So Misbah could come back, after all
“Molly”, real name Misbah Rana, is the girl who ran away from her mother in Scotland to join her father and the rest of her family in Pakistan, prompting a public panic that she might have been abducted to take part in an arranged marriage. What had really happened was that she had left of her own accord after her mother had taken her away to a remote part of Scotland, taking advantage of her daughter’s young age to separate her from the rest of her family and her religion. When I wrote about this at the time, I got a comment from “Old Pickler” (one of a number of anti-Muslim trolls who used to post her a lot at the time) saying:
She is not in a position to give her consent. Of course at the moment she regards all this as rather exotic. But this dozy idiot should realise that she can run away from Scotland but not from Pakistan.
The fact that she is now living with her family in Blackburn, not Lahore, disproves this fact, as well as any suspicion that the father was some sort of religious tyrant (he actually pulled Misbah out of a fundamentalist-run Islamic college) because he allowed her to return to England as soon as her mother could not turn up and drag her back to her boyfriend’s house in Scotland. And by all accounts, her life in Scotland wasn’t freedom; it sounded pretty miserable, living without her siblings and with her mother’s strange boyfriend in a rainy and wind-swept small town.
I notice that this newspaper persistently refers to Misbah Rana as “Molly” throughout, when this is a name which was never her own, was foisted on her during her time in Scotland and which she rejected. Perhaps this is a similar bit of ham-fistedness to the Daily Mirror’s persistent use of “Holly” to refer to Celyn Vincent (the name actually means holly, but it still isn’t her name), but the Mail has a tendency not to respect people’s choices when those choices involve Islam, as demonstrated in their coverage of female converts over the years.
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