Honour Killing: Persistence of an Ugly Tradition
by Haideh Moghissi
Feminist theorist and author; Professor of sociology, York University.
- First Posted: Dec 18 2011 07:31 AM
- Updated: 3 days ago
As the honour killing phenomenon shows, it is imperative that progressive Muslims speak out when women's rights are trampled in their midst.
It seems four Afghan women had to lose their lives in a horrifying murder plot in Kingston, Ont., for the Canadian public, including a number of Muslim Imams, to acknowledge a terrible tragedy: Every year, thousands of women are killed by their male relatives in the name of restoring family “honour,” and this reality does not exclude Canada. The cold-blooded murder of the Shafia daughters may have woken the community up to the existence of “honour killings” in Canada, but other cases of such horrific victimization in our country have certainly preceded it. In December 2008, another Muslim zealot in Toronto killed his teenage daughter, Aqsa Parvez, simply because she refused to wear the hijab. The sad record of crimes of this type in Canada since 9/11 is, by some counts, 16 cases, involving Sikhs and Hindus in addition to Muslim families.
The media spotlight on the Shafia trial in Kingston might help create awareness about the terrorized lives of young women in religious fanatic families in this country. It might prompt policy-makers to stop tiptoeing around harmful “cultural” practices, regardless of whether they are rooted in sacred texts. The public outcry might also warn strict fanatic families that children and young women’s rights are recognized and protected under secular laws in this country.
The media, however, have fallen short of their responsibility to provide accurate information so as to educate the public about the honour-killing phenomenon. Sadly, it is hard not to think that some of the commentaries deliberately sharpen the tip of the blame that, at present, is pointed at Muslim and Arab cultures in general. For example, in reaction to the Shafia case, the media has disturbingly and repeatedly misrepresented the words of an Arab feminist sociologist, Fatemeh Mernissi, who said that, “a man’s honour lies between the legs of a woman.” Making it seem like this statement is an Arab colloquial, the media is effectively smearing the whole culture for the mindless crime of a few Muslim fanatics. (Note, too, that the Shafia family is of Afghan, not Arab, origin, but that the media does not take this distinction into account.)
Furthermore, throughout these reports, no mention is made of the fact that the horrific tradition of cleansing families’ “tainted honour” in the stream of women’s blood has existed in Christian societies around the Mediterranean shores, and is not solely an Islamic/Arab tradition. Reports suggest that in Greece, for instance, there were 197 cases of crimes of honour between 1960 and 1963 alone. In fact, it was not until 1981 that law reforms under then-prime-minister Andreas Papandreou made it so that perpetrators could not be acquitted or granted leniency on the grounds that the victims had “dishonoured” their family.
The point is, wherever women’s bodies are presumed to be the property of their fathers and husbands, and wherever religious teachings enter the domain of law to sanction women’s lesser value, men can easily get away with killing women by claiming that they did so in order to “restore family honour.” Today, honour killing happens in almost all Muslim-majority countries, and, sadly, it is on the rise in societies where controlling women’s sexuality and sexual and moral conducts and maintaining the authority of the patriarchal family have more than ever become the emblem of “cultural authenticity,” the “anti-imperialist” struggle, and the “return to Islamic values.”
Regrettably, the same twisted understanding of faith or cultural identity travels with some migrants to their adopted countries in the West. Earlier this month, a BBC report revealed that police have recorded 2,823 cases of crimes of honour in the U.K. in the past year alone.
Having said this, it is encouraging that 60 Canadian Muslim groups and dozens of Imams decided to discuss the subject of honour killings in their sermons and emphasize the wrongness of the practice rather than get defensive or apologetic about it. This was certainly a step forward. However, they, too, came short of unambiguously and unconditionally condemning this most backward, oppressive institution of Islamic cultures. Instead, they continue to refer to honour killing – men’s culturally and religiously sanctioned claim over women’s bodies – as “domestic violence.” Furthermore, they repeatedly state that Islam does not condone the practice, as it is not mentioned in the Quran. This is a disturbingly misleading claim. Granted, many Islamic cultural and legal practices cannot be traced to the Quran. But Islamic traditions are not limited to the Quranic prescriptions. Thousands of hadith (the sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohammed) and sunna (the reported practices of the Prophet) are important bases of many Islamic legal and cultural traditions and practices.
In some cases, zealot Muslims do not follow Quranic edicts, but instead follow the “tradition.” For example, in the case of adultery, the Quran explicitly sets the punishment of 100 lashes for both adulterer and adulteress (24/1), but, in countries where fundamentalists are in power, like Iran (or, recently, Afghanistan), people resort to the horrible practice of stoning. Similarly, while the Quran does not make any mention of a specific punishment for blasphemy, in 2006, the Iranian Ayatollah Fazel Langrani issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling for the killing of Rafiq Tagi, a prominent physician and author of the Azerbaijan Republic who was known for his controversial writings. Only a month ago, Tagi was brutally assassinated for his alleged anti-Islamic views and publications.
The point is that Islam, like all other religions and ideologies, can be both mercilessly violent and mercifully compassionate, depending on who represents it and for what purpose. Islamic organizations and Imams need to recognize that, to counter the stereotypes, Islamophobia, and cultural racism against Muslims, they need to show the differences between the values and worldviews of rational Muslims and literalist fundamentalists and fanatics through their own examples. To clearly condemn outdated and harmful “Islamic” traditions – including various forms of traditional or state-enforced gender violence (honour killing, stoning women to death on the charge of adultery, public lashing, imposed veiling, practices of child marriage, and female genital mutilation, to name a few) – is a much more effective way to challenge Islamophobia than to continuously complain about it, keep silent about it, or, worse, deny the existence of such practices in Islamic traditions.
Photo courtesy of Reuters.
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