It was a seemingly ordinary night three years ago when Zahida Parveen, then 30, was asleep in a room with her two small children. Her family was poor, but she was happy with her life with Mehmood Iqbal, her husband of four years. All that changed in an instant when she was forced out of bed, viciously attacked and left for dead, her face mutilated beyond recognition. Her attacker: her 35 -year-old husband, who did it because he was convinced his wife was having an affair.

As awful as this incident sounds, it's even worse when you consider that it's not uncommon. Parveen lives in Pakistan, a country where such attacks on women - known as honor violence - take place too often. There's a saying in Pakistan that honor is like a person's nose. "If a person dishonors you, they say that person has cut off your nose," explains Riffat Hassan, Ph.D., a Pakistani-born Islamic theologian who teaches at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "It's a metaphor, but in Pakistan people actually do it," Parveen is living proof of that. Today, with her husband n jail in Pakistan, Parveen agreed to give Glamour an exclusive interview and retell her tragic tale.

An Attack with no warning

Recuperating from her reconstructive surgery, Parveen sits curled up on a leather chair in the suburban Maryland home of Nasim Ashraf, M.D., the kidney specialist and Pakistani expatriate who arranged for Parveen to have her face reconstructed. Shakir, Parveen's younger brother, is perched protectively beside her.

Parveen looks like a child. At just 4'11", her 78-pound frame practically disappears beneath her black floral shalwar kameez, the billowy pants and ankle-length dress that is Pakistan's national dress. A black-and-white-checked scarf is wrapped loosely around her head, and every so often it slips down to reveal the wavy black hair covering the severed lobes that were once ears. Her prosthetic eyes are just a week old, the two brown-pupiled glass globes held tentatively in place by a few thin strips of surgical tape affixed to the outer lids. A gauze pad is taped to the bridge of what was once her nose, now a gnarled mass of scar tissue marked by two jagged holes.

Aseela Ashraf, Dr. Ashraf's wife, arrives and pat Parveen gently on her bony back before sitting down. The two women have become close and Parveen now has two people she trusts to translate and fill in details that are too painful for her to talk about.

Parveen's first arranged marriage took place when she was about 16, which is common in Pakistan. Luckily, Parveen liked her firs husband. "We had a very good time together," she says. "He was a decent person." But it took many frustrating years of trying before she became pregnant. "When I found out I was with child, I was so happy. Then my husband died of a heart attack before our son was born," she remembers matter-of-factly, as if tragedy is an accepted fact of her life.

Parveen moved back in with her mother to deliver the child. At first, she didn't want to remarry. But soon, a local matchmaker approached Parveen's family about Mehmood Iqbal, a barber living in a nearby village. "I was excited t meet him," Parveen says, shrugging her tiny shoulders. She married him, taking her one-year-old son to live with her new husband, and three years later, she gave birth to a daughter. My husband was fine the first four years of our marriage, " Parveen insists. "If there was something wrong with him, I would not have stayed." The one thing that struck her was that Iqbal was unusually quiet. "He would only sit and listen," she recalls, as if that might explain why he came undone. But when asked why she thought her husband went on to commit such a heinous act, Parveen answers, "It was the devil."

Actually, honor killings are part of the fabric of Pakistani married life. "Once a woman is married, it's culturally believed that she belongs to her husband and is supposed to be obedient - her behavior reflects on him," explains Sheila Dauer, director of Amnesty International USA's Women's Human Rights Program. Though honor violence takes place in other predominantly Islamic countries - including Jordan, Egypt and Turkey - Pakistan has received the most attention for these crimes. More than 850 women in Punjab ( a Pakistani region) were victims of honor killings in 1998 and 1999 alone, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Amnesty International estimates that many more cases go unreported. Honor violence comes in many forms: Women have been shot, burned, strangled and mutilated with razors, axes and knives. The causes vary as well, from having affairs to asking for a divorce to talking to a man who's not a family member.

to be continued>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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