I was fooled, shown wrong photo, cheated: Shoaib Malik

Hyderabad: I want to clarify a few wrongly reported facts about me in some sections of the media, newspapers and television channels in India and Pakistan. I want to make my position clear especially because I am to wed Sania Mirza in the near future.

Ayesha first started calling me on the telephone when I was in Sharjah with the Pakistani cricket team in 2001. She said she was living in Saudi Arabia. Every time I brought up the topic of meeting her, she would send me a bunch of photographs. The truth is, I haven’t to this day met the girl in the photographs.
In 2002, I came to Hyderabad specifically to meet Ayesha. Just before I left Pakistan, she told me she had to rush to Saudi Arabia on urgent work and her cousins — Reema and Maha apa (meaning older sister) — would take me around. I asked her family where she was and they said that in the last year she had put on a lot of weight because of which she did not want to meet me until she could shed some of that. I told them I had photographs of her and that she wasn’t fat, but they told me those were older photographs.

Ayesha wanted us to get married. In 2002, she told me that people in Hyderabad were talking about our relationship and it was putting her parents in an embarrassing position. She wanted us to have a telephone nikah to stop the talk. I was only 20 then. There was a lot of pressure. I called her from a friend’s shop in 2002. I got a nikahnama signed thinking the girl I was marrying was the one in the photographs.

A year or so later, I travelled to Hyderabad in the hope of meeting
her, but once again it was the same story.

In 2004, my brother-in-law travelled to Hyderabad to meet Ayesha and her family and again the same story was repeated. Later that year, I was in Hyderabad with the Pakistani cricket team. Mr MA Siddiqui invited the team to his house for dinner. I was hoping to meet Ayesha, but the same story was told to me.

In a practice game, the next day, I won the man of the match award. Later, I said that I was happy this was happening in my wife’s city.

We accidentally ran into the truth about who Ayesha was. It was the worst moment of my life. No one enjoys being made a fool of and that was exactly how I was made to look. It happened in August 2005. My brother-in-law got a photograph of a teacher in Saudi Arabia, who was telling people around her that she was married to me. His nephews were studying in that school. I was aghast when he showed me the photograph of the teacher; the woman in it was the person I called Maha apa. I told Ayesha I was going to release the photographs she had been mailing me to the media. She apologised and told me that the other girl was married and that I would ruin her life if I released those pictures.

In 2008, my lawyer sent a legal notice to Mr MA Siddiqui. After that, he stopped making false allegations, until of course, news of my marriage to Sania Mirza became public.

Now, they are asking for a divorce. To begin with, there was no nikah because they pressured me into it, with the intention to cheat. In Islam, there can only be a divorce if the nikah is valid.
This is the opinion of Mohammed Khader Ali, Sadar Qazi (chief Qazi) of Hyderabad and president of the Andhra Pradesh Association of Qazis on nikah and the Muslim law: Firstly, in Muslim law, it is about the process, procedure, there can be no tampering with that. Secondly, meher (dower or a specified sum of money), two witnesses (one from the bride’s and one from the groom’s side), vakhil (guardian of the bride) and finally the bride and groom, all these parties have to sign the nikahnama at the time of the nikah.