The couple have found out they are actually siblings
A husband and wife have been horrified after discovering they are actually brother and sister after 24 long years. A Pakistani couple united in an arranged marriage over 24 years ago recently learnt that they were in fact of the same parents, SMACK reports.
The siblings, who were separated as children after the tragic death
of their parents, were later adopted by different families until they
later married each other.
It took about 24 years for them to realise the truth.
“We thought our marriage was normal, we thought we were cousins” explained Abdul Rahim, 47.
“Everybody in town knew we were brother and sister but no one had the courage to tell us until now,” said the sister turned wife, Aisha, in tears.
Anthropologist Juliane Edwards, who has studied the case of
incestuous arranged marriages in Pakistan for decades is not surprised
the least by the situation.
“It’s a cultural thing. When endogamous consanguineous
marriages, or marriages between cousins, is socially acceptable, then
marriage between siblings doesn’t seem as far-fetched,” she explained.
“I’ve repeatedly studied cases in Pakistan where widowed fathers would marry one or more of their daughters,” she admitted.
“I’ve heard of one case where one man’s daughter was allegedly
very ugly and could not find a husband, so he forced his son to marry
his own sister as a punishment for being lazy,” she recalls.
Last year, a Pakistani Federal Shariat Court judge made
international headlines after refusing to allow a woman to divorce her
brother from an arranged marriage stating that being siblings “was not enough of a justification” to obtain court approval for divorce under Sharia law.
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