In the Afghan version of that Persian tale, Shirin is courted by a wealthy prince, as well as the penniless Farhad. She tells Farhad that if he can remove the face of the mountain with an ax, she will marry him instead of the prince. He labors for months, and when the prince sees he really is moving the mountain for her, he sends a woman to tell Farhad that Shirin has already married. Farhad kills himself, and so does Shirin when she learns of his death.

“I’m still standing on my word, and I will try to reach her until the last drop of my blood,” Mohammad Ali said. “Shirin and Farhad knew that in this temporary world they might not reach one another, but God knew they might do so in the next world, and my ambition is also the same.

“If they separated me from her, if anything happened to her,” he added, “I would commit suicide.”

Mohammad Ali said he moves around his village with great care now, fearful of being attacked by Zakia’s family. He says he is unarmed — “I don’t have so much as a nail file” — although Zakia’s family claims he carries a rifle with him.

Zakia’s aggrieved father, Mohammad Zaman, and some of her brothers sat in their mud-walled house and gave their side of the story. By last week it had changed considerably. Instead of being already engaged, as the family had told officials at the Women’s Ministry, Zakia was actually already married, to her cousin, and so could not marry again, her father said.

Court officials said there was no evidence that was true, and Zakia denied it.

Mr. Zaman said his nephew had already paid the bride price — 28,000 Afghanis, or $500, about the price of three goats. Mr. Zaman said he knew he could have gotten much more, “but he’s my nephew, and I didn’t want to cheat him.”

The marriage was never consummated, he said, because of a delay in arranging a wedding party. In the meantime, Mohammad Ali came on the scene and lured Zakia away.

“We would not harm her. We would not do anything to her,” said Mr. Zaman, who also claimed he had “not even a nail file” as a weapon. “We know that boy just deceived her. It was not her fault. We just want her to come home.”