Women in Dark Times (25 page)

Member States of the Organization of Islamic Conference, like other States Members of the UN, in keeping with their obligations under the universally accepted instruments on human rights, have all committed themselves to opposing any use of arbitrary or extrajudicial killing of any human being, particularly women, in the name of passion, honour or race.
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They were responding at least partly to a documentary on honour crimes, screened internationally as well as at the UN, which opened with the image of a mosque and the sound of a call to prayer.
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Whether Fadime Sahindal was a Muslim became the subject of fierce dispute. The Islamic Council in Norway pronounced that she was not. But others saw her family, although they were not active worshippers, as part of an immigrant Muslim community whose identity relied on religious precepts, even if these were not strictly observed. You are born and remain a Muslim throughout your life unless you declare your desire to leave Islam. For those adhering to this view, Sahindal’s state funeral in the cathedral in Uppsala, a media event attended by Crown Princess Victoria, the archbishop, two government ministers and numerous other dignitaries, was an affront (even if, out of respect for Islam, the canon took any reference to the Trinity out of her address). There is a tightrope to walk here. The Islamic Council was most likely repudiating Sahindal, rather than intervening to protect her family from racial hatred in response to her death. But the tacit condemnation, if that is what it was, should not be taken to mean that Islam condones her killing – or, according to one common but mistaken argument, requires it. Honour killing is not a religious act and no justification for it can be found in the Qur’an. In the Qur’an, life is sacred and can only be taken in pursuit of justice. Slave girls must not be forced into prostitution ‘when they themselves wished to remain honourable’;
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if they are, they will be forgiven by God (compare this with the cases of women killed after they have been raped, often by a family member). Men and women are punished equally for adultery. Denigration of females, to the point of infanticide, is the practice of the pagan, whose folly is demonstrated by the fact that he imputes daughters to God while valuing only sons for himself. On the Day of Judgement, the baby slaughtered at birth will be resurrected and asked for what sin she was killed.

