It began with Maria. She entered my life for a brief while when she was nine years old. I lost her two years later to a world that I then little understood. I was the mother that she did not have, and she was the daughter I had never given birth to. The last time I saw her, she was sobbing bitterly. Between gasps for breath, she said she wanted to kill herself. I shuddered as she said it, the shock no less than it had been the first time she spoke it six months before.

The final image I have of her is her face pale with grief, her brown eyes as dark as the deep shadows under them that no eleven-year-old should have. She moved stiffly, the bruises from her most recent beating still vivid. Maria was a bargaining chip in an auction that was closed to outsiders. I never saw her again, but there isn’t a day that I don’t think about her, wonder how she is, and ask myself, Could I have done more to stop the apparent inevitability of what happened to her?

In trying to locate her afterward, the cultural barriers came down to close me out as effectively as the four walls of purdah that went up and now confine her. A year later, I was told that Maria, still weeks short of her twelfth birthday, was pregnant with her first child. Forcibly married, she had been traded off at the age of eleven to a man described to me as "already having two wives, and so old he has lost all his teeth and shakes all the time," possibly from Parkinson’s. In exchange for Maria, the ancient bridegroom had given one of his daughters to Maria’s father, a widower who had wanted to remarry and could not afford the bride-price.

I first met Maria when she moved into my home after I went to live in Pakistan in 1988. Her father was a security guard for the house in which I lived in Peshawar. An ancient frontier town between Pakistan and Afghanistan and close to the fabled Khyber Pass, Peshawar is Islamically conservative. It was also violently volatile — bombings, kidnappings, and machine-gun assassinations were regular occurrences. A decade ago, the city numbered five hundred thousand; when I moved there the population had tripled with Afghan refugees who had fled the Soviet invasion of their country in 1979. Maria, her aged grandmother, and her father were part of that exodus, forced out of their homeland when Soviet MIGs and helicopter gun-ships obliterated their mountain village and killed the rest of their large extended family, including her mother, five siblings, and even her pet dog.

Their first home in Pakistan was a carport, closed on three sides only. Maria was put to work at the age of six, as a child-minder for the infant of her father’s employer. When I met her three years later, she had never attended school. It simply had not occurred to anyone to enroll her. Within a few weeks of being in her company, I realized she had a keen and questioning mind, and a near-photographic memory. Her English vocabulary grew daily. With her father’s permission, I entered her in the first grade of an Afghan-run girls’ school.

Maria and I shopped for fabric for her school uniform, selected a serious-looking schoolbag, and filled it with exercise books, a pencil set, and a calculator. Together we worked on her homework and baked her favorite cookies. I told her bedtime stories; she told me stories about her life in Afghanistan and the country’s folklore. I presented her with a puppy, a tiny stray I had found. She filled my house with flowers. I introduced her to birthdays and birthday cakes. (Few Afghans know when they were born or how old they are.) She explained Muslim holidays to me and asked me to fast with her during the month of Ramadan, which recalls the time the Koran was first revealed to the Prophet Mohammad.

By the following year, Maria had advanced to third grade, had learned to read and write, and was fluent in English and Urdu, as well as her own two languages, Dan and Pashto.

One day, when we were out walking the pup I had given her, she slipped her hand inside mine and said, "You are my mother, my second mother." And it felt that way.

Yet there were a number of occasions that indicated too clearly that I was not. To celebrate some minor success of Maria’s that I no longer recall, I took her for an ice cream sundae, her first. At the time, the only place to find one was the town’s sole four-star hotel. The comparative luxury of the lobby and the livened employees clearly intimidated her and she clutched my hand tightly. But she relaxed and grinned widely when served with the enormous sundae. It was a simple outing, but for Maria it was a splendid adventure, and she talked about it animatedly with everyone she knew.

Friends of her father, however, were enraged and told him so, and a high-ranking and close Afghan friend of mine lectured me on the inappropriateness of what I had done. "But I asked her father’s permission," I replied, pointing out that I had never made any decision, no matter how minor, concerning Maria without first obtaining her father’s approval. In this archpatriarchal society, I had tried hard not to offend social mores.

"You are encouraging an Afghan girl, a Muslim, to be immodest," he continued. "What?" I asked confused. Maria and I were both wearing the local traditional dress, shatwar kamiz — long, baggy pants worn under a long-sleeved, loose, knee-length tunic. Additionally, Maria’s head and chest were covered by the large white sheetlike chador she had worn as long as I had known her, even though her religion didn’t require it of her until she reached puberty. I also pointed out that there were other women present in the hotel coffee shop. "You are exposing her to a way of life that is alien to her, and should be alien to her. She does not belong in public places—you are encouraging her to be a prostitute."

I was too stunned to argue.

