How many others like Humayra Abedin are there in the U.K.? Or would asking that question be "Islamophobic?"
"London doctor is held as forced marriage hostage," from The Independent, December 7 (thanks to Fugue):
British lawyers were this weekend working frantically to rescue a London doctor who has been beaten and held captive in Bangladesh in an attempt to force her into marriage. Dr Humayra Abedin, known as Dorothy to her friends, this weekend faces being forced to marry a complete stranger, unless efforts by lawyers to free her, using new powers, succeed.
Dr Abedin is being held hostage by her family in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, where she is thought to have been gagged, bound and violently beaten to get her to comply with her parents' wishes. The 33-year-old trainee GP is depressed, suicidal and without hope, according to an email she managed to send to a close friend last Friday. This is the first time friends have heard from Dr Abedin for more than three months.
Her parents and uncle were yesterday served with a Forced Marriage Order issued by the British High Court on Friday. Dr Abedin, who has worked as a doctor in the Britain since 2002, is among the first cases to be heard under the Forced Marriage Act which came into force on 25 November. The move came after the family ignored orders from the Bangladeshi high court to bring Dr Abedin to court.
The new legislation allows judges to issue protection orders to prevent forced marriage and help to rescue victims who have already been married off. Those convicted of forcing people into marriage can be jailed for up to two years.
Anne-Marie Hutchinson, the barrister from Renaissance Chambers acting for Dr Abedin, said: "There are real concerns for the safety of this young woman. It is understood that she is to be married this weekend. The Forced Marriage Act offers protection to all residents of this country. It makes it clear that because she lives here it is not just a domestic matter for the Bangladesh authorities."
While the Act is not enforceable in Bangladesh, lawyers for Dr Abedin are confident it will strengthen the resolve of the authorities in Dhaka.
The only child of Mohammed Joynal Abedin, a retired businessman, and his wife, a housewife, Dr Abedin trained as a doctor in Bangladesh and then came to England in 2002 to study at Leeds University. She has since set up home in Leyton, east London ,while working in hospitals across the capital. Dr Abedin is described by friends as an intelligent young woman who loves Bollywood films and Hindi music. She is only a year away from qualifying as a GP.
Her Muslim family became incensed after she developed a close friendship with a Hindu Bangladeshi man she met in London. Since May, they have made several attempts to keep her away from him and to force her into marriage. The Metropolitan Police launched an inquiry at the end of June, after she was held captive in her flat by her mother and uncle, who visited for several days. Her case has also been taken up by Interpol.
Her family duped her into returning to Bangladesh in August, by claiming her mother was seriously ill. They then hid her passport and plane ticket, and have held her captive since 5 August. She has been subjected to physical and psychological violence and denied contact with friends or lawyers. There are also unconfirmed claims that Dr Abedin has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital at the wishes of her parents, who have insinuated in court that her relationship with a Hindu man is a sign of mental illness. [...]
Muslim Romance is a pitiful thing.
How could this poor, unfortunate woman not have suspected what lay in store for her if she returned to Bangladesh? "...she was held captive in her flat by her mother and uncle, who visited for several days." This implies that her mother and uncle flew from Bangladesh to Britain, then abused her during the visit. And after this she still returned home? "...has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital at the wishes of her parents, who have insinuated in court that her relationship with a Hindu man is a sign of mental illness." Surely, having grown up in this environment she should have known about all this. What was she thinking? She should have just sent flowers to her mother and a get well note, with an addendum saying please don't bother to visit again.
Here we have the case of a highly educated woman, intimately familiar with the culture, who nevertheless is deceived by her own family, perhaps feeing "My parents would NEVER do that to me." Yet, there she is. Trapped. Half-way around the world. Horrible.
And one wonders: What are her options? Who will intercede for her? The British shariah courts?
@Eastview:
We are all blind when it comes to family. We believe that Mother and Father love us and would never do harm to us.
Apparently, we're dealing with a societal monster that says to these Bangladeshis that they somehow owe it to their daughter to do this to her.
The perpetrators most likely believe they're doing the right thing. That's why this is the news story that it is. If this was the work of deranged parents, we wouldn't be reading it. Instead they would be doing time in a mental institution.
The problem is that this mental institution is the size of a community in Bangladesh. It may well be that most people who live there AGREE with this behavior. It will be interesting to see if the country will give any credibility to the British Courts, or whether they sweep the whole thing under the rug, "marry" this woman by force, and then act as if nothing is wrong with this.
For a country lacking good doctors, they sure know how to treat one, don't they?
How is it possible that a woman, who is smart enough to become a doctor, did not have an inkling of her parents' extremism? She had to know their radical islamic beliefs were contradictory to her behavior.
I find it very difficult to sympathize with an apparently intelligent individual who is "duped" into such a volatile situation. It isn't like islamic violence is rare or uncommon.