The point is not to suggest that the Qur’an is a progressive text for women. It famously assigns men to ‘a degree’ above women (how far that degree extends is a matter of dispute).
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It exhorts the husband to beat a disobedient wife. Spiritual equality between men and women is not matched by equality in relation to marriage, child custody or divorce. But nowhere in the Qur’an is it suggested that women who are raped, have sex outside marriage, choose their husband against the wishes of their father, or in fact do none of these but are simply talked about as if they do, should be killed. According to a 2002 report of the Egyptian Women’s Centre for Legal Assistance, the mere suspicion of indecent behaviour was the grounds for 79 per cent of all crimes of honour.
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‘I know that killing my sister is against Islam and it angered God,’ states Sarhan, a Jordanian interviewed by Husseini – he is introduced to her in his cell by a prison official with the words: ‘This is Sarhan, he killed his sister to cleanse his honour’ – ‘but I had to do what I had to do and I will answer to God when the time comes.’
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Honour takes precedence over Islam.
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Feminist commentary on the Qur’an
draws the most scrupulous distinctions between Islam as ethical principle and Islam as a set of diktats based on an increasingly oppressive interpretation of law. Honour killing is not an Islamic practice, but violence against women can be sanctioned by a literal reading, many would say misreading, of sharia law. In sharia
law
,
zina
(adultery or sex out of wedlock) is harshly punished – public lashings for unmarried girls, stoning for men and women adulterers. But only on the testimony of four witnesses, which means no guardian is sanctioned if he acts on suspicion alone.
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For Leila Ahmed, it is institutional and legal Islam, determined by the politically dominant class, that has veered consistently against women.
Ghada Karmi reads the Qur’an
itself as two texts, one regulatory, which arises out of the conditions of the time, and the other universal, spiritual and philosophical, a guide to the inner life, which by definition cannot be grounded in law. In both cases a wedge is driven between Islam as practice and as word. ‘A reading by a less androcentric and misogynist society,’ writes Ahmed, ‘one that gave greater ear to the ethical voice of the Qur’an could have resulted in – could someday result in – the elaboration of laws that deal equably with women.’
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Before Islam, it is often argued, women were freer – the Prophet’s first wife was famously an independently wealthy older woman. According to al-Bukhari, the
hadith
compiler, earlier marriage customs included a woman being invited by her husband to co-habit with another man in order to secure a child, and women having several sexual relations, the paternity of any child being decided by a gathering of her partners on the basis of which one the child resembled most. Institutional Islam can be fairly charged with sanctioning the loss of those freedoms and playing its part in their demise, although whether it initiated or legitimised these changes is, according to Karmi, a question with no definitive reply.
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In the debate over Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code, the Islamists split in two, with one group arguing for its abolition for contradicting sharia and the other for its retention as a check on promiscuity (in 1999 the scholars committee of the Islamic Front in Jordan issued a fatwa against its abolition).
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But simply by opening the question, widening the gap between potentiality and history, between the inner message of a faith and religion in the vice of political power (and serving it), or more simply between a text and its interpretation, you make it impossible to lay the worst – and honour killing has a fair claim to be described as the worst – at Islam’s door. Such forms of questioning, at which of course feminism excels, have always been the strongest riposte to the brute conviction of any power or law. Feminism is never served by seeing any religion or culture, immovably, as a monolith which leaves no one, especially no woman, with any room to breathe. Here the significant opposition is not between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ (which always works to the advantage of the culture making the distinction), but between those who go on reading and those who do not. Assign honour killing to Islam as a type of fait accompli and you strip away the chance of seeing it as a practice, not reflective simply of a coherent social order or belief system, but of one that is torn and unstable, which precisely requires violence to secure itself. Crimes of honour are meant to be a solution: ‘The problem is over now,’ Sahindal’s father stated after her death.
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To which one answer is to place such crimes under the prism of multiple, shifting, conflicting points of view, to tell the same story over and over again. In
In Honor of Fadime
, everyone’s version, including the father, Rahmi Sahindal’s, is told. And if Wikan comes down against Rahmi, she otherwise hovers, giving voice, for example, to Nebile, the thirteen-year-old sister who insists that Fadime lied to the media: ‘We aren’t into that kind of culture . . . She lied and lied . . . I know, I know . . . whatever I say, that I know for sure.’
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We are up against not just different stories but hearts torn, violently, against themselves, for which the case of Shafilea Ahmed provides one of the most vivid, painful examples. How do you go on living in the home when a parent has killed your sister? What would it do to your mind? Certainly lying – which makes interpretation even more precarious – seems to be part of the frame. Both Mevish and Junyad Ahmed lied in court (although whether they any longer knew they were lying we cannot be sure). When Alesha Ahmed, fourteen at the time of the murder, told friends at school what had happened, she appears to have embellished and distorted her account, saying her father had hacked her sister to pieces. Then she goes quiet for nine years. In court, the defence tried to use Alesha’s exaggerations and the robbery to discredit her testimony: her accusation was a ‘wicked’ concoction designed to get her out of trouble. ‘It didn’t get me out of any trouble,’ she simply replied.
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Missing in the courtroom, in pretty much any courtroom, was the idea of how we all make our lives bearable by elaborating stories about ourselves. These hugely complicate the picture, requiring us to be readers before we are judges, alert to the complex nuances of the world before anything else, willing above all to question the paths of monolithic truth (this, I have been arguing throughout this book, is something of special relevance for women and at which they can be particularly adept). In fact, for all these siblings, lying had been a way to survive. Alesha Ahmed was not alone in being torn, as she put it, between her dead sister and her parents (nor surely in having been ‘haunted’ by what happened for years).

