Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chairman Imran Khan has deemed his failed marriage to journalist Reham Khan as his life’s biggest mistake.
The party head made the remarks while sitting down for an interview with a British newspaper Mail Online at his residence in Bani Gala on Sunday.
“I did not catch a glimpse of my wife’s face until after we were married. I proposed to her without seeing her because she had never met me without her face being covered with a full veil”.
“The only idea I had of what she looked like came from an old photograph I had seen in her house.”
The reason, the former cricketer explains, is that his bride, Bushra Maneka, 39, is a leading scholar and spiritual guide in the mystic Sufi branch of Islam and she will not meet men other than her husband with her face uncovered, nor venture unveiled outside her house, which she rarely leaves.
She is a mother-of-five, and when she and Khan, 65, first met three years ago, she was still married to her first husband, a senior customs official named Khawar Fareed Maneka.
When Bushra finally did remove her veil, Khan adds: “I was not disappointed, and now I am happily married.It would, he admits, have been unthinkable if someone had told me I would marry someone whose face I hadn’t seen. I would have thought they were mad.”
