Eager to get away, in 2010, she enrolled in a political science master’s degree program at the University of British Columbia. Life in Vancouver gave her a newfound sense of freedom and with it, the resolve to get a divorce.

“I just loved that I wasn’t with him and could focus on my studies,” she said.

Yet he continued to terrorize her from afar with phone calls, often in the middle of the night, accusing her of infidelity and threatening to take away their daughter.

Ms. Monzur informed her husband their marriage was over while on a visit home in June 2011. He fled the bloody attack after leaving her blinded.

“There was so much internal bleeding in my eyes, it’s a miracle I’m still alive,” she said.

Her family reported the attack to the police, but they were concerned for her reputation if the incident became public. Outraged relatives and colleagues, however, took to social media and encouraged her to speak out. Ms. Monzur, her eyes swollen shut and nose bandaged, described the attack in a television news interview from her hospital bed, the first of several that received international news media coverage.

Supporters held rallies demanding justice, yet she said the publicity also elicited a flood of threats and scorn. When her husband was caught two days later, he accused her of having an affair in Canada and trying to kill him with sleeping pills, while his parents claimed she was pretending to be blind.

After he died of a heart attack while in jail awaiting trial that December, his relatives told journalists Ms. Monzur conspired to have him killed.

By that time, Ms. Monzur had resettled in Vancouver, but was struggling with her disability.

“School was my comfort zone,” she said. University friends helped her to do research and transcribed her successful master’s thesis. Then she announced she wanted to take the law school entrance exam. “Everyone thought it was ridiculous,” she said, smiling. “I’m stubborn, so the best way to make me work is to say, ‘Rumana, you can’t do it.’”