She pleaded with her husband not to beat her, but he punched her in the face. "I'm not going to beat you, I am going to kill you," he said. Then he began to smash her head, face down, against the floor, while a servant and their 5-year-old son watched. At the same time he was also throttling her, releasing his grip momentarily to demand that she repeat the Shahadah testimony of faith -- which Islam requires a dying person to recite -- three times: "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger." Baz obediently spoke her lines until she lost consciousness.
Fallatta [the husband] then showered, changed his clothes and put what he thought was his wife's dead body into their car, driving off with the apparent intent of burying her. But as she regained partial consciousness, he panicked and dropped her off at Bugshan hospital, saying she had been involved in a car crash and that he had to hurry back to the scene to try to rescue others involved.
During the days in which Baz was in a coma, fighting for her life, her father took photographs of her grotesquely disfigured face. And after she recovered, she decided to permit the photographs to be published, thus doing what no woman in the kingdom had ever done. Of course, there was nothing particularly unusual about her bruises: Baz was a victim of one of the world's most common, and least punished, crimes. But in Saudi Arabia especially, Baz had shattered a wall of silence about domestic violence. The images of her grotesquely bruised and swollen face sent shockwaves through her country and around the world, casting an unwelcome but glaring spotlight on the abuse of women that thrives behind the mask of Saudi religious dogmatism. Baz would also go on to divorce her husband -- almost unheard of in Saudi Arabia, where divorce is invariably the other way around -- and win custody of her children, again in defiance of precedent.
After 12 operations, Baz has recovered her beauty -- if anything, the few scars that remain are cogent, rather than disfiguring. She sips a glass of St. Emilion and emphasizes that she is a devout Muslim. "But I do not think about who is Muslim or who is Christian -- we all come from God," she says. "None of this is about a religion; it is about society. What happened to me happens to women all over the world. But you can take what happens to women all over the world, and in Saudi Arabia, multiply it by 10.
With a nod to Jill from Feministe, who writes,
This is what bravery looks like.She's right.
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