Photos by Stewart Innes.
The mood was tranquil in a Jordanian maternity hospital last month, when suddenly a 35 year-old man, accompanied by his two brothers, stormed into the room where their unmarried cousin was recovering after giving birth, by Caesarian section, to her baby the day before. In front of medical staff, the man pulled out a gun and opened fire, shooting six times, killing the 25 year-old mother. The baby slept on unharmed at the corpse’s side. The gunman then promptly turned himself in to police, telling them he had acted “to cleanse his family’s honour.”
Just a couple of weeks before, a Jordanian man stabbed his pregnant sister to death after she married an Egyptian against the wishes of her family. The brother then called the police, and waited for them to arrive at the scene. He had used a kitchen knife. There were 25 stab wounds to different parts of his sister’s body. He told the police investigators, in a familiar phrase, that he had committed the crime “to cleanse the family’s honour”.
This is the reality of “honour killing” today in Jordan, one of the most open and democratic nations in the Arab world. It is the custom that forms the backbone of Australian-based, Jordanian-born author Norma Khouri’s now-discredited “memoir, “Forbidden Love” - a book whose basic claims of detail were not corroborated by any of the Jordanians interviewed by The Australian across the country.
But shifting “Forbidden Love” from the true life to the fiction shelves won’t make honour killing go away. This particular type of crime - “Jara’im Al-Sharaf,” in the highly emotive Arabic - may occur only rarely in Jordan, but the number of cases reported has remained consistent over the past decade, at about 20 each year. Such killings are against the law and the key dictates of Islam, yet they are almost condoned by the mitigating defences still enshrined in the Jordanian legal system. There have been urgent campaigns by human rights and women’s activists to increase the sentencing penalties: but taking a life to redeem honour is still widely regarded, in the more conservative quarters of Jordanian society, as a pardonable offence.
Honour killing is spawned by a potent mix of factors - social and psychological, traditional and modern. Above all, though, the practice marks a fault-line: the point where the unease of Middle Eastern societies, when faced with the threatening force of sexual freedom, surfaces most plainly and with most shocking effect.
A detailed report released this April by Human Rights Watch cuts to the heart of things: “It is the most extreme form of domestic violence, a crime based in male privilege and prerogative, and woman’s subordinate social status. Honour killings are the most tragic consequence and graphic illustration of deeply embedded, society-wide gender discrimination.”
The act of violence itself, though, is only one element in the background that makes the persistence of honour killings possible. Police do little to try to deter these crimes, and often regard the perpetrators as “vindicated men.” Almost always, the killer is a close relation of the victim. The courts are lenient: a convicted honour killer will generally receive a sentence of about one year in jail, which will be reduced to six months if the victim’s relatives agree. Women who are under threat of violence from their own families are often incarcerated by the authorities for their own protection, and can remain in government detention centres for years on end. Those women suspected of honour offences may even be subject to humiliating virginity examinations, required by police at the insistence of their families.
Honour killing is now widely regarded, thanks in part to Norma Khouri’s efforts, as a Jordanian phenomenon. The truth may be quite different. There are regular reports of honour killings from the Palestinian West Bank, from Lebanon and Iraq, and, further afield, from Pakistan. Investigators believe the practice may well exist, shrouded in silence, in the conservative Arab nations of the Gulf.
Amal Al-Sabbagh, director of Jordan’s National Commission for Women, is explicit about this: “Compared to other countries,” she argues, “Jordan has gone a long way in admitting the problem, and has been courageous enough to stand up and talk about it.” Dr Al-Sabbagh believes the cascade of changes affecting the entire Middle East provides some explanation for the endurance of honour killing customs. “We have in our society an amalgam of people who still believe this is right, that this should be done. In many ways the transition though which our whole region is going, politically and economically, has had its effect. We in Jordan have had to accept great, disturbing economic changes: honour crimes are one of the last bastions of traditional social power, with conservatives saying we cannot change our present practices.”
Only last year, the lower house of the Amman Parliament rejected a set of liberal measures to expand womens’ rights, and a protracted effort to change the sentencing provisions for honour crimes has also stalled. But Al-Sabbagh knows the problem lies much deeper than the law. “We need a whole change of mind-set, across society,” she says: “An effort at consciousness-raising.”
What, though, does Jordanian society think? What’s the view of the “Arab street,” that bustling, picturesque, engaging place, where a hundred opinions contend in raucous, joyous argument at every hour of the day? Over the past week, The Australian conducted a range of interviews with everyday Jordanians, in provincial cities and in small, outlying Bedouin communities. These discussions were always open in spirit, and full of depth. They were all with men - it’s not easy for western journalists to start holding talks with women outside the major city centres of the Arab world. Our discussions suggest that many Jordanians condone the principle of honour killing, if only as a regrettable last resort. The subject is rarely tackled in public, but every time an honour killing takes place, word spreads. Attitudes are contradictory: almost always, popular ideas of justice are loosely based on the precepts of the Koran; but there is also an urgent desire to control the onrush of “western-style” sexual conduct. In one northern outpost, a group of Bedouin workmen explained their view that women are the badge of each family’s honour.
“The male in our society has a strong sense of protective jealousy for the woman,” said Fayez Izbaidi: “Sexual sin brings disease and disgrace.” But killing a woman who strays is not the best way of resolving matters: a brokered marriage between the woman and her lover is almost always the preferred option. The Bedouin men divided on whether they would kill one of their own sisters caught in an affair: “Of course, that’s what a real man would do, at once,” said one: “That kind of violence disgusts me,” said another.
There were precedents quoted from the Koran; the story of a recent honour killing, which took place in the nearby city of Irbid, was also raised.
“We’ve never heard of it happening in our tribe, of 35,000 people,” they insisted: “But when it does happen, it’s done more as an example, to deter other women from wrong conduct.”
Men in mid-life, well-schooled in religious teachings, led the talk; occasionally, with an air of bravado, a young man would break in. “I hate my culture,” said one: “I can’t do what I want to do. I would like to know a girl and live with her, in a western way, but not here - and every young man I know agrees with me…”
Mohammed Musaeed, the leader among another group of Bedouin men, insisted that men and women are “as equal as the teeth of a comb” under Islam, and that when a woman’s life is taken once she has sinned, it is to gain forgiveness for her soul. “If such things happen,” he said, vaguely, “they happen on a tribal level. The feeling is that if a girl is allowed to do such things, then others will follow - so simply expelling her from the community isn’t enough.”
Much closer to the capital, in the large industrial town of Zarqa, where honour killings have been recorded, a lengthy mid-afternoon talk uncovered a similar mix of attitudes: Abdel Abbo Rababa, who runs a barbers’ shop, goes strait to the point: “I’m from the countryside, originally, a country boy. For me, if someone’s going to touch my honour, you could expect some kind of reaction. I’m pretty relaxed and modern in my outlook, except on this front. I’d be very vexed if something happened to one of my sisters before marriage. I wouldn’t let it pass, and most people I know would be like me.”
All the men in the talk at Zarqa knew very well that the law is lenient to the honour killer, if the crime is judged to be one of passion, and not premeditated.
“Truthfully, it’s very rare that there’s an honour killing,” said Abdullah Amali: “Most people would favour marrying the girl off to the man she was seeing. But when it does take place, in the way this happens in our society, you hear about it only very quietly, and because of the nature of the crime, you can’t ever bring it up with the families involved.”
This climate of taboos and shame helps create the conditions in which crimes of honour continue to be committed, and swept under the carpet. Many Jordanians regard the practice as a marker of something traditional in their culture - even though moderate Islamic scholars here have repeatedly stressed that the Koran does not allow individuals to decide the law or take life.
In fact, by a startling twist of irony, the laws that regulate honour killing have nothing to with Muslim jurisprudence at all: they come from somewhere very different - the West. Jordan’s legal code is a mix, descended from Islamic “Sharia” ideas and Lebanese and foreign influences. Several central principles come from the French Code Napoleon, and are a legacy of colonial days. Among these is the very Gallic idea of reduced penalties for a fatal “crime of passion” - a killing by an outraged husband who catches his Bovaryesque wife in flagrante with her lover. Jordanian law has its echo in the provisions of mitigation for crimes committed in the heat of the moment: in effect, this has evolved into a get-out clause that keeps sentences for honour killing low.
Amman lawyer and human rights activist Reem Abu Hassan, who has been involved in many law reform campaigns, describes Jordan’s present dilemma: “I think our country is trapped on this point,” she says: “A conservative society is being exposed to globalization, and to many reforms in all aspects of life. These mitigating legal provisions for crimes of honour are one of the ways for conservative people to protect their heritage and identity. But of course honour crimes aren’t part of our identity! If we look back at Islamic criminal law, it’s clear that Islam is against such practices.”
It would be easy, at this juncture, to conclude, with judgmental, western eyes, that honour killings only affect women, and highlight grave disparities between the sexes in Jordanian society.
But over time many of those who fight within Jordan for womens’ rights, and who deal constantly with the inside stories of honour crimes, have come to see things differently. They paint a picture of honour killings as a social cancer - a picture in which entire families are torn by furious pressures, and both the male perpetrator and the slain woman are victims. This, believes Reem Abu Hassan, explains the extreme violence so frequent in these crimes: “The relationship between victim and perpetrator is very close. The process the killer goes through is tortuous. He resists, and then eventually breaks out in anger, and fury - fury against the woman, and himself.”
How to break the cycle? Publicity, speeches by members of the Jordanian royal family, quiet lobbying, grass-roots meetings between conservative law-makers and their female constituents - all these avenues have been tried. But one obvious measure to change the culture remains to be explored: the deterrent of a long prison term for honour killings. If this reform were introduced, if the punishment were more closely calibrated to the crime, and Jordanian law sent out a message of strong protection for the lives of women, perhaps the fierce appeal of honour killings might at last begin to fade.
(Copyright © 2003 Stewart Innes. All rights reserved)