CAIRO, May 26 (AFP) - A 22-year-old Egyptian university student committed suicide one month before her graduation because she had been forced by her parents to marry an illiterate distant cousin, police sources said Wednesday. Salwa Hammad Mohammad took her husband's gun and shot herself in the head in the newly weds' modest apartment in the town of Sohag, 500 kilometers (300 miles) south of the capital. Mohammad was due to graduate in June from the faculty of Arab studies at the Sohag branch of the prestigious Al-Azhar University, where she was considered a model student, police sources said. But she could not fight the depression that nagged her since her parents forced her against her will to marry 35-year-old painter Saad Zuwayed, as is often the custom in the conservative communities of southern Egypt. Mohammad found nothing in common with her husband of nine months and decided to take her own life, police said. Around half of Egypt's 61 million population is illiterate, with the majority living in impoverished areas of southern Egypt. The number of Egyptians with university degrees represented only 7.3 percent of the population in 1996, up from 4.3 percent 10 years earlier, according to official statistics.  