IN the beginning it was a tale of unrequited love. The year was 2004 and Ameneh Bahrami was a beautiful 24-year-old working at a laboratory in Tehran and also taking classes at university.

In pictures from the time, she smiles widely, beaming at the camera with youthful confidence. She received many marriage proposals, some even from teachers at the university.

One such proposal came from a man called Majid Mohavedi, whom Bahrami had never met. Mohavedi’s mother called the Bahrami house and asked for her hand in marriage. The young woman refused the proposal and this was conveyed to the Mohavedi family. The next day, Mohavedi tracked down Bahrami at the university, where they were both students. The two got into a heated argument, and Bahrami insists that at that point she still did not even know her stalker’s name. Subsequently, Mohavedi’s mother continued to call the Bahrami home with a series of escalating threats. In one phone call she told Ms. Bahrami that “her son was a man and if he wanted to have her, he would have her.”

Soon Mohavedi himself began to call the Bahrami house with his own threats. In his first call he threatened to kill her. Then his threats became more pronounced. “I am going to do something to destroy your life so that no one will marry you,” he said. Two days passed. As Bahrami was leaving her workplace on the third, she sensed that someone was following her. She stopped in the lane so that her pursuer would pass by. By the time she realised it was Mohavedi, it was too late to save herself. She felt a liquid splash against her face; it felt like hot water. When the burning started she knew it was acid. She was afraid to touch her face because she could feel her flesh dissolving.

By the time Bahrami was taken to the hospital, she had lost sight in her left eye. A week later, she lost sight in her other eye as well. Her mother would not let her look in the mirror. She knew her daughter would not be able to bear the grotesque image that would confront her.

Soon after the attack, then Iranian president Khatami sent Bahrami abroad for treatment. This support was withdrawn in 2005, when president Ahmadinejad came to power. Bahrami, who had been able to regain sight in one eye, was forced to return to Iran and live in a shelter. There she developed an eye infection and once again lost her sight.

In 2007, she went to the court and asked for revenge under the Qisas and Diyat law. She said she wanted to do to Mohavedi the same thing that he had done to her. The court told her to just ask for a hanging, saying that it would be much easier for them to do. Bahrami refused.

In 2008, the Iranian court rendered its judgment. It ruled that the then-27-year-old Majid Mohavedi should also be blinded with acid, forced to pay compensation, and also serve a jail term. After the judgment, however, the Iranian authorities delayed enactment of the punishment, using various administrative delays to avoid the blinding by acid that the court had ordered. Finally, the date of punishment was set for May 14, 2011. On this day, Bahrami went to the hospital where the punishment would be carried out. However, at the last minute the procedure was postponed again when hospital officials said they could not find a doctor to administer the procedure.

Under Iranian law, Bahrami had been given the right to carry out the punishment on her perpetrator, the man who had disfigured her for life and left her blind and struggling. On July 31, 2011, however, hours before the punishment was again to be carried out, Bahrami forgave the man who had changed her life forever. In the words quoted by the Iranian news agency, “For seven years I’ve been trying to pursue retribution and to prove that the punishment for an acid attack is retribution but today I decided to pardon him. This was my right but in future the next victim might not do the same.” The prosecutor general of Tehran declared that her act of forgiveness was “a courageous act.”

In the weeks to come, the Supreme Court of Pakistan is set to reconsider the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance of 1990. As Bahrami’s case illustrates, a number of complex and vexing issues are implicated in determining the breadth of the law’s application and enforcement. In the case of Bahrami, the Iranian court found a way to allow the wronged victim to enact what would undoubtedly have been a cruel punishment. Bahrami’s insistence on bringing the case, and her refusal to settle for monetary compensation for years as the case languished, could also be interpreted as a feminist subversion. Here was a woman insisting that a man who had wronged her be made to suffer just as she had, using Islamic injunctions to make her case. On the other side, sceptics could similarly allege the possibility of yet another woman cornered into ‘forgiving’ her assailant.

In this last sense then, it is not the issue of revenge or even justice that is the most complex aspect of enforcing Qisas and Diyat laws, but the issue of forgiveness. While compensation amounts can be debated and tabulated into forms of equity, other aspects of inequality cannot. Women have less power than men, and the poor less than the rich.

Given these details of reality, can the forgiveness of the weak be given as freely as those of the strong? In the case of Bahrami, her words were all that was available to make that judgment; she said that she was “happy” to have pardoned him.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com