Over the fall of 2007, Aqsa Parvez shuttled between friends’ houses and youth shelters. She was afraid to go home. Her father, Muhammad, was enraged because she refused to obey his rules. He swore he would kill her.

On the morning of December 10, Aqsa huddled in a Missis­sauga bus shelter with another Grade 11 student, a girl she had been staying with for the past couple of days. They had plenty of time to make it to their first class at Apple­wood Heights Secondary School. As they waited, Aqsa’s 26-year-old brother Waqas, a tow-truck driver, showed up at the bus stop. He said that she should come home and get a fresh change of clothes if she was going to be staying elsewhere. Aqsa hesitated, then got into his car.

Less than an hour later, Muhammad Parvez phoned 911 and told the dispatcher that he had killed his daughter. Within minutes, police and paramedics arrived at 5363 Longhorn Trail, a winding suburban street near Eglinton and Hurontario, and found Aqsa unconscious in her bedroom. The 16-year-old wasn’t breathing. The para­medics started CPR, found a faint pulse, and rushed her to Credit Valley Hospital, 10 minutes west. A few hours later, she was transferred to SickKids and put on life support. She died just after 10 that evening. The official cause was “neck compression”—strangulation.

In the days following her death, Aqsa’s story was widely reported in the Canadian media as well as on CNN and the BBC. Was her murder an honour killing or simply a gruesome case of domestic violence? Worldwide, an estimated 5,000 women die every year in honour killings—murders deemed excusable to protect a family’s reputation—many of them in Pakistan, where the Parvez family had emigrated from.

Canada prides itself on its multiculturalism and, to varying degrees of success, condemns institutionalized patriarchy. But there is growing concern that recent waves of Muslim immigrants aren’t integrating, or embracing our liberal values. Aqsa’s death—coming in the wake of debates about the acceptability of sharia law, disputes over young girls wearing hijabs at soccer games, and the arrest of the Toronto 18—stoked fears about religious zealotry in our midst. Is it possible that Toronto has become too tolerant of cultural differences?

When police arrived in answer to his 911 call, Aqsa’s father, who worked as a cab driver, was arrested and charged with second degree murder. Waqas was charged with obstruction. The charges against both men were changed to first degree murder in June, after police decided her death was a planned and deliberate act.

The Parvez men are being held in a cellblock at Maple­hurst Deten­tion Centre in Milton. They will be tried together at the Brampton courthouse sometime next year. If convicted, they face automatic life sentences without the possibility of parole for 25 years. Aqsa’s mother and the rest of the Parvez family will likely be called as material witnesses.

At the southern end of Hurontario Street, Mississauga’s main drag, there’s a stretch of squat, low-income housing where many new Muslim immigrants settle. As you drive north, you see stores offering halal meat, instant passport photos, Thai food and Pakistani takeout. Dental and legal clinics advertise in Perso-Arabic script. By the time you hit Burnhamthorpe Road, the strip malls have been replaced by green glass condos and ele­gant medical clinics. East and west of Hurontario are expensive subdivisions with garage-fronted homes, most of them less than a decade old. This is where the Parvez family lived.

Mississauga’s population has tripled in the past 30 years. Today, there are more than 700,000 people living in the country’s sixth largest city, and half of them are visible minorities. South Asians outnumber the second largest visible minority by almost three to one. They form what StatsCan calls an “ethnic enclave.” Slightly more than half of all minority households don’t speak English at home. The city’s planners expect these numbers to rise steadily over the next two decades.

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