WASHINGTON: Pakistani-American entrepreneur Muzzammil Hassan founded Bridges TV in New York in 2004 to counter stereotyping of Muslims. On Thursday, he walked into a police station and reportedly told them he had beheaded his wife.
Hassan, 44, was charged with second-degree murder after police found the decapitated body of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, 37, at the Bridges TV station in a Buffalo suburb. Although the incident happened last Thursday, it hit the mainstream media only this week because of the extensive coverage of the air crash in Buffalo at the same time.
But details that began to trickle out on Monday shocked the local community in Buffalo, the sizable Pakistani immigrant community in New York and the US, and rights groups across the spectrum, coming amid growing concern over a prospective Taliban takeover of Pakistan.
According to initial accounts, Aasiya had filed for divorce on January 6 and had an order of protection mandating that he leave their home as of February 6 following bouts of domestic violence. The couple had been married eight years and has two children. Hassan, who came to the US in 1979, has been married twice before and has two other teenage children.
On Thursday, she placed a call to her sister Asma Firfirey in Cape Town, South Africa, even as she was in another confrontation with her husband, to enable her overhear their exchanges. At some point on Thursday afternoon, Hassan decapitated Aasiya.
Police are yet to find the murder weapon. The incident has kicked off a stormy debate about what role religion played in the brutal slaying. Some American rights activists and commentators have termed it an ''honour killing'' and blamed extremist interpretations of Islam for the beheading. Muslim activists are urging against applying cultural and religious stereotypes in what they say is an extreme case of domestic violence.
On Tuesday, the local Buffalo News, in a story headlined ''Muslim influence speculated in slaying,'' reported a prominent New York women's rights activist as saying, the slaying was ''a terroristic version of honour killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women's subordination to men.''
''Too many Muslim men are using their religious beliefs to justify violence against women,'' said Marcia Pappas, New York State president of the National Organization for Women, adding that while domestic violence affects all cultures, Muslim women find it harder to break the silence about it because of a stigma.
Muslim activists though condemned what one academic called ''exploitation of her (Aasiya's) death by others with an agenda of vilifying Islam and demonizing Muslims.'' After a story in the Toronto Star that reported the slaying with a reference to Sharia law, Aliya Khan, a professor of clinical medicine at McMaster University, wrote to the paper expressing outrage that the article jumped from ''describing the tragic murder to attacking Sharia law, as though it could somehow be blamed for a totally unrelated incident.''
But the looming shadow of the Taliban over Pakistan and Islamabad's capitulation to extremists in enforcing Sharia law in Swat has not brought any comfort to overseas Pakistanis. There have also been at least three other incident in US and Canada involving honour killings.
On Tuesday, the New York Times ran a story about the Taliban threat reaching across oceans and into New York City. Several Pakistani immigrants from Swat region spoke of how Taliban terrorists were extracting ransom from them (during visits their home visits) and their family members who are kidnapped in Pakistan. In some instances, the Taliban was also calling them in the United States.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges