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muhammad was a terrorist
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Date Posted: 23:46:13 05/30/04 Sun
In reply to:
Server OF JUST Desserts (SJD)
's message, "The Violence of Islam in the Modern Era" on 23:40:59 05/30/04 Sun
"Honour" Killings of Muslim women to "please allah"
Another disturbing aspect of traditional Muslim treatment of women is the phenomenon known as “honour killing.” This behaviour, which has absolutely nothing “honourable” about it, involves the murder of women by their male relatives for some perceived slight against the honour of the family unit. Primarily these slights are sexual in nature, ranging from something as serious as fornication to something as relatively innocuous as flirting with a man outside the family. A wife requesting a divorce is cited as another common motivation for honour killings, and they often occur simply because a girl refused to marry a partner chosen by pre-arrangement. There have even been instances where Muslim women have been killed because they had been raped, a crime which Islamic law often considers to be the fault of the woman, not the rapist. This despicable practice has spread to the West, brought along by the Muslim immigrants who have been settling primarily in Western Europe. Great Britain has seen a rise in this crime. For instance, on 12 October 2002, a 48 year old Kurdish man, an exile from Iraq, savagely murdered his 16 year old daughter after receiving an anonymous letter telling him that she had been sleeping with her boyfriend18. She had brought shame upon the family, at least according to an anonymous note, and for this he repeatedly stabbed her back and chest, finally burying the blade of his knife so savagely into her throat that the metal tip snapped off after hitting bone. The BBC at the time also reported that the girl had left a note to her father detailing her intention of running away with her boyfriend, and the reason given was his previous propensity for punching and kicking her. Indeed, police reports noted that she had been beaten for months before her murder took place.
The same article also details other honour killings in Britain. In March 2002, a Muslim woman was kidnapped, strangled with parcel tape, and set on fire after filing for divorce from her husband. A Muslim man stabbed his daughter to death, over 20 strokes, because he caught her at home with a boyfriend in February 2002. In September 2002, a Muslim man went to the home of his estranged wife and hacked her and their two small children to death with a machete. Unfortunately, this sort of butchery is becoming more common in the West among the resident Muslim immigrant populations. Honour killings have also been reported in Italy, Sweden, Brazil, and Ecuador.
The impetus for this behaviour is not an aberration from the treatment of women in Muslim populations, but instead is firmly ground in the societal, and even legal, sanction of many Muslim nations. Honour killing is common across the Muslim world, more common than many would like to admit. Indeed, the United Nations Population Fund estimates that around 5,000 women are murdered each year through honour killings. The reason for this crime is the deep grounding in Arab culture of the communal sense of honour and shame. If one acts shamefully, then the shame is not just borne by the individual, but by the whole family group, often concomitant with social shunning by other members of the community. This then combines with the Islamic tendency to downgrade the personhood of women, and gives a heartbreaking cocktail of worldly religious fanaticism and the scapegoating of women. This bears out in the case, more typical than we would like to believe, of Rofayda Qaoud, a 17 year old Palestinian girl who was raped by her two brothers. She was taken into custody by the Palestinian police, and then returned to her family after she had given birth. Her mother demanded that she commit suicide. The girl refused, and her mother came into her room one night and wrapped a plastic bag around her head, slit her wrists with a razor, and then beat her on the head with a wooden stick, killing her19. The mother specifically stated that upholding the family honour was the reason she murdered her daughter.
Honour killing is abetted by the fact that the need to maintain honour is a mitigating circumstance under the legal systems of many Muslim countries. The Palestinian mother who murdered her daughter could have received a maximum sentence of five years in prison, specifically because the honour factor was introduced and accepted as mitigating, even though the penalty for premeditated murder under Palestinian law is capital punishment. Many countries legally accept honour as a mitigating factor, including Jordan, Morocco, and Syria. In a speech on this subject, Azam Kamguian listed the articles in various Muslim countries which sanction honour killings by lowering or abolishing the punishment for murder if the murder was committed to maintain “honour”: Article 562 in Lebanon (abolished in February 1999), Article 340 in Jordan, Article 548 in Syria, Article 153 in Kuwait, Article 237 in Egypt, Article 309 in Iraq, Article 334 in the United Arab Emirate, Article 70 in Bahrain, Article 179 in Iran before 1979, Articles 418-424 in Morocco, and Article 252 in Oman20. He also notes that Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan and Qatar also apply a strict, traditional interpretation of shari’a in which honour killing is tacitly acknowledged. Indeed, a bill was recently introduced in the Jordanian parliament which would have increased penalties against those who commit honour killings. The bill was soundly defeated on the principle that it contradicted Islamic teaching and traditions, according to a Jordanian parliamentarian interviewed in the Associated Press story of 4 August, 2003. The placement of the burden of guilt for familial shame stemming from misbehaviour, even that of male members of the family, onto women is an injustice which stems from Islamic misogyny codified by centuries of tradition and orthodox interpretation of the Qur’an and the ahadith.
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