JUBAIL, SAUDI ARABIA: A London court has sentenced Pakistani parents to life in prison for murdering their 17-year-old daughter, Shafilea. Both the parents, Iftikhar and Farzana, are from a village in Punjab. Shafilea was brought up in the UK but her parents had always pressured her not to adapt to Western culture. She was forced to marry a relative back in Pakistan wherein she drank bleach chemical to abort the forced marriage attempt. Her eventful life came to an end in 2003 when she was strangled to death by her parents.
We may discuss separately whether Shafilea’s parents were right or wrong in enforcing severe restrictions on her, which were in conflict with the culture and environment she was exposed to, while growing up and attending school in the UK. Parents who are not ready to accept that if you live in the West, you either have to integrate with the adopted homeland’s culture and values, or face living an isolated life full of contradictions only make things difficult for their children and themselves. If they are not ready to face this dilemma, then why do they immigrate to the West? More or less every other immigrant family from Muslim Asia faces the same issue as Shafilea’s parents did — squeezing the children between two cultures, forcing them to live ‘a rural Pakistani life’ while in the West; is it not better that they stay back in their home countries and raise their children per their cultural and family values.
The other extreme is equally dangerous wherein some young Muslims in the West get entrapped by extremist/ terrorist organisations. These young recruits end up destroying their own lives, lives of their parents and friends, and sullying the image of their country of origin. Can’t there be a middle way, away from these two extremes?
Masood Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, August 7th, 2012.
