Carnal Reason

In the last few weeks, the Swedish society has been touched by the brutal and calculated murder of Fadima Sahindal; a young courageous woman who chose to live according to her will and paid the price by her life. In the last two months, two other young women in Denmark and Britain were killed by their fathers because of the honor of the family. Honor of men and the family took their lives. Honor killing is a tribal and Islamic practice prevalent in Islam- ridden countries and Muslim inhabited communities in the West. Being killed deliberately and brutally is, in fact, a price that victims pay to practice their minimal human rights such as how to dress, talk to men other than their male family members, live, work and study independently, and marry at will, or have voluntary sexual relations.

Hundreds of women get shot, burned, strangled, stoned, poisoned, beheaded or stabbed every year in Islam ridden countries because their male relatives believe their actions have soiled the family name. They die, so family honor may survive. According to this tribal and religious practice, woman is a man’s possession and a reflection of his honor. It is the man’s honor that gets tarnished if a woman is ‘loose’. The murderers and their defenders refer to this verse of the Koran 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, chapter 4, verse 34. Honor killing is a tribal practice that has been incorporated in the religion of Islam, because of its anti - women nature and misogynist philosophy. And the law is usually on the man’s side, not only in the Middle Eastern and the Central Asian countries, but shamefully, in the Western countries too. They often letting murderers go unpunished or with a light sentence.
SecularIslam.org

This type murder is hard for the western mind to understand. Here is an case in point, via Chicago Boyz.

Earlier this year, a young Turkish woman was killed by her brother, to ‘restore the family’s honor’. As it recently turned out during the trial of the 19-year-old boy, she had been raped by a family member five years before her killing:

He said he was deeply unhappy and that he could only be happy were he to free himself from an old burden. Something terrible had happened in his family when he was 14, he said, something involving his sister. Ayhan apparently told Melek [his former girlfriend - RG] that if she knew what he had been through and witnessed, she would understand hy he had to do something his older brothers should have done years ago: kill Hatin.

Investigators now believe that Hatin was once raped by one of the men in her family. She was a victim of incest, and under her community’s crude code of honor it was not the rapist but the victim who should be held responsible.

If someone had raped my sister, I might very well commit murder. But I would kill the rapist, not my sister.

My point here is not to deplore this disgusting practice, these killings with no honor. It is not to call attention to the cowardice of men who kill women for being victimized, the very same women they failed to protect.

My point is to emphasize the gulf in world views that separate us. A culture that would allow this barbarism to continue is one whose entire moral outlook is suspect. When the Muslim world chooses to blame the West for this, that, or the other, why the hell should we care? It is clear that there is no one they will not blame. Except themselves.

Posted on October 10th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: General