The household was fast asleep when the six men broke in. They sought out Sobia Batool Shah, 22, and one of them attacked her with a hatchet, chopping at her limbs in an effort to sever her legs. “He was relentless and must have hit me at least 15 times,” she says.
“I screamed in pain and pleaded with him to stop, but he was like a man possessed,” she adds. “I even told him I will not seek a divorce.”
Shah was attacked by men from her own family – including her father, Syed Mustafa Shah, her uncle and cousins – who broke into the house, in Naushahro Feroze, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, as “punishment” for refusing to withdraw her application to divorce her husband.
Speaking to the Guardian by phone from the Peoples University of Medical and Health Sciences for Women, in the city of Nawabshah, where she is being treated, Shah says she is in “immense pain” and her legs are both in plaster.
Plenty of religious people are non-violent and plenty of non-religious people are. It is indeed one of the easiest routes to radicalise someone to do awful things but also not the only one.
I’m not disagreeing, it’s just that when there’s one thing common among a huge percentage of violent people, maybe you should look into it.
And religion and especially islam is there way too often. If it was up to me, I’d ban all organized religion, starting with islam and christianity following shortly after.