Daughter says leaving marriage, refusing to wear the hijab, were the reasons. Father says, “listening to expert evidence on honour crimes was like hearing about a ‘different world’ — he’d never, he said, lived in that world or held those beliefs.”
Latest Updates: honour killing RSS
-
johnpi
-
johnpi
Rod Dreher tells the story about when he discovered one of his relatives – a “kindly old man” – had helped kill someone in the name of “honor.”
On his deathbed not too many years ago, a relative of mine confessed to having been part of a white lynch mob in the 1930s, which strung up a black man after he was caught having sex with a white woman. She accused him of rape. The sheriff led the lynch mob. There was no need for a trial; what a black man did to a white woman was considered so horrifying that nobody could wait for a trial and a verdict. After the black man was murdered, the guilt-stricken white woman confessed that the man had been her lover, and she called him a rapist to protect her honor.
None of us ever knew this about my kinsman, until in his dying days, he admitted it because it tortured him. It had been on his heart all his life. I pray that his repentance in the face of eternity helped him find mercy. It unnerved me, though, to think that that kindly old man had once fallen under the sway of race hatred to that degree, a race hatred that was part of the society into which he was born and raised. It still does, because that world seems like a thousand years ago. But it only seems so far away because many people worked too hard — and some even gave their lives — to drive those demons out.
Seems like a lot of people will go into the fire on Judgement Day in the name of “honor.”
-
johnpi
Krista at MMW begins a conversation about the recent killing of three sibling girls and their mother in Canada. I really appreciate her approach to this incident, relative to some other coverage there (Aqsa Parvez) which I felt was more purely a defensive response. Krista wants to challenge media coverage that dogwhistles anti-Muslim generalizations and prejudice while not sweeping aside the underlying issues within the Muslim community either.
From an update:
…my original goal for this post was actually to use this article as a starting point for trying to figure out how to have these conversations about violence within Muslim communities, in ways that address the violence properly and fully, without feeding into perceptions of Muslims as all uniquely violent/patriarchal/oppressive in ways that other religious and/or cultural communities aren’t. I wanted to come back to a question of how to engage with some of the more problematic media representations without ignoring the actual problems that are happening.
She’s bringing up something that I think must be a central issue for other Muslim bloggers, and certainly something that I think about when I post here at TI.
Particular to my own situation as a convert, I want to discuss, address and confront issues in the Muslim community that diminish my iman and tend to drive me away from Islam in order to recover myself to the religion and not get stuck, but I don’t want to feed the Jafis and the general prejudices of the society against Muslims in the process.
-
Kawthar
In Pakistan, a man murdered his sister, claiming she had an illicit relationship with a landlord, but
[A]ccording to family sources, Bux was in financial debt of the landlord and as he could not repay the money, he had married his daughter to the landlord. However, now the landlord wanted to marry Shehla Bibi, therefore, Bux thought it best to kill her rather than stain the family’s honour.
-
Kawthar
Self-appointed “terrorism expert” has the following gem to offer:
[I]t is more pertinent to understand that the act of beheading in Islam is frequently and closely associated with “honor killings.”
-
Kawthar
Germany’s Deutsche-Welle offers one of the most troubling definitions of “honour killing” that I’ve seen to date:
The term refers to a Muslim daughter being executed by the males of her own family, who jointly decide she has disgraced the family’s honor through her sexual behavior.
