Muslim 'honour' attacks: Survivor speaks out

David Cohen
28 Jul 2009

When Hannah Ali was 13, she walked in on a conversation between her mother and two older brothers that left her reeling.

"They were making plans to fly me to Pakistan to marry a man called Jamal who, at 29, was 16 years older than me, a cousin on my mother's side whom I'd never met," Hannah recalls.

"I told them they could forget it. But when I started protesting, my mother (who had long since divorced my father) chided me, saying: 'Don't be a silly girl, you've been engaged to Jamal since you were nine. You cannot pull out now, it would bring shame on the family.'"

Their plan was to get Hannah wed as soon as she finished GCSEs at her local state school in Hackney, east London, but when she insisted that her plan was to study further to become a nurse, and to marry a man of her own choosing, the response of her brothers, who were in their twenties, was brutal.

"They punched me in the face and started shouting, 'How dare you speak to us like that! We are your brothers; we want the best for you. If you don't get married, we will kill you, and nobody will ever find out. Don't you dare bring up the subject again!'"

It was the beginning of a dramatic chain of events that would see Hannah forced into marriage at gunpoint, raped repeatedly by her husband, and fleeing to a women's refuge centre in Derby.

In doing so, she bravely ignored text threats from her brothers to murder her in a so-called "honour killing" and started a new life with a new name far away from her childhood home.

Until now, Hannah, 22, whose name has been changed for her protection, has never gone public with her story.

But last week's shocking events, in which two Muslim men from Leytonstone were charged with attempted murder after they allegedly poured sulphuric acid down the throat of their married sister's lover, has prompted her to speak out.

In that widely reported case the men are said to have carried out the brutal attack on the woman's boyfriend on 2 July as a matter of "honour".

The 24-year-old victim, a Muslim, who was blinded and had his tongue destroyed, was also stabbed twice by masked men and is still fighting for his life in hospital.

The attack impelled Scotland Yard to issue the woman - who, like Hannah, is Muslim, born in London of Pakistani descent - with an "Osman warning", a formal alert that she is in grave danger of being killed.

The police believe there may be up to a dozen honour killings in the UK every year. 

"When I heard about the case I was shaking uncontrollably because I also had a secret boyfriend as a teenager and I lived in constant fear that my brothers would find us together and kill us both," says Hannah.

"Forced marriages - and the threats often used to enforce them - are more common in this country than people realise. I went to a state school and of seven Muslim girls in my class, three of us were forced into marriage. And that's just one classroom in Hackney."

The problem of forced marriages is a growing phenomenon in the UK, with the Home Office Forced Marriage Unit handling 1,600 cases of forced marriage a year and fielding 5,000 calls for support.

Nearly half those who phone in are under 18, some as young as 11, but victims can include mature professionals too, as in the case of Humayra Abedin, the 33-year-old doctor from East Ham who was duped into flying to Bangladesh and held captive by her parents for four months last year while they plotted a forced marriage, only for a court in Dhaka to save her at the last moment.

Indeed, this time of year is the peak time for calls to the Home Office hotline from teenagers who, having completed their GCSEs, are terrified that their parents plan to whisk them to south Asia and marry them off in the summer holidays. And it's not just Muslim children who are at risk.

Although 60 per cent of victims come from Pakistani Muslim families, forced marriage and "honour" attacks are said to be a cultural rather than a religious phenomenon, with Sharia law forbidding forced (as opposed to arranged) marriages.

For those in the know, the 2007 Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act allows victims to seek injunctions and annulments.

After she had run away, Hannah eventually used the act to her advantage - her marriage was annulled last month and her husband deported to Pakistan.

But like many other victims, Hannah had no idea that the act even existed and thought that she had to face up to her family alone.  

"As the sixth of nine children I had seen my two older sisters forced into unhappy marriages with men who regularly beat them up and I was determined it wouldn't happen to me," she begins.

"I managed to delay things when I insisted on going to college after my GCSEs, although I had to endure my family's moaning that education wasn't important for women, that my job was to get a husband, have children and cook for the family. 

"I appealed to my older sisters but they said I should just accept my lot and pray five times a day. The only freedom I had was at college where I had my first boyfriend, a Muslim boy, whom I saw secretly at lunchtime but I stopped seeing him because I was terrified that my brothers would kill us both if they found out."

When college ended and as Hannah's 18th birthday approached her sisters took her to a jeweller to adorn her for her "upcoming wedding". "When I refused to buy anything, my oldest sister grabbed my hair and held me down and said: 'We've been through it, now it's your turn, you can't get away'. I thought about calling the police but I was scared that my brothers would kidnap me.

"I had no idea, then, that forced marriage was against the law and that what my family was doing was illegal."

After that, things happened fast. "We flew to Pakistan, my brothers sitting either side of me to prevent me running away. I cried all the way and felt like I was being led to my execution."

A week later, in July 2005, on her wedding day, Hannah met her husband-to-be for the first time. "I know it sounds clichéd but he truly was short, fat and bald," she recalls.

"My brothers had arranged for me to marry an ugly guy twice my age with a shit personality and no sense of humour.

"I said I couldn't go through with it but they took my passport off me and then the best man pulled out a gun and held it to my head and said: 'Sign the papers or we'll shoot you.'

"That night, I refused to have sex with my husband, but he raped me anyway. He raped me 10 times in that first week alone. I became totally numb to my own life.

"After three months living in his parents' house, we came back to London, where I got a job working in a pharmacy in Walthamstow. My husband never worked and only got his visa to come here because he was married to me."

For three years, Hannah says she hardly spoke to her husband and refused to lie in the same bed as him, preferring to sleep on the floor.

Then, last July, she bought herself a laptop and discovered on the internet an organisation called Karma Nirvana that is dedicated to helping the victims of forced marriages. She sent off an email. Within days, with the help of Karma Nirvana, she had hatched a plan.

"As soon as my husband went out of the house, I called in sick at work. I packed my bags and met a policewoman, who put me on a coach to the Karma Nirvana refuge in Derby.

"I remember nervously looking around to check that I didn't recognise anyone, then throwing off my burqa. Finally I was free."

The next day Hannah got a text from her brothers that read: "If you don't come back, we're going to find you and kill you and we don't care if we go to prison."

But supported by Natasha Rattu, a key-worker at Karma Nirvana, Hannah ignored the threatening texts, which gradually ceased, and carved out a new life.

"Hannah has made enormous strides," says Natasha. "When we first saw her, she was so timid, she could hardly meet your eyes. Today, she's a thoroughly modern young woman with a boyfriend, who wears make-up and jeans and who looks like she's living rather than just existing."

Hannah engaged solicitors to have her husband deported, and says that although she misses her two younger sisters terribly, she has never felt better.

"I've paid a huge price for my freedom. Earlier this month my father died from a heart attack but I couldn't attend the funeral. I've had to face the fact that I can never see any of my family again because my brothers have vowed to kill me if they find me."

There is a silver lining, though, she says. "I heard through the grapevine that my mother realises the damage she's caused and that my younger sisters won't have to go through the trauma of forced marriage.

"It's taken my excommunication to wake her up to the fact that she's not living in the dark ages.

"There are days I feel totally bereft and alone, but also I feel immensely proud of how far I've come. I have a boyfriend I love and plans to study to become a nurse.

"Most Londoners take their freedoms for granted, but not me: I had to wait 21 years to be liberated. I think about it - and all the women who are still trapped in forced marriages - every day."