Fundamentalist Father Allegedly Kills Own Teenage Daughter for Being Too Independent

Posted by Jesse Wendel, Group News Blog at 12:28 PM on December 14, 2007.

Aqsa Parvez, sixteen, of Mississauga, Canada, (just to the west of Toronto) died Tuesday after her father, Muhammad Parvez, a 57 year-old taxi driver, allegedly strangled her on Monday when she returned to her parent's home to pick up some of her belongings. He has been charged with murder. Her 26-year-old brother, Waqas Parvez, has been charged with obstructing police.

The Globe and Mail

Ms. Parvez's friends described the Grade 11 student at Applewood Heights Secondary School as someone who was drawn to Western culture even as her family adhered to a devout form of Islam. Friends paint a picture of a hardworking and cheerful girl who loved dancing, fashion and photography - interests that often clashed with her strict home environment.

Last week, Ms. Parvez temporarily moved in with a friend from school.

"She said she wasn't getting along well with her family and that things weren't right," said Trudy Looby, the mother of one of Ms. Parvez's friends, Alisha. "When she was here, she was very happy."

During her stay, Ms. Looby said, Ms. Parvez didn't wear the hijab, a head scarf that friends said was a hot topic within her family.

Krista Garbutt remembers walking down the street with Ms. Parvez earlier this year, when the two of them spotted Ms. Parvez's brother walking toward them. Panicking, the teenager quickly fumbled for her head scarf, trying to put it on. "There were times when we'd be walking down the street and she'd see her brother and she wouldn't be wearing her hijab and she'd have to put it on," Ms. Garbutt said. "She said, 'He'll kill me, he'll kill me.' I said, 'He's not going to kill you,' but she said, 'Yeah, he will.' And nobody believed it."

There's more...

What a waste of a life.

First, obviously, when you leave, leave. You don't ever go back for your stuff. From airplane crashes to the Johnstown Flood, to refugees to fleeing abusers, when it's time to go, go.

Second and separate from the tragedy of this child and her family, is the issue of fundamentalism.

From 1988 - 1993 there was a study done called The Fundamentalism Project. I will be returning to it over and over again.

The Fundamentalism Project was a big deal, the largest study of its type ever attempted. Scholars of every type world-wide examined fundamentalism -- the religions, the people, their sacred and traditional books and fables and stories, their cultures and beliefs, rituals and practices for men, women, men and women, and for children, their historical backgrounds, and the contexts in which the fundamentalists currently lived and in which they had come from over many many years. This was done for every major group of fundamentalists which the scholars were able to distinguish, throughout the world.

After which, the scholars asked, what do all of these groups have in common?

Hullabaloo

Evolutionary Theology

Those of you who follow the religious beat more closely than I do have probably seen this article called The Fundamentalist Agenda, by Davidson Loehr. I may not have religious experiences, but I do have epiphanies and reading this was one.

The five characteristics are

1) Men rule the roost and make the rules. Women are support staff and for reasons easy to imagine, homosexuality is intolerable.

2) all rules must apply to all people, no pluralism.

3) the rules must be precisely communicated to the next generation

4) "they spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed. (Several of the scholars observed a strong and deep resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism. Both have almost identical agendas. Men are on top, women are subservient, there is one rigid set of rules, with police and military might to enforce them, and education is tightly controlled by the state. One scholar suggested that it's helpful to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. The phrase 'overcoming the modern' is a fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941.)"

5) Fundamentalists deny history in a "radical and idiosyncratic way."

All of this is interesting and it's interesting because it crosses all religions, cultural and regional boundaries. When the scientists were presenting their abstracts, "several noted that all their papers were sounding alike, reporting on 'species' when studying the 'genus' was called for, that there were strong family resemblances between all fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact, no way to influence each other."

Now, evolutionary psychology theories of the moment can be awfully facile because mostly they reinforce certain social norms that can easily be explained in other ways. (No Virginia, women do not necessarily practice fidelity and men do not "need" to spread their seed far and wide because of their alleged biological programming. It's a lot more complicated than that.)

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Jesse Wendel is a blogger for Group News Blog