The Runaway Bride
	Caught between cultures, the children of immigrants often face stark choices between traditional and modern values. Usually, a fragile balance is achieved. But in the most wrenching cases, the scales can tip wildly, and sometimes violently. In this special report, TIME explores two issues — forced marriage and female circumcision — that are among the most divisive and controversial of Europe's cultural fissures
	By AISHA LABI | Bradford

Posted Sunday, Month XX, 2003; 00:00 GMT

	NIGEL HILLIER/UINITED NATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHERS FOR TIME Noor, born and raised in Britain, was forced last year to a marry a distant cousin she 'd never met, and then taken to the Netherlands

Noor Khan awoke one morning last September to a knock on her bedroom door. Several people, most of them strangers, stood clustered outside. It was Noor's wedding day, and she was the last to know.

A relative visiting from Amsterdam pushed forward in introduction her son, a pleasant-faced young man named Munir (like Noor's, his and other names have been changed to protect Noor's identity). This was Noor's husband-to-be. Noor's brother Ali embraced her, squeezing so tightly it hurt. "Don't embarrass me," he whispered. But when Noor, then 17, objected, he exploded. "I'll kill you. I'll do it right now, I don't care," Noor says he shouted. Munir and his companions went downstairs and Noor began sobbing uncontrollably.

Munir's mother handed Noor a beaded red salwar kameez — the tuniclike top and leggings worn by women in northern India and Pakistan. "Put this on," she instructed. Faced with Noor's unrelenting tears, she tried to reassure her, promising that her son would make a good husband. But when Ali returned a short while later, the outfit still lay beside Noor on the bed. He threatened to kill her if she didn't change within five minutes. "I was so frightened," she says, "I just did it."

The nikah, the contractual part of a Muslim wedding ceremony when the bride and groom agree to the marriage, took place in Noor's bedroom. An imam came to oversee the proceedings, but Noor refused to answer him when he asked for a second time if she consented. A third failure to do so would stop the proceedings, so Ali took her aside and repeated his threat. Noor appealed to her father, who had just returned from one of his frequent visits to Pakistan, but he did nothing. Her body heaving with sobs, Noor quietly said yes. "Congratulations," the imam said. "You're married!"

Arranged marriages are not uncommon in immigrant communities across Europe. They are rituals faithfully carried over into a new, Westernized lifestyle, sometimes generations after immigration. Defenders of the practice argue that the resulting matches are often more successful than self-made marriages. But every year, hundreds of arrangements deteriorate into forced marriages, founded on emotional or physical coercion. It is an intensely private battle, an extreme manifestation of a complicated culture clash — religious vs. secular, old vs. new, East vs. West — that occurs in smaller ways all over Europe every day.

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