Jonathan Kay on honour killings: The genocide that Muslims inflict on themselves

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Jonathan Kay on honour killings: The genocide that Muslims inflict on themselves

Jonathan Kay September 7, 2010 – 2:49 pm

Paula Bronstein / Getty Images: Qamar Jan, an 18-year-old Afghan woman, was attacked by her fiance after refusing to marry him.

More developments in the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman set to be stoned to death for the crime of “adultery” (even though her husband already had died at the time of her allegedly “illicit” relationship): This week, it was revealed that, even as she awaits on death row, Ashtiani got 99 lashes for the further crime of appearing in a Times of London photo without a headscarf. (The Times now concedes that the photo actually was of another woman — adding an additional level of surreal horror to what already was a singularly pitiful case.)

The only possible good news to be wrung from this horror is the fact that the case has united the whole of the civilized world — including Europe’s otherwise morally relativistic intellectuals — in unanimous condemnation of Iran’s Medieval theocracy. Even the most devout Euro-pacifist can only be horrified at the prospect of this regime possessing a nuclear weapon.

And yet Ashtiani is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to “honour killings” in Muslim societies. An astonishing investigative report in Britain’s Independent by celebrity left-wing journalist Robert Fisk (who has taken a laudable break from his America-bashing beat) concludes that the usual UN figure of 5,000 honour killings per year worldwide is off by a factor of at least four — and that the real number is about 20,000. Not all of the killers, it should be emphasized, are Muslim: There are some Christians and Hindus in this mix. But the vast majority of killings take place in Muslim nations such as Pakistan, Jordan and Turkey.
Here’s one particularly awful example, recited by Fisk:

[Consider] the young woman found in a drainage ditch near Daharki in Pakistan, ‘honour’ killed by her family as she gave birth to her second child, her nose, ears and lips chopped off before being axed to death, her first infant lying dead among her clothes, her newborn’s torso still in her womb, its head already emerging from her body … She was badly decomposed; the local police were asked to bury her. Women carried the three to a grave, but a Muslim cleric refused to say prayers for her because it was ‘irreligious’ to participate in the namaz-e-janaza prayers for ‘a cursed woman and her illegitimate children.’

The Independent article contains dozens more example like this. The grisly details change from case to case, but all are animated by the repugnant notion that women are disposable possessions that can be destroyed like a lame horse or a chipped plate.

As Fisk correctly notes, this view of women is not confined to Islam — it typifies all backwards, heavily tribalized societies from Africa to Central Asia. But it is a particular problem in the Muslim world because the religion’s foundational text, the Koran, is essentially a crystallization of the tribal practices and myths of militarily successful 7th-century Bedouin Arab tribes — and so, as in the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, it offers a veneer of religious legitimacy to misogynistic bloodletting.

I am hardly the first pundit to bemoan the lack of Western feminists who’ve shown any interest in this gendered genocide. Most are too busy denouncing the phallocentricity of free trade and unregistered guns to mourn the killing of 20,000 women every year for the crime of falling in love, having boyfriends, bearing children — which is to say, being human.

That 20,000 figure, by the way, exceeds the total number of Palestinians killed in both Intifadas and the 2008 Gaza conflict combined — a useful factoid to keep in your holster the next time Judy Rebick or Diana Ralph garbs their anti-Israeli bigotry in feminist pink.

Speaking of which, I have a new Palestinian martyr to offer the world. Everyone already knows the names of Mohammed al-Dura and Rachel Corrie. But how about the 17-year-old Gaza girl who, in 2005, was murdered by a brother for the crime of becoming pregnant … by her own father. Fisk has the details:

He was present during her murder. She had earlier reported her father to the police. They neither arrested nor interrogated him. In the same year, masked Hamas gunmen shot dead a 20-year-old, Yusra Azzami, for “immoral behaviour” as she spent a day out with her fiancée. Azzami was a Hamas member, her husband-to-be a member of Fatah. Hamas tried to apologise and called the dead woman a “martyr” – to the outrage of her family. Yet only last year, long after Hamas won the Palestinian elections and took over the Gaza Strip, a Gaza man was detained for bludgeoning his daughter to death with an iron chain because he discovered she owned a mobile phone on which he feared she was talking to a man outside the family. He was later released.

How unfortunate for all these girls and women that their deaths didn’t come at the hands of Jews — in which case, they’d probably have streets named after them, just like al-Dura.

Islamist conspiracy theorists like to imagine that Jews are plotting to rape and kill their women. Looks to me like Muslims are progressing well with that project without any infidel help.

National Post

jkay@nationalpost.com