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:
“Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.”
—W.E. (William Ewart)
“Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being, as if he had drunk some powerful drug. He had been feeling weak and done before. Now the life came back into him, he felt delivered from his own fretted, daily self.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)