Article translated from hespress.com by Abdelhafid Missouri

Monday August 31st, 2009
Mohamed el-Raji

1- Zainab is lying in bed now in the hospital, alone and in the company of the police officer chosen to watch her. Zainab is not a political prisoner transferred from a prison to a hospital for treatment. She is a little girl of eleven springs. She entered the hospital after escaping the home of the judge she worked for as a maid washing the dishes and clothes and cleaning the walls and the floor of the house. Every day, she covers the distance between the grocer and the home tens of times, takes bread to the baker’s, looks after the familiy’s children, takes the heavy trash-can out early morning whenever she hears the trash-truck blowing its horns. It is most likely that she was wondering through her stumbling steps while opening the door and the stars still twinkling in the sky why children were still sleeping till sun-beams that sneak in through the windows wake them up whereas she has to wake up at the time when the grocer opens his shop [?]
She must have been lamenting her father in silence and wondering when looking out of the home window and watching girls her age on their way to schools why she is not like them. Then when she finds none to answer her innocent, perplexing, and burning questions, she weeps, before people weep with her and share her sadness with her. On that day, she appeared on the television screen explaining the details of a minor part of her bitter suffering in the house whe works at, a house governed by an insensitive judge and a rough wife.

2- Zainab is now lying in the hospital. The severe pain may have receded somewhat from the deep wounds inflicted by iron bars that the judge would place in the flames till they turn red before he strips himself of his human feelings and then places them on the little girls’s body. He then pulls her from her hair and orders her with a rough voice to continue the work she had started in the kitchen. The pain of the wounds will inevitably go. However, there is a deep wound that is hard to easily remove,
that wound that has not developed fully yet
that severe pain will float on Zainab’s spyche when she grows up.

Zainab will be a grown-up someday. She will become a woman. And like other women, she will stand before the mirror to comtemplate her face that was not spared the scars of the hot iron-rods. Not even the most sensisitve of her body were spared. They too were exposed to full disfigurement. That will stand before Zainab as an enormous complex when she thinks of getting married. Zainab does not only need a regular doctor to treat her visible wounds. Rather, she also needs a specialist in cosmetic surgery to restore areas violated by disfigurement. The public hospital where she is currently lying will not provide her with all that. Therefore, it is necessary that charitable people intervene. Zainab will not remain a little child forever. Think about her life when she becomes a woman.

3- In line with that, Zainab is in need of whoever can do her justice or a least a portion of it. Who is that sadist who has turned her life into hell [?!]That one should be punished even if she forgives him and no matter if her father withdraws the complaints he filed agianst him. He must be punished. If that does not happen, Moroccans then should come together, perform the funeral prayer, and read the opening chapter [of the Quran] for the spirit of justice in this holy month.

4- Zainab’s father too has a share in the responsibility. Or at least he should be fully aware that he is accountable to his little girl till she matures, as the law stipulates, or till she moves to her husband’s home [when she gets married], as sharia stipulates. Yet, he sacrificed her and threw her into the hands of two sadist individuals even though she is little and unable even to defend herself. Imagine a little girl taking care to children her age while she too is in need of someone to take care of her [!]

Cursed be poverty. Yet, merely making statements such as this is not sufficient. This does not excuse parents for shirking their responsibilities towards their loved ones. Their children are an immense trust on their necks. Those who are not capable of assuming it had better think a thousands times before having them.