Why Misbah isn’t going back to Mama
Osama has been doing a good job, *ma sha Allah*, of keeping up with the story of Misbah Iram AKA “Molly Campbell” ([[1]](http://www.osamasaeed.org/osama/2006/09/misbah_speaks.html), [[2]](http://www.osamasaeed.org/osama/2006/08/molly_campbell.html)), a combination of her nickname and her mother’s boyfriend’s name. Sarfraz Manzoor has an article in today’s *Guardian* media supplement (for some reason not online, but [Islamophobia Watch reproduced it](http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/2006/9/5/media-stereotyping-in-the-molly-campbell-case.html)) about how what he calls the white media got it wrong – they automatically assumed that the girl had been abducted and that what awaited her in Pakistan was a false marriage, and they could not understand why someone would want to live in Pakistan rather than the Western Isles.
Even when Misbah had spoken publically on Friday, the media still insisted that she had done wrong by fleeing to Pakistan and that her fate should be decided in the UK, not Pakistan. This is the gist of the Hague Convention, and it often results in parents being forced to hand over their children after a marriage, in which they had lived in their spouse’s home country, breaks up, often not to see them again for years. (I personally know a brother whose marriage to a Syrian woman broke up, and the wife came to England with their son, and the British authorities refuse to allow the father to take the son back to the son’s home country because Syria is not a signatory to the convention.)
Pakistan is not a signatory to the Hague Convention (as is the case with most Muslim countries), but there is a judicial agreement, agreed in 2003 (really bad PDF [here](http://www.soas.ac.uk/honourcrimes/Mat_Pak-UK_Protocol.pdf)), but whether this constitutes an international treaty or is binding in Pakistani law, as it appears not to have been passed by any law-making body there, I’m not sure. What is absolutely clear is that Islamic law is absolutely on the side of Misbah and her father, given that it is an imperative when deciding on who receives custody of a child after the break-up of a marriage for the judge to consider the religion, and moral standing, of both parents. In the case of Misbah’s mother, she is said to be an apostate who, since the end of her marriage, has begun drinking alcohol, taking drugs, keeping dogs in her house and living with boyfriends without marriage. She is also said to have put pressure on Misbah to change her religion.
Whether or not the Pakistani authorities will follow the Shari’ah or this convention, which was surely not made with such a case in mind, remains to be seen. There is another complicating factor which may count in Misbah’s favour, which is how Pakistan defines a child – in Islamic law, childhood ends at puberty, which for girls means menarche (their first period), or fifteen lunar years, whichever comes first. So if Misbah is already physically an adult, or they manage to drag the legal wrangling out in Pakistan until she becomes such, the legal agreement which specifically mentions children may be irrelevant to Misbah’s case. Still, a halfway house may be reached, by which Misbah may be returned to the UK to live with her older brother Omar who, like the rest of the family except the mother, has not renounced Islam. Still, as a Muslim I really do hope that the Pakistani courts see what is in everyone’s interests except Louise Campbell’s: for the family to remain united, for the time being, in Pakistan.
