Girl, Interrupted - in memory of Aqsa Parvez, plot #774

On December 10, 2007, a 16-year old girl Aqsa Parvez was murdered - by her Pakistani immigrant Muslim father, Muhammad Parvez, and her brother, Waqas Parvez, in what is euphemistically termed an Islamic "honour killing".  The cause of death was strangulation.

Sweet 16: more than 20 Facebook pages devoted to
Aqsa Parvez were created within days of her death.Image credit: Facebook.

But this didn't happen in Pakistan, it happened in Mississauga, Toronto (Canada), where the population has tripled in the past 30 years - there are currently more than 700,000 people living in this, the country’s sixth largest city, and half of them are visible minorities.

Provocation for the father to murder his daughter must have been profound - he had sworn to kill her - because she had abandoned the use of her hijab (headscarf) - which is apparently a sin according to the Koran (and under Islamic Sharia law).

The otherwise unmarked grave of Aqsa Parvez, in Plot #774.

The details and the background to the murder of this child (she was aged 16) are adequately described in a factual and unemotional  4-page article by Toronto Life (click on link).


As if the murder wasn't bad enough, there is an article on 22 January, 2009 in Jihad Watch, that describes how Aqsa was buried without a headstone - she was laid in an unmarked grave, in plot #774 in Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, Ontario. One Pamela Geller took up a collection to raise funds for a headstone, and a group of infidels contributed sufficient to make it a goer. But there was a problem, according to Pamela Geller in the article:

The bottom line is that the family (her alleged murderers) has to "sign off" on it. We are still waiting for them to look at the headstone. Clearly they are the obstacle. We have tried to pursue purchasing a plot near, around or in the vicinity of her unmarked grave. The Islamic Society owns them all. *sigh*.

The Toronto Life article says:

Aqsa’s death got to the heart of a heated debate about women in Islam. Some progressive Muslims, such as Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan of the Muslim Canadian Congress, saw her murder as evidence of rising Islamic fundamentalism in Canada. The majority of Muslim leaders, however, insisted that Aqsa’s murder was not an honour killing. Mohamed Elmasry, who heads the Cana dian Islamic Congress, and Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, described the death as a teen issue and a case of domestic abuse.

The imam whom Applewood contacted to get help for Aqsa was Sheikh Alaa Elsayed, who presides over the Islamic Centre of Cana da. The centre is the largest mosque in the GTA, its impressive minaret visible from the QEW. Elsayed, a tall and good-looking man with a friendly smile and flowing white robes, came to Cana da from Egypt when he was 15. In his 20s, he lived in Bermuda, Saudi Arabia and Europe but eventually made his way back to Toronto. Before he found his religious calling, he was a district safety manager for Home Depot. Elsayed’s office reflects the hectic pace of his job. There are religious texts, pamphlets, counselling books and, the requisite prop of any skilled listener, a bowl of candy on his desk. As imam, he’s responsible for weddings, funerals, divorces, domestic disputes, spiritual counselling and, of course, leading prayers. After he heard from Applewood, he phoned the Parvez family twice, once speaking briefly with someone at the house and another time leaving a voice mail offering support and assistance. He never had the opportunity to help because no one in Aqsa’s family returned his calls.

The day after Aqsa’s murder, Elsayed went into damage control mode. Worried about a backlash against Muslims, he and another imam held a press conference where he read passages from the Koran to demonstrate how Islam condemns honour killings. Taking a life, he said, is an act against all humanity.

“The fact is, the Koran says to cover,” Elsayed tells me. “This is what God Almighty says. You want to adhere to it? Good for you. If you don’t want to adhere to it I cannot force you, but you will be held accountable on judgment day. There are so many Muslim women who are not covered now. Do we do anything? Do we shoot them? We do not.”

But you see, they do, and they did, and the murder has been tacitly sanctioned by them.

I just did a search on Facebook and found twenty (that's 20) groups that are in memoriam for Aqsa Parvez and which also variously relate to advocacy groups against Islamic honour killings, against the suppression of women in society, the abuse of women, etc. All of these groups are open for anyone to join, and, amazingly, one of them is called Support Toronto Life Magazine and its coverage of the Aqsa Parvez murder. Now, you, like me, might wonder - why on earth would they need a group like that? 

Well, the answer to that question would seem to lie in the last group in the search. It is a closed "by invitation only" group with 313 members, called Call to Action: Toronto Life’s Misrepresentation of Aqsa’s Parvez’s murder. If you read the basic info about the group, there is a long diatribe about how the coverage of Aqsa Parvez's murder "misrepresented" Islam with the premise that it is a religion associated with violence.

This would be laughable if it were not so serious. The facts of this case, and all the other cases of Islamic-initiated violence - of "honour killings" of women, stonings, horrific attacks, bombings, beheadings, dragging bodies through the streets, the Al Queda in the Swat valley in Pakistan, and other barbaric acts too numerous to mention here - not forgetting 911- would seem to support the premise, QED. 

