June 20, 1999
FOR SHAME: Arab Honor's Price: A Woman's Blood
By DOUGLAS JEHL
RESAIFAH, Jordan -- It took six years for the al-Goul family to hunt down
their daughter Basma.
She had run away with a man, afraid for her life after her husband suspected
her of infidelity. Her husband divorced her and, in hiding, she married the
other
man. But back in this overcrowded, largely Palestinian village, where a
woman's
chastity is everyone's business, the contempt for her family kept spreading.
----
"Women accused in sexual misconduct cases in Arab countries (e.g. in Jordan)
... are jailed to protect them from being killed."
----
"We were the most prominent family, with the best reputation," said Um
Tayseer, the mother. "Then we were disgraced. Even my brother and his family
stopped talking to us. No one would even visit us. They would say only, 'You
have to kill.' "
Um Tayseer went looking for Basma, carrying a gun. In the end, it was
Basma's 16-year-old brother, just 10 when she ran away, who pulled the
trigger.
"Now we can walk with our heads held high," said Amal, her 18-year-old
sister.
What is honor? Abeer Allam, a young Egyptian journalist, remembered how it
was explained by a high-school biology teacher as he sketched the female
reproductive system and pointed out the entrance to the vagina.
"This is where the family honor lies!" the teacher declared, as Allam
remembers it.
More than pride, more than honesty, more than anything a man might do, female
chastity is seen in the Arab world as an indelible line, the boundary between
respect and shame. An unchaste woman, it is sometimes said, is worse than a
murderer, affecting not just one victim, but her family and her tribe.
It is an unforgiving logic, and its product, for centuries and now, has
been murder --
the killings of girls and women by their relatives, to cleanse honor that
has been
soiled.
Across the Arab world, in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, the
Palestinian
territories and among Israeli Arabs, a new generation of activists has
quietly begun
to battle these honor killings, an enduring wave of attacks prompted by
sexual
conduct that is sometimes only imagined.
In Jordan, home to the most candid talk about the issue, the Government under
King Abdullah has promised to join in the fight, following the example set
by the
late King Hussein and Queen Noor, who helped to lift a lid on public
discussion
of the killings. At a conference in Jordan in early June, delegates from
the region
were asked to develop ways to respond "sensitively to the situation in
countries
of concern." But those engaged in the battle say it would be hard to
exaggerate
the magnitude of the opposition they face.
Across today's Arab world, modernizers may be wrangling with traditionalists,
and secularists with Islamists, but a nationalism overlain by Islam remains a
powerful political force. Even leaders like the late King Hussein and Egypt's
President, Hosni Mubarak, long entrenched, have had to balance pro-Western
outlooks against the risk of being seen as the instruments of outsiders.
Activists trying to call attention to honor killings say they face a
similar challenge
from those who portray their campaign as an assault on Arab ways. "They
accuse
me of trying to make the country promiscuous," said Asma Khader, a Jordanian
lawyer who is a leader in efforts to tighten the laws against honor killing.
Even in places like Resaifah, a largely Palestinian village of noisy
streets and
dirt alleyways 45 minutes from Jordan's capital, Amman, contempt for honor
killing can be heard. "If you spit, does it come back clean?" said Sheik Ali
al-Auteh, 57, a tribal leader, mocking the idea that honor could be cleansed
with blood.
"A guy who kills might think that dishonor goes away," said his daughter,
Yousra, 17. "But when he walks past, people will say, 'There goes the guy
who killed his daughter.' "
The Code: Broad Acceptance of Tribal Justice
Yet the stories told by the al-Goul family and others, including killers and
women who were attacked by their families, suggest a broad acceptance
of an unwritten code, one that sees the unchaste woman as a threat. As
long as they can remember, girls like Amal al-Goul say, their brothers
warned them: If you stray, you die.
