Coerced Conversions

The Dawn, Pakistan
Review

February 5, 2006

By Zofeen Ebrahim

Human rights activists say that the converted girls have been victimized threefold: they are poor, belong to a minority community, and are women, reports Zofeen Ebrahim

When Pakistani cricketer Yousuf Youhana, the only Christian in the national team, announced that he had embraced Islam to become Mohammad Yousuf last September, the conversion hit the headlines everywhere.

But the conversion of three Hindu girls, a few weeks later, went almost unnoticed in the media. There was little concern that the girls, Reena (21), Aishwariya (19), and Reema (17), from a lower middle-class family in Karachi’s Punjab Colony, had run away from home to become Muslims.

Their father Sanao Menghwar and mother Champa, who searched for them for two weeks, said they tried to lodge a complaint at the local police station but were not allowed to do so.

The police finally registered a complaint on October 22 on the intervention of a deputy superintendent of police. Three Muslim youths, identified as suspects by Menghwar, were apprehended, but later released on bail when the girls testified that they had only helped them convert.

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