hijab.

Young people, girls in particular, want to "fit in", to be accepted, to be just like their peers. There are social-cultural codes for acceptance, and girls want to be accepted within their very special social enclaves. There is comfort for young people already sufficiently confused by the changes in their social standing, their impending maturity, their hormonal imbalances; no one wants to be shut out of the opportunity to be as one with those they admire.

Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan of the Muslim Canadian Congress point out that the Koran makes allowances for non-compliance in even its more relaxed views of what constitutes modesty by indicating such allowances for non-compliance in the dress code as in other religious edicts if the (social) environment is not conducive to their observance.

They also point out that imams and clergy at many of Canada's mosques continually berate young women for eschewing the hijab, and condemn them for "violating Islam". At a Montreal mosque's web site the kindly injunction to observe the wearing of the hijab is expanded upon by warning that its removal will result in rape and the bearing of "illegitimate children".

Other non-hijab-wearing risks are enumerated as "stresses, insecurity, suspicions in husbands' minds, as well as instigating young people to deviate toward the path of lust". Fairly graphic, pretty frightening, not at all objectively instructive, and nowhere does it appear to indicate that men are obliged to restrain themselves and behave responsibly.

"By removing your hijab, you have destroyed your faith. Islam means submission to Allah in all our actions." Or, if not Allah, then one's male relatives.