And when a woman like Basma al-Goul is thought to have crossed the line,
her family is ostracized, with her eight sisters deemed unmarriageable by
the neighbors, and her five brothers confronted with taunts in the street. It
was after other boys questioned his manhood, saying that Basma should
be dead, the family said, that Mahmoud al-Goul ran to shoot his sister
down.
"Before my sister was killed," Amal, the 18-year-old said, "I had to walk
with my eyes to the ground."
Most often, the killings occur among the poorer and less educated,
particularly in Arab tribal societies like Jordan's and the Palestinians,
with
long traditions of self-administered justice. The killings are rare among the
educated and urbane.
But even among those upper classes, it is rare to hear condemnation of
the killings. Across Arab society, a bride is expected to be a virgin, and
other people's justice is not a subject for polite company.
In dozens of conversations in the Arab world in recent months, lawyers,
laborers, clerics, cooks, physicians and politicians said most often that,
personally, they could not condone honor killing. But most also said they
felt the tug of traditions that could lead a man to kill, and some suggested
that they would be inclined to act on them.
"I would do what I have to do," said Bassam al-Hadid, a Jordanian with an
American doctorate who spent 12 years as a hospital administrator in the
United States, when asked whether he would kill a daughter who had sex
outside marriage.
Even some victims of the attacks said they deserved their fate. "He shouldn't
have let me live," said Roweida, 17, who was shot three times by her father
after she confessed to an adulterous affair, and, along with dozens of girls
with similar stories, is being held for her own protection in a Jordanian
prison.
"A girl who commits a sin deserves to die."
The System: Built-In Empathy for the Killer
Among all Arab countries, only Jordan publishes what are considered credible
crime statistics, so the extent of honor killing is difficult to gauge.
Often the
killings are hushed up, experts say, and disguised as accidental deaths. And,
most often, the killings occur outside the big cities, far from government
scrutiny.
Except in Jordan, government officials tend to treat the issue as taboo, at
least
in response to queries from foreign journalists.
But the statistics show that honor killings regularly claim 25 lives a year
in
Jordan alone, about one in four homicides in a country of just four million
people, according to Jordanian officials.
In Egypt, which last reported crime statistics in 1995, a Government report
counted 52 honor killings out of 819 slayings. In Yemen, with a population of
16 million, Mohammed Ba Obaid, who heads the department of Women's
Studies in Sanaa University, said his surveys found that more than 400 women
were killed for reasons of honor in 1997, the last year for which research is
complete.
"The culture does not allow any other choice for males," said Dr. Obaid, who
attended the recent conference in Jordan and called the figures "very
alarming."
The killings are also known in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and other Persian Gulf
countries,
and among Arabs in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The experts say it would
be
safe to estimate that the number of Arab women killed for reasons of honor
amounts
to hundreds each year.
But in most countries, activists and human-rights groups say, most killers
receive
light punishment, when they are prosecuted at all. Arab judges, who are
almost
always male, are generally allowed great latitude in sentencing, and most
tend
to see honor as a circumstance akin to self-defense.
"Nobody can really want to kill his wife or daughter or sister," said
Mohammed
Ajjarmeh, chief judge of the High Criminal Court in Jordan. "But sometimes
circumstances force him to do this. Sometimes, it's society that forces him
to do this, because the people won't forget. Sometimes, there are two victims
-- the murdered and the murderer."
That sense of empathy is built into judicial procedures.
An explicit exemption in Jordanian law, for example, allows a man who kills a
female relative surprised in an act of adultery or fornication to be judged
"not
guilty" of murder. Another loophole sought out by most defendants allows
leniency for those who can persuade the court that their sense of lost honor
caused them to act in an uncontrollable rage.
A Jordanian found guilty in an honor killing can be sentenced to as little
as six
months as prison. If the killing is ruled to be premeditated, the minimum
penalty
is a year. No similar forgiveness is offered to a woman who kills, even if
the
circumstances are the same.