Here's a clue - If you have parents/brothers/sons/friends/spouses who are muslim, don't expect them to look the other way when you act un-islamically. Tolerance is simply not a part of their cult.
I submit that she is actually mentally ill, and should not be allowed to see patients ever again, if she survives.
Who would board a modern day time machine, also known as an airplane, to travel back to the 7th century? Someone with a scientific mind? Someone trained in the "scientific method"?
I agree wholeheartedly with the posters above...she, above all others, must have known what her Bangladeshi culture and Islam represent. To willingly go there, no matter what the ruse, IS MENTAL ILLNESS.
I never let muslim doctors treat me...no matter what my HMO/PPO prescribes.
DJM
"I find it very difficult to sympathize with an apparently intelligent individual who is "duped" into such a volatile situation. It isn't like islamic violence is rare or uncommon."
I do not think our open society can appreciate the kind of pressures these girls are under. Thirty years ago a relative worked with a a young woman who had married a man brought in for her by her family. She hated him and as the muslims were not so powerful then she eventually left him and managed to get him sent back.
All the local liberal groups up to and including the MP fought to prevent his deportation. What clinched it though was her attitude, she said "I will be dancing on the tarmac when they ship the bastard out!" Her British colleagues were puzzled that she had married him in the first place but she told them simply "My mother said if I did not they would throw me out and I would never see them again". I might add - or worse?
Also six years ago I worked in a 60% muslim office and a British born and educated girl there had walked out of an arranged marriage. She was disowned by her family and muslims in the office were polite to her face, but behind her back they spoke of her with contempt.
Third posting - Was TypePad designed by a jahidi?
Ever wonder why there are no famous mohammedan romances?
Why their literature is so undeveloped?
The TypePad problem persists, and can’t be good for their business. It makes one wonder if the reason is simply TypePad technical incompetence, a clumsy surveillance effort, or a not so stealthy jihad.
There are also unconfirmed claims that Dr Abedin has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital at the wishes of her parents, who have insinuated in court that her relationship with a Hindu man is a sign of mental illness.
We’ve seen these tactics before:
Political Abuse of Psychiatry in the
Soviet Union and in China:
Complexities and Controversies
http://www.jaapl.org/cgi/reprint/30/1/136.pdf
Now why would those who follow a Religion of Peace adopt the methods of repressive infidel states?
We should demand that her captors and family not “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them”, and release her immediately.
Sadly this is all too common in UK. There used to be this stunnigly beautiful Kashmiri girl who worked at my local cornershop. She was married off right after her GCSEs i think. Last heard shes lives with her agriculurist husband in some Pakistani village.
If she's smart enough and old enough to be a doctor, she's smart enough and old enough to know better about the religion she chooses to continue to embrace. I can't feel sorry for her plight. In her own way, she's also part of the problem.
It's ironic given the silence of the left on issues like this, that if she was a working class girl she'd be completely buggered, probably in a very real and literal sense.
With particular reference to this case, remember they walk among us, but are not us.
When Ayaan Hirsi Ali went 'back home' for her sister's funeral, she had the sense to sleep on top of her passport so her mother couldn't steal it.
A point to be emphasised for anyone reading here, who is new to this site: under Muslim sharia law, Muslim women are not permitted to 'marry out'.
Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women, since the children belong exclusively to the husband and must be reared as Muslims.
But Muslim women are only allowed to marry Muslims; it is simply not permitted for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man, if the man continues in his non-Muslim faith rather than converting to Islam (or if, even worse, the Muslim woman apostasises and joins her husband's faith!).
From the article:
"There are also unconfirmed claims that Dr Abedin has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital at the wishes of her parents, who have insinuated in court that her relationship with a Hindu man is a sign of mental illness"...
They find it absolutely unthinkable that she would look outside Islam for a marriage partner; she must be mad!
Of course, all we wicked Infidels would argue that this woman's choice of a Hindu man as potential marriage partner was evidence of a glimmering of sanity...the first baby step, even, toward apostasy and liberation from Islam.
Think about it. According to a British police study that took place in the early 1990s, women married to Muslim men in the UK were found to be ten times more likely to be murdered by their husbands, than women with non-Muslim husbands.
Not so long ago, here on dhimmiwatch, there was a newspaper article in which a Muslim female doctor, in the UK, was blowing the whistle on the sky-high rates of extreme domestic violence within the Muslim 'community' - up to and including men hitting their pregnant wives on the stomach.
Seems to me that by hankering after a Hindu man this lady was subliminally seeking a husband who might be kind and gentle toward herself and any future babies, rather than cruel and violent.
Furthermore: there is a good biological reason why this Bangladeshi Muslim lady might have been attracted to a man from outside her closed, inbred little group. Seemingly, humans subliminally are sexually attracted to the body scent of someone who is genetically most different from ourselves, especially in the area of the immune system..whose scent says "I am a non-relative".