A few months later, I had to go out of town, and when I returned, I learned that Maria had been absent from school for the period I’d been gone. Eventually she told me that her father’s friends had been advising him that education of girls was a bad thing. "It makes them argumentative and they become unmarriageable," they had said. That Maria was not yet eleven seemed irrelevant.

And then the beatings began. She suffered in silence at first. I found out about them accidentally when she had trouble rising from the floor cushions her family used in their quarters instead of furniture. Her grandmother told me what had happened and showed me both Maria’s bruises and the thick ax handle that caused them.

Maria had trouble walking for several days. I wanted to confront her father, but neither she nor her grandmother would permit it. "You will only make it worse for her," Maria’s grandmother told me. "A man has the right to beat the women in his family. There is nothing you can do."

And certainly that had seemed the case nationwide when I had attended Pakistan’s first conference on child abuse held the previous year. I had sat dumbfounded as doctors, lawyers, and legal experts had recounted how difficult it was to prevent, report, and prosecute cases of child abuse. "It is a man’s right to discipline his family," local culture insisted. At that same conference a lawyer recounted a case of incest being thrown out of court despite the girl’s having been made pregnant by her father. Incest doesn’t happen in Islamic families, said the judge categorically as he quashed the case.

Maria’s beatings continued, and increasingly her father confined her to her family’s quarters. And then I learned why. "He wants to remarry, and he has found a new wife who won’t want Maria. New wives in our country never want the other wife’s children. He will give Maria to the man whose daughter he marries," explained her grandmother. "Maria must do as her father says. It is our way."

The child, who just months before had begun to have dreams that perhaps one day she could attend college, continued to resist. "He can kill me. It is better I should be dead. I want to die. I will kill myself."

Afghan friends warned me not to interfere. "Even if he does kill her, no authority here would challenge his right to do so," said one. She is his daughter, she must obey him." An Afghan colleague suggested, "Buy her, offer her father money and just disappear with her." And while the thought of purchasing a human being was as abhorrent as the violence, I gave it serious consideration. A telephone call to the American embassy told me that adoption in Pakistan took at least two years. Additionally, I would have to prove she was an orphan or had been abandoned by her parents.

Shortly after that, Maria’s family moved out, and despite many attempts to find her, I never saw her again. In another culture and because of our closeness, I could have expected her to find me. But the world outside her home was forbidden to her unless she was accompanied by a male relative. Her physical confinement I knew she would cope with as have other women in her culture; it was the imprisonment of her mind that would be as painful to her, being forced to marry a man she found repugnant.

I hope the above brief account shook you to your foundations.  Understand that this is not describing some isolated experience, but truly represents the usual plight of women in that place at that time.  Today we need to know what actually pertains, rather than uncritically buying into what is proclaimed in the media.  Maria's account is from a book my wife Bunnie recently finished, and I have just begun reading.  I hope that some of you will want to purchase and peruse this volume as well.

PRICE OF HONOR:  Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World by Jan Goodwin.  A Plume book by the Penguin Group, 1995.

I can substantiate the accuracy of the above narration as I lived for nearly six years in Pakistan, and spent time in the Peshawar area where Maria lived.  It is important to note that the plight of women described here existed under a relatively moderate Islamic regime!  The fundamentalist party of Pakistan has never won an election, although it seems to be gaining momentum.

This book also examines the lot of Muslim women in Afghanistan, Iran, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordon, Egypt, and Israeli Occupied Territories.

While we need to protect those followers of Islam who are loyal citizens of the United States, we also need to keep in focus where the threats to our nation originate.  Few Americans are knowledgeable about the religion of Islam, and are apt to accept what they hear in the media without critical examination.  I'm perturbed that already it has become "politically incorrect," to consider Islam in any other light than peaceful and benign.

PERTINENT QUESTIONS

A case can be made that few adherents of the world's various religions faithfully follow the teachings of their holy book--including Christianity.  More significant, perhaps, is what kind of cultures do these holy books seem to generate?  Let's consider those nations most often labeled "Christian."  Here I see a rather consistent pattern, as these nations usually

*  Have a democratic type of government where the people can control their own destiny

*  Allow a significant portion of their population to obtain an education

*  Treat women with a high degree of respect, allowing them to divorce, and also allowing them to select their own marriage partner

*  Honor freedom of the press, and do not imprison people just because they disagree with the ruling party

*  Support a judicial system that, although not perfect, provides a high degree of security for its citizens

Such vital rights and obligations are not in evidence in most of the Islamic nations of the world.  It's not enough to merely proclaim, "The prevailing conditions are not consistent with the teachings of the Koran, but are merely the result of 'zealous fundamentalism.'"

Perhaps a fair question would be, "If you have a choice, would you rather live in a Christian-based nation, or in one that is Islam-based?

World politics may produce strange bedfellows, but let us have a clear perception of things as they exist behind the political smokescreen.

donhawley1@attbi.com

www.spiritandtruth.com

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