with the Butcher children, Diane (Sophie Lawrence) and Ricky (Sid Owen). She and Ricky begin dating for a brief period, until Shireen's stern father Ashraf (Aftab Sachak) finds out and forbids her from seeing Ricky. Ashraf then decides that Shireen will enter an arranged marriage, and he humiliates his daughter further by requesting that Dr Harold Legg (Leonard Fenton) perform a vaginal examination on his daughter, to confirm she is still a virgin; Dr Legg refuses. Ashraf removes Shireen from the local comprehensive and puts her in a boarding school to keep her away from undesirables. Shireen dislikes it so much that she runs away announcing she is being bullied by racists, so Ashraf removes her from the school. Shireen has a brief date with Trevor Short (Phil McDermott) in 1989, but this ultimately leads nowhere as Shireen is betrothed to Jabbar Ahmed (Gordon Warnecke). Although Shireen is opposed to the idea of an arranged marriage, when she meets Jabbar she changes her mind. She falls in love with her suitor and is devastated when the marriage is called off due to the Ahmed family finding out about Ashraf's extra-marital affair with a white mistress. Before the Karims move away to Bristol, the women of the Karim and Ahmed families meet in secret, to discuss the possibility of Shireen and Jabbar marrying. Whether they reunite or not is not revealed, as the Karims leave Walford shortly after. Sohail KarimSohail Karim''', played by Ronny Jhutti, arrives in 1988 and takes a liking to Diane Butcher (Sophie Lawrence). He tries to blackmail her into dating him, by threatening to expose his sister Shireen's (Nisha Kapur) secret relationship with Diane's brother Ricky (Sid Owen). Diane agrees until Sohail tries to molest her, and after the date ends abruptly, Sohail informs his father Ashraf (Aftab Sachak) about Shireen and Ricky. Sohail later rebels against his father's heavy-handed manner, and reacts badly when he discovers that his father is having an affair. Sohail, along with the rest of his family, moves to Bristol in 1990. Reception In 2003, Steve Pratt from The Northern Echo'' suggested that the Karim family were forgettable: "Few but the most fanatical soap fans will remember Albert Square's Karim family. They stayed in EastEnders for two years at the end of the 1980s, but were quickly forgotten after moving to Bristol in the wake of an arranged marriage that went wrong."