A symbol of hope, even in the dark bestial Islamic world

It's no secret how I feel about Islam – about how it's a misogynist death-cult bent on brainwashing its followers into treating women like cattle and dealing with dissenters by either torture, death, or usually both, for example – but even the darkest corners of the world and its numerous faiths can have a ray of light shine through now and then. Right now, its source is Mrs. Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman who recently married in a brave and stunning move that defeated numerous stigmas and prejudices.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Ms. Mukhtar, 37, said her new husband is a police constable who was assigned to guard her in the wake of the attack and who has been asking for her hand for several years. She is his second wife.

She said the constable, Nasir Abbas Gabol, 30, and she married Sunday in a simple ceremony in her dusty farming village, Meerwala, in the southern part of Punjab Province.

“He says he madly fell in love with me,” Ms. Mukhtar said with a big laugh when asked what finally persuaded her to say yes.

I personally don't have much of an issue with polygamy in itself. The problem is that usually, men who form a "harem" of wives tend to treat them like disposable objects of pleasures, or even burdens, but if it's all in an atmosphere of love, I'm all for it.

But, how exactly is marrying for this woman "defeating stigmas"? The story behind it is shocking, disgusting, and very sadly, not unique. Mrs. Amai was gang-raped on a village's orders in 2002, as retribution to the charges laid on her brother claiming he had "illicit relations" with a woman from a rival clan. This was actually a cover-up; it's the brother himself who had been molested by three of the rival clan's tribesmen.

There is so much that is horrifyingly, disgustingly wrong with the above paragraph I wouldn't even know where to start. A village council sentencing an innocent woman to be gang-raped, as punishment for crimes her brother didn't even commit?

How can we call them "humans"? Why not "demented, retarded beasts"?

All I can say is it doesn't really surprise me these 'people' live in rival clans like the retarded fucking gang-raping child-molesting animals they are. Seriously, this is so incredible I can't even begin to describe it, so in my current state of disbelief, I'll just move on.

Anyway ... So what exactly has Mrs. Amai's marriage got to do with defeating a stigma? It turns out that in her retarded culture, it's quite common, even expected, of women who underwent rape, thereby being "impure" in the eyes of Islam, to take their own lives. Mrs. Amai instead expressed her love and married – the equivalent of a gutter-living drug addict becoming a CEO for a pharmaceutical company or something here in North America in terms of social stigmas and expectations of a person's role(s).

Anyway, I suppose what's in the past is in the past. As of now, Mrs. Amai is very happily wed, even forcing her husband, Mr. Gabol, to lease his ancestral home to his first wife and such. Not many Western-culture husbands would have agreed to that, so if this Mr. Gabol did, all the better for all of them. :) Even the worst of stories can have a happy ending, after all. "Just keep living".