Life
In July 1995, Ahmed arranged for the 15-year old Zaynab to marry an Egyptian man named Khalid Abdullah in December, and Maha began preparing an apartment for the couple in the family's house.
On November 19 Ayman al-Zawahiri bombed the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan, and Zaynab's fiancé went into hiding, named as one of the conspirators. When police arrived to arrest her father on suspicion of involvement eight days later, Zaynab took her father's rifle and held it over her head screaming, while her mother barricaded the door.
Zaynab recalled celebrating the engagement of Umayma al-Zawahiri at her family's house for an all-day party, and her father Ayman al-Zawahiri knocking softly at Umayma's door asking the two girls to please keep their singing and partying quiet as it was nighttime.
Her fiancé re-surfaced in Tehran in October 1997, and contacted the family to try to re-schedule the wedding he had missed. Ahmed agreed to bring his family on a long vacation culminating in the city for a farewell to the reluctant Zaynab as she started a new life with Abdullah.
Six months after the couple began living in a rented Tehran apartment, Abdullah phoned his father-in-law to report that Zaynab was inconsolable at being separated from her family, and the marriage was not working out. She returned to live with her family.
Read more about this topic: Zaynab Khadr
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The anti-suffragist talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is a lot of cant. I have no patience with it. These storms beat on woman just as fiercely as they do on man, and she is not trained to defend herself against them.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“A moment that gave not only itself, but
Also the means of keeping it, of not turning to dust
Or gestures somewhere up ahead
But of becoming complicated like the torrent
In new dark passages, tears and laughter which
Are a sign of life, of distant life in this case.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)