I Filed Pakistan's Courts Under Lost After the Maria Shahbaz Ruling. Then a Muslim Father in Kasur Went Back to the Same Courts for His Own Daughter, and the Judgment He Won May Be the One That Protects Ours.
A Muslim father in Kasur refused a clerk's empty ledger and won eleven pages from the Lahore High Court. Maria Shahbaz's lawyer says the ruling against her is no longer valid.
In February I read the Federal Constitutional Court's decision in the Maria Shahbaz case twice, then closed the tab and made a decision of my own. Thirteen years old. Married to a man of thirty. The marriage upheld. I decided that Pakistan's courts were not a place where a Christian girl could expect anything, and I stopped expecting. It is a restful kind of decision. It asks nothing of you afterward.
I want to tell you about the man who did not make it.
His name is Muhammad Aslam and his daughter is Hina. In May he went to the Sattokatla police station in Lahore and reported her abducted. Then Hina stood before a magistrate and said she had not been abducted at all, that she had married a man named Muhammad Luqman of her own free will, and that her father's complaint was false. You have read that sentence before. It is the sentence that ended Maria's story.
Aslam went to the municipal committee office in Kasur and asked for the record of his daughter's marriage. There was no record. So he went back to the police with a different complaint: not abduction now, but child marriage under a law that had been in force exactly one week on the day the marriage supposedly took place, and a forged marriage certificate. The police declined to register it. A judge in Kasur dismissed his application. He took it to the Lahore High Court.
On August 31 Justice Munawar Iqbal Duggal gave him eleven pages. Hina's national registration record puts her birth on March 1, 2011, which made her fifteen years and two months old on May 18, when the marriage was supposedly performed. Luqman's side said she had told them she was nineteen. The court said they had produced nothing contemporaneous to contradict the record, and that was that.
Then the judge did the thing I had decided no judge in Pakistan would do. He read the new law as written. The Punjab Child Marriage Restraint Act came into force on May 11 this year. It sets eighteen as the minimum age for both sexes, and in Section 5 declares that living with a child in a marital relationship that came out of such a marriage is child abuse, regardless of the child's consent, punishable by five to seven years and a fine of at least a million rupees. "The police cannot decline to set the criminal law into motion," the judgment says, "merely because the alleged child has expressed willingness to reside with the adult contracting party."
Read that once more with Maria in mind. The willingness of the child was the whole case against her, and now a high court has said in writing that it does not matter. Muhammad Saqib Jillani, the Supreme Court advocate who represents Maria's family, told Christian Daily International and Morning Star News what he thinks that means: the high court set Hina's case apart from the February ruling because the new law came after it, and "in a way, the high court has stated that the FCC judgment is no longer valid after the law." Ejaz Alam Augustine, the Christian member of the Punjab Assembly who wrote the "best interests of the child" amendment into the bill when it passed on April 27, called the ruling "a remarkable precedent for all cases of similar nature."
Here is the part I keep turning over. Nobody in that family is a Christian. The father, the daughter and the man she says she married are all Muslims. The law a Christian legislator fought to shape was tested first by a Muslim father who simply refused to accept that a clerk's empty ledger was the end of his daughter. If the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so, it turns out, does a well written statute. The protection our girls needed was built, and then a man who does not share our faith walked through the door first and held it open.
I should not pretend the door is wide. Justice Duggal did not hand Hina to her father. She told the court she was afraid of her family, and the court believed her enough to place her with the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau instead, with supervised visits for both sides. Katherine Sapna of the paralegal group Christians' True Spirit welcomed the ruling and then said the thing that needed saying: police and lower courts "often show bias in cases involving underage Christian girls," and a precedent is only as good as the constable who has to apply it at eleven at night.
In Kafka's parable a man from the country waits his whole life at a door built only for him, and dies without going through it. Aslam went through.
I think about the persistent widow in Luke, the one Jesus praised for wearing a judge down, and I notice that I had always cast the widow as us. The Christian family. The minority. It did not occur to me that the widow might be a Muslim father from Kasur, that the judge might rule for him, and that the ruling might be the one my people had been praying for. God is not tidy about whom he uses. Ask Cyrus. Ask the centurion.
Aslam stood at a government counter and asked for a record that was not there. That is where I want to leave this: an ordinary man at a window, refusing the blank page. If you are a member, you have already helped pay for someone to notice him. If you are not, that is the work, reading the eleven pages so that the next father, whoever he prays to, does not walk through that door alone.
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