Shoaib Malik married Sania Mirza in 2010 but had also married another woman, named Ayesha Siddiqui in 2002 over the phone.
Former Pakistan cricket team captain Shoaib Malik left the sporting world stunned as he shared the pictures of his wedding with actress Sana Javed. The announcement confirmed the rumours of his divorce from Indian tennis star Sania Mirza, whose family also confirmed the same in a social media post a day later. But, not many are aware that Sania wasn’t Shoaib’s first wife. Sania and Shoaib tied the nuptial knot in 2010 and also have a son named Izhaan Mirza Malik. But, Shoaib had reportedly married another woman, whom he had to divorce, before starting a new life with the Indian tennis ace.
Right before Shoaib was to marry Sania in 2010, a controversy erupted where a woman named Ayesha Siddiqui from Hyderabad claimed to have married Shoaib in 2002.
While Shoaib had denied the allegations, Ayesha, also known as Maha Siddiqui, decided to file a police complaint and also showed video proofs of their wedding.
It was then reported that the two reached a settlement where the Pakistani cricketer had to divorce Ayesha and also give her alimony of INR 15 crore.
The most interesting part of Shoaib and Ayesha’s marriage was that it was a ‘telephonic nikah’. In an interview with Times News Network, Shoaib himself talked about having a telephonic nikah without even seeing his bride. The cricketer, just 20 years old back then, only had a few pictures of Ayesha with him, and the two used to talk on the phone regularly. But, not long after, Shoaib was tricked into marrying Ayesha, who wasn’t even the girl he thought she was in pictures.
While Ayesha kept giving one excuse after the other and refused to meet Shoaib, in 2002, she told the cricketer that she wanted to marry him immediately as the news of their relationship was all over the headlines, making it difficult for her family.
“This episode happened in 2002. Ayesha wanted us to get married. While I definitely wanted to marry her, I didn’t want to rush into it. For one, I hadn’t met her. She suggested that we could do a telephone nikah right away. There was no way I could tell my parents about a telephone nikah, because it’s not the way they wanted me to get married. I was just 20 then, and under a lot of pressure from Ayesha to get married as she was saying that her family was losing face in Hyderabad as word had got around that we were courting. I walked out of my house one morning in June 2002, and went to my friend’s shop and called from there. I got a nikahnama, signed it, thinking the girl I was marrying was the one in the photographs,” Shoaib said in the interview.
It was sometime in August 2005 that Shoaib got to know that the girl he was talking to on the phone, wasn’t the one he had seen in pictures. When he confronted Ayesha about the same, the woman also told him the truth.
Shoaib even thought of releasing the pictures he had with him but was asked not to do so by Ayesha as the girl in the photographs was already married. Thinking the release of pictures would ruin her life, Malik decided against doing so.
