Daddy and hubby in court
Samia Shahid’s father and first husband have been arrested and appeared in court.
Her first husband, Choudhry Shakeel, has been arrested on suspicion of her murder while her father Mohammad has been held as an accessory to murder.
Both appeared in court in Pakistan and have been remanded for four days.
Her father. Her father (allegedly) helped the husband she was forced to marry to murder her. I can never get used to that.
Shaimaa Khalil, a BBC Pakistan Correspondent, reported from Jhelum:
The police car which brought them to the court was surrounded by journalists. I got as close as I could to them to see if they would comment but they did not.
The media were barred from entering the courtroom and the hearing could not have lasted more than two minutes with the judge remanding them in custody for four days while the investigation into Samia Shahid’s murder continues.
They could still sweep it under the rug.
My father has often not approved of things I have done (my father is a fundamentalist Christian who thinks women belong in the home, but still manages to be proud of me i spite of it). At least one of his daughters married someone he didn’t approve of. I can’t imagine, in his absolute darkest hours, that he would even for one single second consider murdering any of us for choosing our own pathways.
I definitely do not approve of my son’s wife, but I attended his wedding, gave him a special gift, and wished him well. I can’t imagine anything that would make me murder him for such an act.
But when you see women (or your children in general) as property, you consider it your right to dispose of that property how you will. This is a bad, bad mark for religion, and for patriarchy in general (whether religious or not).
Indeed – and it’s the seeing your daughters or your children in general as property that I find so hard to get my head around. The affection part seems so utterly basic.
I visited my parents today, something I do reluctantly at best. An entire wall of their house is dedicated to wedding and some other photos of any and all relations. I probably don’t need to spill the punchline here, right?
I occasionally wonder whether my parents are actually real or written by Charles Dickens. As it happens, mrs latsot did actually find a photograph of me. I was on the end of a line of a dozen people. it wasn’t a picture OF me, in other words, i just happened to be on it. I don’t think mrs latsot was featured in any pictures at all.
Here’s my point:
Oops, hit post.
I was about to say that this enmity which will forever exist between me and my parents and has extended now and then to violence (on their part) could never go this far. Forty years of acting like dicks speak for themselves but it couldn’t go much further than that.
Its unthinkable, I mean, even in my horrific family. But it’s not unthinkable at all, is it? It’s not only thinkable, it happens all the fucking time.
i think that’s what I was trying to say.
I think the reason the affection that stops people from killing their kids isn’t there in this case, and in some abusive fundamentalist Christian homes in the US, is that having children isn’t a choice for them. They weren’t wanted, and there’s no love in the house already, so it doesn’t extend naturally to the children that way. Everyone is forced into preset roles so a man who is gay or who just wanted to go on a road trip for a decade before marrying can’t be themselves, so they resent the wife and children their culture forced on them.
Although the problem with that is they went to so much effort in this case to bring her back so they could kill her.
Unthinkable but not unthinkable at all. Quite so. That’s why I said I can’t get my head around it. I know it happens but I find it hard to think.
‘They could still sweep it under the rug’
…and they probably will. Pakistan seems to be a ‘shame’ culture, if so, it’s easy to understand the motivation for this murder.
Iknklast & latsot
I was just plain lucky with my parents, my father was an atheist and my mother was one of those ‘rights of passage’ Christians so I was spared the familial dysfunctions produced by Christian ideology. They were remarkably non-judgemental and tolerant by the standards of their generation (they were both born before the First World War). I realised later that they were expecting grandchildren, however my wife and I had no interest in reproducing, I certainly can’t remember any pressure from them to produce the next generation. I’m 70, my parents were nearly forty when I was born so, of course, they both died long ago, I still miss them. There’s baggage of course, I wish that they had stood up to my bullying elder brother, but they had their reasons. I also wish I’d apologised to them for being a total prick as a teenager although that wasn’t entirely my fault.