Those are the laws that Jordan's Government has signaled that it intends to
toughen. But, in an indication of the depth of opposition in place around the
region, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, Abul-Hadi al-Majali,
and the District Attorney of Amman, Tawfiq al-Quaisi, said in interviews
that they opposed the effort.
"There is an internalized belief that the woman is the one responsible for
shame, because she could have resisted the seduction," said Zahra
Sharabiti, a Jordanian lawyer who specializes in defending those accused
of honor killings. In Egypt and in Jordan, convicted killers who opened their
doors warily to a Western stranger soon spoke with a defiant pride about
the justice they administered and received.
"We do not consider this murder," said Wafik Abu Abseh, a 22-year-old
Jordanian woodcutter, as his mother, brother and sisters nodded in
agreement. "It was like cutting off a finger."
Last June, Abu Abseh killed his sister, bashing her over the head with a
paving stone when he found her with a man. He spent just four months
in prison.
Marzouk Abdel Rahim, a Cairo tile maker, stabbed his 25-year-old daughter
to death at her boyfriend's house in 1997, then chopped off her head.
He also said he had no regrets. "Honor is more precious than my own flesh
and blood," said Abdel Rahim, who was released after two months.
In fact, honor is so precious that it is not unusual, experts say, for a
victim
to be slain on the basis of rumor alone. As often as not, said Dr. Hani
Jahshan, the deputy medical examiner of Jordan, his autopsy of a woman
slain for reasons of honor will find that her hymen is intact.
In Jordan, premarital sex is a criminal offense, regarded as equal to
adultery,
while a girl under 18 who engages in consensual sex is deemed to have been
raped. A woman cannot leave home without the permission of her family, and
an unmarried woman who becomes pregnant is not merely a criminal, but,
by law, her child is taken away at birth to be raised in an orphanage.
Dr. Jahshan's duties include examining girls and women taken into custody
and accused of involvement in breaking sex laws. His findings are reported
to the police and prosecutors, not to the girls' families. But three times
already, girls he examined alive have been returned to him dead.
The most recent was a 17-year-old girl arrested as a runaway this spring.
Her father had heard that the girl and her 16-year-old sister had been in
restaurants with men. Dr. Jahshan found that the girl was a virgin, and
she was ordered released by the authorities, who first obtained assurances
from her family that she would be safe.
But two weeks later, the girl was back on his table, killed, along with her
sister, by her father and two brothers, who could not believe that they were
innocent.
"Working here is very difficult," Dr. Jahshan said, as he showed forensic
photographs of the bruised, burned, battered or punctured bodies of the
young women who have come to him as corpses. "We have to solve this
problem."
Honor killings are not exclusively an Arab phenomenon. They are known in
India,
Pakistan and Turkey, among other places, particularly among poor, rural
Muslims.
Many Arabs complain that attention to their society's portion of the
problem reflects
a Western tendency to see them as backward.
"When a Western man kills his lover or wife, the crime is called a crime
of passion,"
said Mohammed Haj Yahya, an Arab-Israeli sociologist at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem who is active in efforts to combat honor killings. "But when it
happens
in Arab societies, it is called a family honor killing, and we are viewed
as barbarous."
Still, the prevailing tendency in the Arab world has been to leave the
phenomenon
unexplored. In Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and other places where
honor
killings take place, newspapers rarely mention such killings.
The Fervor: Islam's Teachings and Chastity
And when an American news magazine wrote earlier this year about the
killings in
Jordan, its Egyptian counterpart, Rose al-Youssef, issued a loud defense,
saying
that the notion that such a "brutal custom" was still being practiced was a
product
of foreigners' imaginations.
But what distinguishes honor killings in the Arab world is that they are
seen less
as crimes of passion than as inherently just. "Women are largely looked
upon as
bodies owned and protected by the husband, by the father, by the brother or
even
other relatives," said Salwa Bakr, a novelist who is Egypt's most prominent
feminist
writer.
