Making It Dishonorable to Kill for ‘Honor’

Nora Ahmed was on her honeymoon when her father cut off her head and paraded it down a dusty Cairo street because she had married a man of whom he did not approve.

Begum Gadhaki was sleeping next to her 3-month-old son when her husband grabbed a gun and shot her dead. A neighbor had spotted a man who was not a family member near the field where she was working in Pakistan’s Sindh province.

Ahmed Ali used a cane to beat his wife across the stomach until she died after she returned home to their tiny village in Yemen from a two-day absence that she refused to explain.

Hundreds of women like Ahmed, Gadhaki and Ali perish every year because their male relatives believe their actions have soiled the family name.

They die so family honor may survive.

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Honor killings are based on a “suspicion of immorality on the part of the victim,” the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says.

But women have no way to know what behavior could be their death sentence. They have been killed for being too friendly to a brother-in-law. Having “arrogant” body language. Sitting next to a man on a bus.

Honor killing exists mostly in Muslim countries, such as those in the Middle East and Central Asia, even though Islam does not sanction the practice.

The United Nations says such killings have also occurred in Britain, Norway, Italy, Brazil, Peru and Venezuela. At least one case has been reported in the United States.

It is an ancient practice sanctioned by culture rather than religion, rooted in a complex code that allows a man to kill a female relative for suspected or actual sexual activity.

“It’s 100% tradition,” according to Madiha El-Safty, a sociology professor at the American University in Cairo. “It’s associated with the value of sexual chastity of the woman.”

The law is usually on the man’s side, often letting him go unpunished or with only a light sentence. The community commonly treats the murderer as a hero and considers the killing a duty, not a crime.

Cultures where the practice exists hold that a woman is a man’s possession and a reflection of his honor. It’s the man’s honor that gets tarnished if a woman is not virtuous.

“A woman in Arab societies is an object for sex and reproduction. As long as she is an object, she is owned by a father, a husband, a brother,” said Salwa Bakr, an Egyptian feminist and writer. “The way she uses her body is not her business but the business of those who own her.”

Ahmed Abbad Sherif, a prominent, conservative tribal leader in Yemen, insists “it’s because women are weaker than men.”

“If she’s immoral, it’s the man’s duty to kill her,” Sherif said matter-of-factly. “Otherwise, he will be despised by the rest of the tribe.”

Feminists, activists and human rights defenders have quietly begun work to end honor killings.

“Men worry about their honor and dignity as if women had none,” said Azza Suleiman, an activist at the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance. “They have stripped us of our honor and appointed themselves its protector.”

Honor killing, although not as widespread as it was decades ago, still thrives in rural areas, where women remain financially dependent on men and justice is administered by village elders.

From early childhood, girls are taught about eib, shame, and sharaf, honor. They dress modestly, lower their eyes when walking in public and are segregated from boys if they’re lucky enough to be sent to school.

And everywhere girls go are reminders that their most important mission in life is to remain virgins until they marry.

Among some tribes in Yemen, guests wait outside the newlyweds’ bedroom. Custom calls for the bridegroom to emerge and fire his gun, signifying his bride was a virgin. In other tribes, a towel smeared with the woman’s blood is paraded on sticks through the village amid ululations and, occasionally, the beating of drums.

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But virginity before marriage and demure behavior afterward are no guarantee of safety.

Women have been shot, burned, strangled, stoned, poisoned, beheaded or stabbed for being friendly to a brother-in-law, sitting next to a man on a bus, falling in love with the wrong person, talking to a man on the phone or even for being raped.

Their killers rarely give them a chance to prove their innocence. They act first and perhaps inquire later.

In Yemen recently, a man shot his daughter dead on her wedding night after her husband said she was not a virgin. At the mother’s insistence, the daughter was examined by a doctor--and was found to have been a virgin, said people familiar with the case.

It turned out the husband was impotent and knew his problem would have been exposed because he had to display a bloodied rag as proof of his bride’s virginity. He lied to protect his honor.

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No official figures tally how many such crimes are committed every year. Many cases, activists say, go unreported or misreported, with families describing the deaths as accidents to prevent further scandal.

A recent UNICEF survey found that in 1997, honor killings claimed the lives of as many as 400 women in Yemen, 52 in Egypt and an estimated 300 in just one province of Pakistan. Jordan reports an average of 25 such killings each year.

In 90% of the cases the United Nations investigated, the victims were killed by or on orders from their families, said Asma Jehangir, a human rights lawyer who also consults for the United Nations.

In Yemen a decade ago, a father learned his daughter had eloped with a man from another clan, breaking a taboo against marriage outside the tribe.

Gathering sons, brothers, uncles and cousins, he headed north in a convoy of about 20 cars, said Yemeni sociologist Abdo Ali Othman. The men stormed the bride’s new home and threw her into one of the cars.

When the convoy reached the edge of her village, her father hurled her to the asphalt and had every car drive over her.

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Although most honor crimes occur in Muslim societies, Islam does not sanction such killings.

“On the contrary, what’s there in the Koran is against it,” said Mohammed Serag, a professor of Islamic studies at the American University in Cairo.

“In the eyes of Islam, those people [who kill in the name of honor] are criminals,” he added. “They get maximum punishment . . . the death penalty.”

