Yasmin Javed shows the camera childhood photos of her daughter Fawziyah, ranging from a beautiful baby to a toddler who can’t sit still to a grinning child with big sparkling eyes. “I’m sorry,” Yasmin says as she gathers them up. “I can’t do any more.” Fawziyah, an only child, grew up, achieved her dream of becoming a lawyer — graduation photos are included — and died two years ago at age 31, 17 weeks pregnant with her first child. “The life I had is gone, it’s over,” says Yasmin, whose face and body seem carved with grief. More than the photographs, footage of family holidays, or glittering selfies with friends and family, Yasmin’s painful silence shows the extent of the loss.
The Push tells Fawziyah’s story as she covers the trial of the man accused of pushing her to her death from the rocky peak of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh: her husband, Kashif Anwar. The film’s interviewer asks Yasmin, “What goes through your mind as the trial begins?” he asks. “I hate it,” says Yasmin, without getting angry at all. “Hate towards him.”
The trials are filmed in Scotland and we watch as prosecutor Alex Prentice builds a picture of the relationship between Kashif and Fawziyah; This picture is supported for the viewer by the sensitively woven contributions of his mother, uncles and friends. His uncle Shahid never liked his arrogance and did not think he was good enough for his beloved nephew (“But he had made his choice and I had to accept it”). Her lawyer friend Ingrid was disturbed by how many photos Fawziyah took and sent back to her husband while they were out, as if to prove where she was and who she was with. The first time Yasmin realized something was wrong was when Fawziyah reminded Kashif to put on his seat belt, and Kashif angrily attacked her.
The court heard recordings of phone calls between the couple when Fawziyah was staying with her parents during Ramadan and Kashif asked her to come home. “Who do you think you are?” she says. “You are a disease in everyone’s life. The sooner you die or get out of my life, the better.” If he had been willing to let her go, the story could have ended there; It was a sad time for the woman and her family, but one they could get through, she survived.
During the searches, Kashif had persuaded Fawziyah to leave social media, blocked male members of the family on her phone and transferred £12,000 from her bank account to his own. Shortly after the searches, Yasmin sat with her daughter as Fawziyah reported her husband to the police for punching a pillow, while her husband told her that he would never leave her, that he would finish her off, that he would destroy her. The defense states as best it can that the woman asked the police to record the incident and returned to her husband.
Calling this a classic example of coercive control fails to capture its slowly enveloping nature. It is the normalization of extraordinary horrors, the distorted effects of growing fear, that characterize it and give it a strange ineffability. Fawziyah was hospitalized early in her pregnancy and cries in the dock as a witness testifies about a visit where Kashif told his “whore” wife he hoped she would die in childbirth and accused her of “bringing out this side of him”. ”.
When Fawziyah fell from the top of the cliff – the defendant insists she slipped – Kashif called her father instead to 999. He told a hiker further down the hill that his phone had been cut off and asked him to call an ambulance. She told the first two people who found her conscious that her husband had pushed her. The defense attorney says this was his misinterpretation that she was trying to save him as he slipped.
The trial centers on whether Kashif’s conduct was sufficient evidence to convince a jury, in the absence of any witnesses, that Fawziyah’s claim was true. The tension as the verdict awaits creates an exaggerated version of the question that permeates the entire film: How does the family endure so much pain? How do the families of two women murdered by their partners at a weekly rate in the UK alone endure so much pain? So what about the countless women who are now secretly subjected to domestic violence?
It is justice that Kashif is found guilty and sentenced to at least 20 years in prison. Kashif’s father says he still hasn’t received the £6,000 engagement ring Fawziyah paid to get it back from the police.
The program makes a point of including a scene in the family’s mosque where the imam (I think) makes it clear that domestic violence has no place in Islam and divorce has no place. But every woman watching, and every sane man, knows that what is happening here, across the country, around the world, and throughout history has nothing to do with religion. This is a much deeper and much older impulse at work.