But no, we are "misunderstanding" Islam or "offending" Islam, and we must not do that, otherwise we could be introduced to the most compelling argument - the same argument that was put by the Muslim protesters to the Dutch publishers of those infamous cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. This was more than just a strong protest.

The sound of a loaded gun being cocked behind your head has historically been a pretty compelling argument that has ended many a disagreement. 

"I just keep seeing Muslims killing people." as said Ann Coulter, American right-wing conservative, as reported in The Independent, August 20, 2004. 

So, why kill Aqsa Parvez? Because it is apparently in the Koran (as the imam is quoted above) - "Women must cover" - not forgetting that the punishment for deliberate disobedience of any of Allah's commands is death.

So, why bother to attempt to defend the crime and ameliorate the news reports with obfuscation about "misunderstanding" Islam? Because it is in the Koran as an acceptable approach (guile) when you are indending to dissemble to conceal your real motives of Islamic dominance - which dominance Allah directs all Muslims must strive towards. The next step would be the implementation of Shariah law, to progressively replace any other laws.

"Islam in America isn't to be equal to any other faith but to become dominant."
"The Koran should be the highest authority in America and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
- Omar Ahmad, Co-Founder of CAIR.

So, are Muslims violent, bad people? Decidedly not. With the exception of the relatively small criminal element that you would find in any society (arguably less in Muslim societies, because the deterrents are so severe - they can be stoned or get their hands, ears or feet chopped off as punishment for some crimes), the vast majority of Muslims are deeply religious, and the Koran forbids them to commit arbitrary acts of violence.

They are people like you and I, but the difference is that they have submitted to a religious ideology (Islam means "submit") where things such as Western democracy and freedoms are anathema to what Muslims are directed to do by Allah - they are blasphemies. However, violence towards blasphemers and infidels (non-Muslims) and in the interest of Islamic domination is acceptable - if not usually recommended - in the Koran (Allah's word). You must not argue with the absolute and infallible word of Allah.

So, what I would suggest at this point is that the Toronto Life actually did not do as thorough a journalistic job as it might have done. The journalistic view was taken using Western eyes. If you look with Western eyes, and using a Western paradigm, at Aqsa Parvez's Pakistani immigrant Muslim father, Muhammad Parvez, and her brother, Waqas Parvez, you see a senseless, brutal, premeditated murder of a child by a father and son - the people who should have protected her. Why would a father and son conspire to deliberately cut short a daughter's life full of potential?

To find an answer, you need to put yourself in the shoes of Muhammad Parvez, and try to understand what pressure he was under. His darling daughter (and I feel sure he would have loved her very much) was in her teens and probably in a rebellious "hormones-on-legs" stage. This is what you might expect of any adolescent - it would be normal. However, in Islam, she is a mature, marriagable woman (able to menstruate and bear children) and she commits an error - she breaks a law which must not be broken - it is an offence, and she is a blasphemer as a result.  She not only does not wear the hijab, she continues to not wear it. What to do - she has blasphemed, and to do nothing would be tantamount to compounding the blasphemy and thereby implicating the whole family - and they will all be held accountable for this on Judgement day.

There is only one way out.  She must be killed - and by the men in the family.  If this was not done, then, by turning a blind eye, they themselves would be in danger of being regarded as blasphemers - which can lead to death, or at least, excommunication in this life, and the certain fires of Hell in the afterlife.  Thus, this was not an "honour killing".  In Islam, this was a perfectly correct and appropriate sentence carried out by the father and son.  Failure to take action would have risked the family going to Hell in the afterlife, and risked losing the support of the local Islamic society (excommunication) in this life - it would have been a classic failure to submit to the Koran, the word of Allah.

Think how angy with the girl her father and brother must have been at being compelled by her stupid actions and under Allah's law to kill her, and how grief-stricken they must have been at being so obliged to kill their loved one.  Before you judge them, consider how you could have coped any differently had you been in their shoes. The trial of these two men under a Western law would have little meaning when they were subject to and obeying a much higher law - one that transcends the man-made laws of Canada. There is only one law - the law of Allah.

There was no failure of justice here, in either system of laws. If there was any failure, it was in the father not telling his daughter clearly and at an early stage (or maybe he did, and she did not believe him):

"Please, please, please put the hijab back on and keep it on like a good Islamic girl, otherwise - under Allah's law - I shall be forced to kill you, and it would break my heart to do that."

Whatever sentence the father and son receive as punishment, I cannot imagine that it would be worse than living daily in the knowledge and memory of having been obliged by Allah's law to kill their daughter/sister. This whole sorry affair is a tragedy that is being and will be repeated in one form or another across the world wherever Islam meets Western civilisation. If it were not for the blasphemous Western civilisation influencing Aqsa and children like her, encouraging them to disobey Allah's laws, then there would have been no need to kill the children. It is the blasphemous Western civilisation that needs fixing, and it will be fixed by implementing Islamic religious supremacy, according to Allah's word.