Islam, which emphasizes chastity for men and women, prescribes 100 lashes each for anyone who violates the Muslim code of behavior. But nothing in the Koran supports the death punishment for honor-related transgressions.

Serag said men who believe Islam approves of honor crimes may have misinterpreted the Koran verse that allows husbands to beat their wives.

“As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct admonish them, refuse to share their beds, beat them,” the Koran says in chapter 4, verse 34.

Because the language is general, it has been open to many interpretations, Serag said. Some scholars believe the beating should be symbolic--with a feather, for instance. Others disagree on who should administer it: the husband or the state.

Still, some religious groups and politicians have criticized attempts to condemn the killings or introduce harsher punishment, arguing that greater freedom would set women on the road to Western liberalism.

“Women adulterers cause a great threat to our society because they are the main reason that such acts take place,” said Mohammed Kharabsheh, a Jordanian lawmaker who heads his Parliament’s Legal Committee.

“If men do not find women with whom to commit adultery, then they will become good on their own,” he said.

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Men who cannot use religion to justify their crime sometimes find sanctuary in the law.

In countries where such actions are prosecuted, the youngest male in a family may be asked to carry out a killing because punishment for minors is less severe.

Judges and police officers have been known to side with the “wronged” man. In areas under Palestinian control, judges usually look for “justifiable excuses” to exonerate the killers, according to Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, a criminologist at Hebrew University who participated in the UNICEF study.

“There is pure conspiracy from the formal system--the judiciary--and the informal one--the tribal system and family,” Kevorkian said.

Women who seek shelter at police stations because they feel threatened by their families are referred to tribal leaders whose concept of justice can be arbitrary.

“One tribal leader told me, ‘I look in her face and I can tell if she is innocent or guilty. A young woman’s life is decided by the look on her face,’ ” Kevorkian said.

Until last February, a man in Lebanon who killed to cleanse the family honor was protected by a law that said:

“A man who surprises his wife, daughter or sister practicing adultery or illicit intercourse and kills or harms one of the two partners without premeditation benefits from the legitimate excuse” that relieves him of the burden of the murder.

After years of protest spearheaded by feminist Laure Moughaizel, the law was amended, making the man’s actions punishable by a sentence lighter than death.

Lawyer and activist Fadi Moughaizel, whose mother, Laure, died before the amendments were made, said in some cases the man murdered the woman because he had a mistress or wanted to get her inheritance.

In Yemen, it is the absence of a functioning legal system, especially in the rural tribal areas, that helps the murderers.

“There are very few villages where the judiciary is represented by a court and a prosecutor,” said Jamal Adimi, a lawyer and head of the Forum for Civil Society.

“Regular murders go unreported,” he said. “Do you really expect people to report a crime of honor?”

The hurdles to ending honor killings go beyond tradition and religion.

In Baghdad, the Iraqi Women’s Federation asked the government 10 years ago to make the punishment--seven years for the killer--more severe. But the government has not responded because it does not want to alienate traditional tribes whose support it badly needs.

Suleiman, the activist with the Egyptian center for legal assistance, said plans to investigate honor crimes had to be shelved because the organization is overwhelmed by other issues, including getting every woman registered in government records.

And in some cases, the victims of attacks even insist they deserve their fate.

“I wish they had killed me,” said Hanan, a 21-year-old Jordanian. Hanan fled her home in the town of Zarqa a year ago after her two younger brothers drenched her with kerosene and set her on fire because she was dating a neighbor. Her father tried to choke her with a rope. She survived it all and now lives in hiding with her boyfriend in the capital, Amman.

“I don’t deserve to live,” she said, “because I brought shame to my family by living with a man without being married.”

The experience among Arab Israeli activists has been more rewarding. In 1994 they founded Al Badeel Assn., a coalition of women’s and human rights groups, to combat honor crimes.

The activists speak in schools to raise awareness but sometimes face resistance, especially from Bedouin tribes, said Linda Khuwalid, a volunteer with the group.

From 1996 to 1998, Al Badeel documented 49 honor killings. There wasn’t a single case in 1999, which Khuwalid attributed to the group’s campaign.

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When the murderers talk about their crimes, there is rarely remorse.

As Marzouk Abdel-Rahim paraded his daughter’s severed head through Cairo three years ago, he gloated to the hundreds of onlookers, “Now the family has regained its honor.”

Din Mohammed Gadhaki acknowledged his wife was “a good mother” but said that after a strange man had been seen near the field where she was working, “I could not let people say I didn’t protect my honor.”

Ahmed Ali blamed his wife for provoking the beating that led to her death almost three years ago. “A man has the right to know where his wife is. I found her behavior suspicious,” he said at the prison where he is serving three years for her murder.

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Once upon a time in Yemen lived a woman called al-Dawdahiyya, said Othman, the sociologist. Al-Dawdahiyya loved a man her father disapproved of, so the couple decided to run away. Soon, however, her father found her and brought her to the tribe’s judge, who ordered her jailed for soiling the family honor.

Upon her release some years later, male members of her tribe were waiting with rocks to stone her because she was no longer a virgin.

But the women in her family managed to spirit her away to a place where no man could find her.

And she became a legend. A symbol of pure love. Songs, poems and books were written about her. To this day, people talk about her.

Is she myth? Is she real? That’s not the point, the storyteller says.

She survived.