FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — When she was 7 years old, Rahila Muhibi was engaged to her 8-year-old first cousin. The betrothal was arranged, in the Afghan custom, by her father.
When Muhibi was ready for high school, her father fended off relatives who demanded that the marriage take place. He thought she was too young, and instead helped her win a scholarship to attend school in Canada.
Last month, Muhibi, 24, graduated from tiny Methodist University here. Her father now says the time has come for Muhibi to return to Afghanistan and marry her cousin.
She has refused, setting up a test of wills with her father and a challenge to the societal customs that require women to be obedient daughters and wives.
Muhibi wants to go to graduate school in the West and continue running a small nonprofit literacy program she founded for Afghan women. But for the program to flourish -- and for Muhibi to reconnect with a family she misses terribly -- she must return home.
"It's hard for me to say no because my father has helped me so much," Muhibi said, speaking flawless English while chatting with fellow students on campus. "But I refuse to be submissive."
Muhibi said she didn't care for her cousin when they were children growing up together in a village in northeastern Afghanistan. She cares for him even less now, she said, calling him "my supposed fiance."
She has told him more than once that she has no intention of marrying him. When he telephoned her to congratulate her the day she graduated, she drove home the point.
"I told him to find someone else," she said. "I said I didn't want him blaming me for making him wait. He treated it like a joke. He said he didn't believe I would really say no because it would bring such dishonor."
Muhibi's father, Abdul Ghaffer, is 63 -- a tall, bony white-haired man. (Some Afghans choose surnames from other family members. Muhibi's father chose his grandfather's surname; she chose her grandfather's.)
A retired government clerk, he and his family rent a simple mud brick house on a rutted side street in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is proud of his daughter's educational accomplishments, he said, despite the criticism he has endured from friends and relatives over allowing her to attend school overseas. But now that Muhibi's education has been completed, he said, she must honor her obligations.
"If my daughter does not accept my idea, well, of course I will lose respect among my relatives," he said over black tea and chocolates in his tiny mehman khana, or reception room. "But I don't think my daughter would do anything against our culture."
Certain family obligations cannot be refused, he said. He pointed out that his son and a nephew are married to sisters of Muhibi's betrothed cousin.
"This is not just a problem for me if my daughter does not marry, but it would be a problem for the rest of the family too," Ghaffer said.
An Afghan woman who refuses an arranged marriage can bring dishonor to her family, and the act may result in banishment from the home. In some cases, reluctant brides have run away, been jailed or committed suicide.
Ghaffer said he considered the groom-to-be, the son of a herder, a fine catch. Now 25, he graduated from Kabul University last year and works for a cellphone company.
Ghaffer himself entered into an arranged marriage when his wife -- Muhibi's mother -- was 11. She too has urged Muhibi to submit to the marriage. "My mother told me: You should listen to your dad," Muhibi said.
With degrees in global studies and political science from Methodist University, she is almost certainly the best-educated woman in her Nikpai tribe. After so many years in the West, Muhibi cannot abide by the old, restrictive ways of her culture, she said.
Even when she lived in Afghanistan, she did not wear a burka as her mother and sisters do. When she was 12, she said, she broke a cultural taboo by sitting with Afghan men to talk politics, encouraged by her father.
Inside the student union building, Muhibi looked at home: Dressed in a white blouse and black slacks, she joked and giggled with several female friends and casually greeted the male students who stopped by to chat.
Muhibi said she received a full scholarship to Methodist after an official from the university visited her high school in British Columbia.
While in college, she obtained a $10,000 grant from the Davis Projects for Peace foundation to start a summer program that in 2007 brought students from Kabul to visit young people in the village where she grew up. They all attended classes under a tree because the village had no school.
She then raised $8,000 in a single night, selling home-cooked Afghan meals to American donors. She used the money to create the 100 Mothers Literacy Program to help educate women in her village.
At first, there was resistance in Afghanistan, she said -- from village elders and the women themselves. The women said they were too old to learn and preferred that the money be used to build toilets.