"In many Arab countries, judges see honor killings as a circumstance akin
to self-
defense. Ayman, 38, in jail in Amman, Jordan, for killing his sister over
her sexual
relationship with a man, said he expected a sentence of less than a year. "
"And these crimes are committed under the pretext that these men are
defending
not only their honor, but society's morality."
Abu Abseh, the Jordanian who killed his sister with a paving stone, was
doing more.
He was administering God's law, he said. "We are Muslims," Abu Abseh's older
brother said, "and in our religion, she had to be executed." That is
certainly a
misunderstanding of Islam, Islamic scholars say, but it is not an uncommon
one.
As a result of a fundamentalist fervor that has touched much of the Arab
world in the
last two decades, Islamic faith has come to be worn more and more often as
a badge
of honor. Sometimes, it as a badge less earned than invoked, for purposes
that do not
always have a basis in the Koran.
"These crimes are occurring because of ignorance of Islam -- by the women who
commit these un-Islamic acts, but also by the men who kill them," said Abul
Menem
Abu Zant, a prominent Islamic leader in Jordan.
For women, and for men, Islam does put a premium on chastity, and it
prescribes
harsh punishments for sexual misconduct -- death for adultery, flogging for
fornication.
But Islam also teaches that religious authorities, not family members, be
the judges,
and that any punishment be deferred until a considered judgment is reached.
Islamic teachings caution further against false accusations. Only repeated
confessions
from the accused or the testimony of four male witnesses are seen as
conclusive
evidence of sexual misconduct. "Treat your women well, and be kind to
them," the
Prophet Mohammed is recorded as saying.
But Islam has always coexisted and, in some practices, become intertwined
with
older Arab traditions. One pre-Islamic Arab custom still prevalent in
Mohammed's
time was known as al-maoudeh -- the practice, explicitly condemned in the
Koran,
of burying baby daughters alive so that they would not later cause the
family shame.
The era that preceded Islam's arrival in the 7th century is now known to
Muslims as
Al Jahiliya, or the Age of Ignorance. But its traditions of harsh justice,
rendered in
verse by the 10th-century poet Al Motanabi ("Your utmost honor will not be
cleansed,
until blood is spilled," he wrote) have survived in Arab folklore and
culture.
Even today, Arab Christian as well as Muslim men are often advised on their
wedding
night, only half in jest, to "slaughter the cat." The phrase is a reference
to a tale in
which a groom brutally beheads a kitten in the bedchamber before having sex
with
his virgin bride. If she strays, the man tells her, she will suffer the
cat's fate.
Honor killings are not committed by Arab Muslims alone. Arab Christians are
a small
minority today in places like Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian
territories, but they
account for a proportionate share of those killings, experts say.
It is among Arab tribes, whose centuries of intermarriage have created
powerful bonds,
that traditional notions of honor may be most enduring. Even in modern
urban life, in
places like Jordan, many people identify most strongly with a tribe, so
that the conduct
of one reflects on all.
"When a man's daughter does a wrong, he cannot sit amongst men," Banjes
al-Hadid,
a member of Jordan's Parliament and a prominent tribal leader, told a
visitor to his
home, atop Amman's highest hill.
"He will be ostracized. They will not even give him coffee. Who would like
to kill his
wife or daughter? But if he does not, in a village or among a tribe, they
will look down
on him."
Some people, like Sheik Abu Zant, the Islamic leader, argue that stricter
allegiance
to Islam is the answer. They note that honor killing, by most accounts, is
far less
common in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have imposed
strict
Islamic law and where premarital sex, sometimes, is indeed punished by
lashing,
and adultery by death.
If Jordan were to follow that example, Sheik Abu Zant said, fathers,
brothers and
sons would be less inclined to carry out the honor killings that some now
justify
as taking Islamic law into their own hands.
But a broader consensus holds that a better solution is silence, when it
comes to
sexual misconduct. "You have to cover it up," said Sheik Hadid. "If no one
knows
what happened, everyone will be more secure."
