WUNRN
Text reference to: Honour Killing: A
Crime Against Islam - http://www.islamawareness.net/HonourKilling/honour_killings.pdf
September 28, 2009
by Valentina Colombo
Research Fellow, IMT Lucca -Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca
Last September 15th Sanaa Dafani, an 18 year old girl of Moroccan origin, was killed by her father because she loved a 31 years old Italian. The father was immediately arrested while the mother tried to find a reason for his act: “My husband loved Sanaa. Maybe she was wrong. I could forgive my husband. Yes, I could. He is my husband, my sons’ father. Sanaa dressed and ate in a proper way, but he did not want her to go out in the evening with bad boys or friends. My husband loved Sanaa. Maybe she was wrong. He always sent her messages: come back home. He wanted her beside him.” Almost the same words were pronounced by Hina Saleem’s mother three years ago.
On August 11th 2006 Hina, a 21 year old girl of Pakistani origin, was slain by her father because she wanted to live like a Westerner and had decided to go and live with a non-Muslim man.
On April 7th 2007, Du’a
al-Aswad, a 17 year old Kurdish girl of Yazidi faith, was stoned by a raging
crowd in
In
The problem of honor killings is known; what is less known is that research made by the American psychologist Phyllis Chesler shows that in the period 1989-2009, there have been 87 victims in the West and 130 in the Third World - and that 84% of honor killings committed in the West are by Muslims. When Chesler exposed these results last September during the International Conference on Violence against Women, she was immediately reminded by the Egyptian minister, Moushira al-Khattab, that Islam does not allow this; that the problem are some Muslims and that the Prophet Muhammad respected women.
Even radical Muslims point
out that honor killing does not belong to Islam. In a document issued by the
Muslim Council of Britain - - after some honor killings in the
Even the words of sheikh
Atiyyah Saqr, former head of Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee in
Honor killing is the product of a male chauvinist society; it can find justification in the Koran and in Islamic tradition. Du’a’s death confirms what has just been said. The Kurdish girl was not only stoned, but her body was mutilated and covered with stones. At the end the crowd started shouting “Allahu akbar”, “God is greatest”, and reciting the shahada, that is the Islamic profession of faith.
One year after Du’a’s
murder, the Saudi activist, Wajeha al-Huwaider, wrote: “Had Du
To all this one can add that in most Islamic countries laws which counteract honor killings almost do not exist. For instance, on July 1st 2009, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad abolished Article 548 of the Penal Code, which had waived punishment for a man found to have killed a female family member in a case "provoked" by "illegitimate sex acts," as well as for a husband who killed his wife because of an extramarital affair. The article also lowered penalties if a killing were found to be based on a "suspicious state" concerning a female family member. The article that replaced it still allows for mitigated punishment for "honor killings," but requires a sentence of at least two years. The new text of Article 548 reads: "He who catches his wife, sister, mother or daughter by surprise, engaging in an illegitimate sexual act and kills or injures them unintentionally must serve a minimum of two years in prison." In the previous text, the killer benefited from a complete "exemption of penalty". We could say that something is starting to change, but we are still very far away from a true fight of honor killings in the country.
Islam and the male chauvinist tradition are the worst enemies of Muslim women. It cannot be denied, as the Egyptian Minister tried to do, that Islam has something to do with this. In the Koran, in Sura IV, we read: “Should any of your women commit some sexual offence, collect evidence about them from four [persons] among yourselves. If they so testify, then confine the women to their houses until death claims them or God grants them some other way out” and “Admonish those women whose surliness you fear, and leave them alone in their beds, and [even] beat them [if necessary]”. If the Koran does not quote honor killings, it can be of some use to justify them. The Swiss-Yemeni liberal intellectual, Elham Manea, is perfectly right when she says that Muslims should admit that there is a problem concerning women in general and honor killings in particular in Islam itself. This is not meant to be anti-Islamic. Manea is a secular Muslim who does not wish to conceal problems; on the contrary, she wishes to face and solve them to improve the condition of Muslim women.
Only in this way can the
West and the Muslim world fight violence
against women who only want to be free, as the Lebanese poet Joumana Haddad
describes in a poem of hers: “They put me in a cage so that/My freedom may be a
gift from them,/And I have to thank them and obey./But I am free before them,
after them,/With them, without them. […] I am a woman./They think they own my
freedom./I let them think so,/And I happen”.
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