There’s plenty of buzz-buzz-buzz about a just-published memoir by a Pakistani-British girl around the Internet just now but … I dunno. It appears to be a catalog of such unrelieved horrors that I’m having a difficult time accepting it.
The book is called The Imam’s Daughter because “Hannah Shah” is just that: the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure.
He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.
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Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!”
Does she still believe they would have killed her? “Yes, without a doubt. They had hammers and knives and axes.”
Is it just me, or is this all a bit reminiscent of the false memoirists J.T. LeRoy and James Frey?
Andrew Sullivan seems to accept it though:
But she didn’t go to the police because they might have responded to such violence by treating it as a community norm. Between the hysteria of the Steynian far-right and the nihilism of the p.c. left, one begins to despair of any sane course of moderation in Europe’s handling of Muslim immigrants and citizens.
But, then, you wouldn’t think she’d really need to call the police if we’re talking about a 40-strong gang with hammers and axes.
I’m perfectly willing to believe that Muslim mobs can behave horribly; I’ve published contraband stoning videos here. There’s something about this story that just sounds fishy to me, though.
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