Zana Muhsen

Zana Muhsen (born 1965) is a British author who has written about the experiences that she and her sister, Nadia (born 1966), went through when they were sent from their birthplace in Birmingham, England to Yemen in 1980 on a purported holiday to meet the paternal side of their family, but sold unaware into marriage in by their father, Muthanna Muhsen, a Yemeni émigré.^[1][2]

Overview

Although Zana asserts that she and her sister had no idea what would happen to them when they travelled to North Yemen, Nadia says that her father showed her a photograph of her future husband, Mohammed, in the UK, and that she knew she was going to be married.^[1]

On their arrival in Maqbanah, a remote area, they were each forced to marry teenage sons of their father's friends. Zana lived in a town called Hockail and Nadia lived in Ashube. Their mother, Miriam Ali, an English woman, appealed unsuccessfully to the Foreign Office for assistance, but was told that the Yemeni government had stated that as they were now married to Yemeni men, they could only leave the country with their husbands' permission.^[1][3]

In 1987, an Observer journalist, Eileen McDonald, visited the girls and wrote a series of articles portraying the Muhsens as cruelly-treated slaves. The girls begged McDonald, and her male photographer, to help them leave the country, and the media coverage provoked an outcry in the UK.^[1][2] This led to the Yemeni government giving the Muhsens permission to leave the country in 1988, but forbade them from taking their children (Zana had one child, Marcus,and Nadia five, Hassan and Tina are two of them).^[1][3]

Zana Muhsen remained in England and in 1992, wrote Sold: Story of Modern-day Slavery with the ghostwriter Andrew Crofts, describing her experiences.^[4] It became an international bestseller and was dramatised by BBC Radio 4.^[5] The picture of a veiled woman on the cover of Sold is Nadia Muhsen. In 2001, Zana Muhsen and Crofts wrote a follow-up, A Promise to Nadia - the true story of a British slave. Nadia Muhsen gave an interview to Melanie Finn, a journalist for The Guardian, in 2002 in which she stated that she was happy with her life, saying, "It was never in my mind that I wanted to leave. It's just my sister, she wasn't comfortable."^[1]

Further reading

• Muhsen, Zana (1994). Sold: Story of Modern-day Slavery. Time-Warner Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0751509519
• Muhsen, Zana (2000). A Promise to Nadia'. Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0316852302
• de Hart, Betty (2001). "Not Without My Daughter: On Parental Abduction, Orientalism and Maternal Melodrama". European Journal of Women's Studies 8:51-65.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Finn, Melanie (2002-04-01). "Nadia's choice". The Guardian (Guardian Newspapers). http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4385270,00.html. Retrieved 2007-09-21. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Ware, Vron (December 1992). "Moments of Danger: Race, Gender, and Memories of Empire". History and Theory (History and Theory, Vol. 31, No. 4) 31 (4): 116–137. doi:10.2307/2505418. JSTOR 2505418. 
3. ^ ^{a b} "Nadia Muhsin : The Mystery Unveiled". Yemen Times. 200-01-31. Archived from the original on 2008-01-09. http://web.archive.org/web/20080109145413/http://yementimes.com/00/iss05/front.htm. Retrieved 2007-09-21. 
4. ^ Walker, Duncan (2004-05-21). "I'm a celebrity, get me a ghost writer". BBC News Magazine (BBC). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3757275.stm. Retrieved 2007-09-21. 
5. ^ Crofts, Andrew. "Sold". http://www.andrewcrofts.com/sold.html. Retrieved 2007-09-21. 

Persondata
Name	Muhsen, Sana
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Date of birth	1965
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