One option pursued by some young Arab women is surgery. On her wedding night,
an Arab bride is expected to bleed. A woman who does not can expect to be
hauled
to a gynecologist by her husband, who would demand to be told whether she had
truly been a virgin.
The Solutions: Proposals of Sharia and of Silence
For women who have had premarital sex, a way to avoid discovery is known as
hymen
restoration. As long as the woman's sexual experience has been limited,
gynecologists
say, the surgical procedure is simple and inexpensive -- a stitching
together of what
remains of the hymen, usually a few days before the wedding, so that it
will tear again
during intercourse.
In Egypt, Jordan, and most other Arab countries, the procedure is illegal,
because it is
seen as defrauding the husband. But it is also widely practiced.
"What's important is saving the woman's life," said a Jordanian
gynecologist who asked
not to be identified.
But the more traditional Arab way to cover up is through a kind of shotgun
marriage that
keeps honor intact. Tribal leaders in Jordan, who serve with the blessing
of the Government,
say they act as intermediaries many dozens of times a year, sometimes at
the request
of young women, and sometimes by their families, in the hope of
legitimizing a union
before it becomes fodder for gossip.
If the male partner is reluctant, Sheik Hadid said, he makes a powerful
plea: "Do you want
her parents to kill her? Do you want her to die?" And as cruel as it may
sound, Sheik Hadid
said, he tries to arrange marriages between the sexual partners even in
cases of violent rape.
"It might not be her fault," he said, "but as I see it, the girl has no
other choice."
Until the Egyptian Parliament acted in April, that thinking was built into
Egyptian law, with
the statute that promised a pardon to any rapist who agreed to marry his
victim. One attempt
to change that statute failed last December, and the usually compliant
Parliament did not
finally acquiesce until Mubarak ordered it repealed by decree.
And even now, some Egyptian legal scholars argue that old provision should
be restored.
"Executing or putting a rapist in jail does not help anyone," said Mustafa
Ewis, a senior
lawyer in Cairo's Legal Resource Research Center, which describes itself as
a human-
rights advocacy group. "But if he marries the victim, then it helps both of
them, giving
them a chance to start fresh and to protect the girl from social stigma."
The attitude is repellent to people like Fawziya Abdel Sattar, a leading
law professor and
former member of the Egyptian Parliament who was active in pressing for the
change.
"Instead of punishing the rapist, the law gave him back his victim to
re-rape her, legally
this time," Ms. Abdel Sattar said.
Still, once the specter of shame begins to loom, some families come to see
killing as
the only choice. In March, the family of Amal, a 17-year-old Jordanian,
discovered that
she was pregnant. She told them she had been raped in December by a friend
of her
father's, who was staying in the family home. Her sister-in-law sold her
gold jewelry
to pay for an abortion.
But the doctor refused to perform the procedure, which is illegal in
Jordan. And so
instead, Amal said, her father decided to use the money to buy a gun.
The next day, he sent her mother and younger siblings from the house,
closed the
windows and curtains, then turned the music loud. As Amal lay on a mattress
in her
room, the father and her 22-year-old brother took turns with the revolver,
shooting her
eight times and leaving her for dead.
Amal's brother is still in jail, but her father is already free on bail.
And Amal, now
bullet-scarred and six months pregnant, is also in jail, with much less
hope of swift
release.
Officially, she is being held for her protection.
Her father, brother and her cousins all still want to kill her. But she is
also a prisoner
of her culture, and of a paternalistic Jordanian law that allows a woman to
be released
only to a close male relative.
Among the 40 or so other Jordanian women caught with Amal in a similar
limbo, prison
officials say, many have been in custody for years -- one since 1990.
Some activists have begun to conclude that their only escape from honor's
thrall may
be to leave Jordan forever, through complicated arrangements that require
the help of
foster families abroad. "They should be considered social refugees," said
Ms. Khader,
the Jordanian lawyer.