Allow free choice of mate to both women and men and - controlling for other factors, like the character and work ethic of the possible partners, they will choose partners genetically different from themselves, and produce children with nice strong immune systems.
By practising inbreeding and polygyny and preventing free choice, Islamified societies continually reduce their genetic diversity and shut off their longterm prospects.
They can get away with this for a while so long as they can 'poach' genetic diversity from other, healthier populations by stealing women, but were they to take over the whole world, there would be a drastic collapse in human genetic diversity (which is pretty limited to begin with, according to the geneticists). Longterm, they're committing genetic suicide.
I met a woman, not so long ago, who had worked in Saudi Arabia, researching genetic diseases. She said that due to the incredibly high rates of consanguinity the place was seething with weird recessives - lots of fun for genetic researchers, because you could see the genetic faults coming out in the open, and you could draw the family trees and work out how the things were being inherited, but...totally crippling for the population.
If the lawyers manage to rescue this Bangladeshi lady, they should insist that a condition of their hauling her ass back out to the UK is that she should apostasise from Islam. Her young Hindu man should insist on it; no apostasy, no marriage. She can choose: atheism, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism...just so long as she ditches Islam, which is destroying her life and happiness.
I'm normally not sympathetic towards Muslimahs. But those of you wishing ill of her are missing the paragraph that DDA so astutely spotted: this woman was targeted for abduction and a forced marriage because of suspicions that she was dating a Hindu. Her family hates the fact that her tilth value will be denied to a fellow ummah member, and that she may end up breeding Hindus. Had her boyfriend been leaning towards Islam, she could easily have convinced them to let him have her, but since that apparently was not the case, it didn't happen. I do agree that she was somewhat stupid to allow herself to be lured to Dhaka: she should simply have cited work pressure as the reason for not going.
I agree with DDA above - if rescued, she should apostatize and then marry her Hindu friend, and be careful never to visit Bangladesh again.
It is worth pointing out again the first thing Jack Straw then Home Secretary, now Justice Minister did on taking office in 1997 was to abolish the "Primary purpose rule". This allowed the immigration service refuse entry into Britain if they thought the primary purpose of the marriage was to gain British residence.
Its thanks to Nulabour paying off its "Asisn" vote that 60% of all partners are now brought in from Pakistan and Bangladesh.
5th posting - damn TypePad this is getting beyond a joke!
"How is it possible that a woman, who is smart enough to become a doctor, did not have an inkling of her parents' extremism? She had to know their radical islamic beliefs were contradictory to her behavior."
I think she truly didn't believe her parents were actually, well, Islamic. She's 33 years old and still single. She's a doctor. She's an only child -- and yet, it would appear her father (a businessman) didn't go find wifey #2 (and 3 and 4) when his first wife produced only a single child, and a daughter at that. I think the good doctor believed her parents weren't into that hardcore, fundamentalist stuff.
Yes, there was the incident in London. But that was Mum and an uncle. How much you want to bet that the phone calls afterward claimed that Mom was sorry, it was a misunderstanding, and after thinking it over, Dad has convinced Mum that they only want their dear daughter to be happy, etc.
Too late, she discovered that there is no moderate Islam. When push came to shove, her "moderate" parents did the (to her) unthinkable. And I'd guess that realization is contributing as much to her depression as anything.
"she is thought to have been gagged, bound and violently beaten"
Is this in preparation for the honeymoon?
"There are also unconfirmed claims that Dr Abedin has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital at the wishes of her parents, who have insinuated in court that her relationship with a Hindu man is a sign of mental illness. [...]"
If you think about it, it is actually a sign of sanity.
Sorry, but we shouldn't get involved, except to print this story on the front pages of our newspapers every time it happens.
It is not in our best interests for any western government to follow islam around the world with a bucket and shovel, to clear up the mess islam invariably leaves in its wake.
For 33 years this woman has never renounced her muslim identity, because she assumed this would never happen to her. Now it has.
If we are ever going to inflict serious damagee on this vile system, we need their womenfolk on our side. And we need to stand back and watch, every time it scores another own goal.
I couldn't agree more.
I am struck by the fact that the penalty provided by the Forced Marriage Act is only two years. Forced marriage involves kidnapping and rape, both of which call for far more severe sentences.
It's sex trafficking of one's own children. It's usually forced incest, in addition to rape, and it's ongoing rape, not to mention false imprisonment.
Dear Fred, the other day I had the typepad problem and found that if you put your signin name in the URL and Yes in Remember me that I could post. BUT, I'll save this with aol edit just in case the typekey or pad thing intervenes.
Your right pulsar182, Muslim romance truly is a pitiful thing. I am still laughing over your comment.
Oh yeah, and also it takes a really long time to for your post to load, so don't give up, as you've probably found already.