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Wednesday, December 12, 2007
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 FOR THE LOVE OF GOD: THE LONELY DEATH OF AQSA PARVEZ
Aqsa Parvez was a Canadian girl living in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. She loved music, photography and her friends. Like most girls of her age, she wanted more than anything to fit in.
For that she was strangled to death by her father on Monday night. Her desire to assimilate to her family's adopted country cost her her life. Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old.
After several months of conflict within her family over her resisitence to wear the traditional Muslim hijab - several months over the course of which she took refuge both at an abused teen's shelter and at a friend's home - Aqsa Parvez went home went home at her older brother's urging to get a change of clothes before going to school. It would be the very last time she entered her home.
Her body would be found by paramedics Monday evening after the father, Muhammad Parvez, called 911 and reported that he had just killed his daughter. The paramedics found a very slight pulse and she was rushed to hospital and put on life support, but she couldn't be saved. Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old.
I'm sure that once Muhammad retains and instructs counsel, he will say that the death of his daughter was a crime of passion and that it was never his intent to kill her. I'm sure that he'll say that it was an accident. I hope an eventual jury of his peers sees through that lie.
Manual strangulation leading to death takes anywhere from three to five minutes. Both the airway and the cartoid artery are constricted with continual, merciless pressure. The crushing of the windpipe must be excrutiatingly painful, as must be the brain's starvation of oxygen. The victim's body will resist and thrash about in an effort to breathe.
Strangulation is the most intimate, most personal way to murder another human being. Being only inches from the victim's face, the perpetrator will see the capallaries in eyes explode. He'll hear the victim's final sounds and actually feel the victim's final breath on his skin. There's abosolutely nothing accidental about manual strangulation. There is no more deliberate a way to kill someone. Muhammad Parvez strangled his sixteen year old daughter Aqsa to death on Monday night.
From what we know, Aqsa Parvez was terrified of her family. Until she graduated from Aqsa's school, her older sister monitored her behavior at school and reported it to her parents. Her friends reported that she was beaten at home. While it isn't unusual for sixteen year old girls to run away from home, it is highly unusual in the South Asian community. No child wants to end up in a shelter.
That is how Aqsa died. We know that Aqsa was lured home by her older brother, Waqas, and that she was murdered by her father. But that doesn't address the all-important "why."
According to her friends, Aqsa increasingly refused to wear the hijab, a traditional headscarf that orthodox Islam demands that women wear to protect their modesty. One can speculate that she didn't want to wear it because she wanted to assimilate more completely into Canadian society. Maybe she just wanted not to be seen as different from her friends and classmates. Perhaps it was just as simple as the fact that Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old.
The media and the blogosphere is desperate to make this about the evils of Islam. It isn't. If anything, the lonely death of Aqsa Parvez is about the perversion of religion. To one degree or another, all monotheist religions drive certain of their followers to murder and, in certain circumstances, religious authorities condone and celebrate this.
Well, not in Canada. Not anymore.
As little personal enthusiasm as I have for it, I'm highly tolerant of the free expression of religion. Your beliefs mean little, if anything at all to me. My esteem for you is based entirely on your social conduct. Believe whatever you want, but your rights end at the point of violence.
So tolerant of religious expression is Canada that it has long refused to step in when religious figures advocate violence, although that is a clear violation of the Criminal Code of Canada. You should not be permitted promote the beating of children or acts of war against other ethnic or religious groups and hide behind your right to free expression in this country any longer. Furthermore, it is well past time that the crminal and immigration law be brought to bear on this.
If an Imam issues a fatwa allowing for the beating of girls not wearing the hijab or advocates violence against Israel, Jews or their interests, they should be arrested. If they are not citizens or permanent residents, they should be deported. The same applies to the sick followers of the late Meir Kahane, who advocate the violent expulsion of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, or racist Christian Identity leaders and the membership of Operation Rescue that have been involved with or been themselves advocates of violence. Canada should have punished Catholic clergy who promoted the terrorist Irish Republican Army, but didn't.
I have great respect and interest in other cultures, but some of their practices are unacceptable to Canadian society. You do not get to bring your ethnic warfare here and you do not get to brutalize your children for whatever your culture or religion dictates. Even the most multicultural of societies cannot be asked to tolerate what happened in Mississauga on Monday.
The government of Pakistan either cannot or will not control the forces that drive people like Muhammad Parvez, but the government of Canada has the power and right to punish them harshly. If the current Canadian government isn't equal to that task, there's an election expected at almost any time.
We should send a very powerful message to the rest of the world: There is no other country in the world more welcoming to other people and cultures, and that this is something that the Canadian people are rightly proud of. But no longer will religion or culture - any religion or culture - be a justification or shield for murder.
I can't think of a lonelier way to die than to be betrayed by your brother and murdered by your father in your very own bedroom, in the place and with the people you are supposed to be safest. And I can't think of anything more obscene than allowing it to be minimized as anything other than a vicious murder because of religion or culture.
For the love of God, Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll By: Bob Dylan From: The Times They Are A-Changin'
PermalinkLabels: The Interfaith Dental Clinic, The Serious Side of skippy
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