The seeming transparency of these crimes, once brought to light, is therefore deceptive. In
Maps for Lost Lovers
, the crime is the beginning not the end of the story – a bloody mark on the page around which reader and characters painfully circulate, uncertain of what they see: ‘They [the murdered lovers] have become a bloody Rorschach blot: different people see different things in what has happened.’
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*

If not in terms of religion, how then can crimes of honour be explained? In a discussion I held with British Muslim women students at Queen Mary, University of London, they were adamant that it was not religion but culture that is to blame. But, as they too were aware, invoking culture is also freighted with risk. Abdullah Yones did not make a cultural plea of honour, even though the case was classified by the Metropolitan Police as an honour crime. Nor was honour put forward in the defence of Fadime Sahindal’s father, Rahmi. He preferred to plead sickness – that is, before he changed his plea and denied the killing altogether by claiming on appeal that it had been carried out by some unidentified man from the woods who forced him to take the blame (the appeal not surprisingly failed and he was sentenced to life). He prefers, that is, to impugn his own mental health, even if he of course blames his illness on his daughter’s conduct, than appeal to what has come to be known as the ‘cultural defence’: a plea for mitigation based on the defendant’s cultural codes. In Florida in 1974, a Greek immigrant was acquitted for the murder of his daughter’s rapist partly on the grounds that no Greek father would be expected to wait for the police. In Los Angeles in 1985, a Japanese American woman who survived after wading into the ocean with her daughters on hearing of her husband’s infidelity was spared the death penalty (
oyako-shingu
, or parent-child suicide is illegal in Japan but recognised as a response to an unacceptable social predicament). The cultural defence challenges the idea of ‘objective reasonable behaviour’, adhered to in US law, an idea itself freighted with cultural baggage. ‘Judges and juries’, writes Alison Dundes Renteln in
The Cultural Defense
(2004), from which my two examples are taken, ‘are asked to weigh a person’s actions in the light of what such an “objective” person would do under similar circumstances . . . There is no such person.’
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Kurds living in Norway, where the concept has more purchase than in Sweden, tended to be unhappy with the trial of Rahmi Sahindal and with the judgement, seeing it as a serious failure of the Swedish legal system not to have raised in court the concepts of
namus
and
sharif
. To have done so, the argument runs, would have protected the Kurdish ethnic minority. It would have ushered difference into the courtroom, challenging the universality and neutrality of Swedish law. It would also most likely have reduced Rahmi’s sentence. The cultural defence is based on a type of utopian fantasy or wish: that the worldview of the minority community, against the whole drift of the dominant society all around, should take precedence in law. In
Maps for Lost Lovers
, the judge rejects the idea out of hand. ‘Batting down’ all talk of honour, he describes the plaintiffs as ‘cowards’ and ‘wicked’: ‘In short they were not grown up.’
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The argument in favour of a cultural defence is that such a defence would have saved the plaintiffs, and the community, from such insults.

But if the cultural defence works, or is intended to work, in the interests of minority communities, it can also backfire to the detriment of the plaintiff and his world. Rahmi Sahindal’s lawyer partly made his decision not to raise the issue on the basis that to appeal to ‘honour’ would have given his client a motive and been tantamount to a confession (even though he at first pleaded guilty). But it is also the case that a plea based on culture can be experienced by the minority on whose behalf it is mounted as a humiliation, by seeming to endorse a hostile view of the group as irredeemably, not to say violently, different. When Judge Denison reduced Abdullah Yones’s sentence from the recommended twenty years to fourteen on the grounds of ‘irreconcilable cultural differences’, it was hardly a neutral decision.
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The implication is that a whole culture or community has a tradition of ‘honour’ that can lead to murder, or that is murderous in and of itself. It is only a short step from here to branding the whole community as a bunch of criminals. For the same reason, Sahindal’s sister and mother worried that too much emphasis on the family’s rejection of her Swedish boyfriend (in fact he was Swedish-Iranian) would confirm the impression that Kurds were hostile to Swedes. They were right to be worried. The family was the subject of a media witch-hunt that spilled over into the whole Kurdish community in Sweden. ‘Kurdish Woman Murdered’ was the broadsheet headline after Sahindal’s death. The headline ‘Swedish Woman Murdered’ – which was not going to happen – would have turned the problem into one implicating all Swedes.