In reality, forces both within the government and Parliament had never intended the bill to pass in the first place … the reason behind it is not about the article itself but fear that the article will lead to reforms … reforms that would hold them accountable, loosen their grip on power, by allowing people to move creatively and freely to move our country forwards.
It is an old game where Parliament and government oppose each other outwardly to give the image of democracy at the expense of the people and our progress. Meanwhile innocents are murdered and our country remains economically stagnant.
What really irked those forces of negativity is the fact that members of the Hashemite family and the people marched together… since they have been trying to use their institutions to create a barrier between the king and his people, so that they may gain more power, by trying to manipulate the king’s decisions the way that suits them.
However, in times past, what kept this kingdom together was the fact that the king and the people rallied together to prevent forces of negativity from taking over the country.8
Some time later, Prince Ali assured me when I interviewed him in August 2006 that he had received the full backing and blessing of King Abdullah to organize the march. ‘Every single member of our family considers this a very important issue because it is against our traditions and religion and is wrong. We are all emotional about this particular issue. King Abdullah is extremely open minded and I told him: “Look, this is an issue and I know this is your government, but is it OK if we make a stand?” He told me to go ahead.’
I asked him what he thought of the deputies’ decision. ‘Unfortunately, sometimes people take the easier route. They do not want to step on anyone’s toes nor stir things up. This is because they cannot deal with this democracy on the one hand and because of their own fears on the other.’
Prince Ali criticized the government’s handling of the matter. ‘It was not a priority for the government and it brushed it over. This, to me, was very bad especially that the government represents the King and we know very well that the King and the royal family were completely against it. I really thought we could change things in a day; obviously you cannot. The whole culture needs to be changed.’
Prince Ali said that one reason why Prime Minister Rawabdeh refused to face us was that ‘none of the officials actually believed that we would go through with it. When we did, they were surprised and confused. They did not know how to react. I was also surprised that the Prime Minister wasn’t there. He was a respected politician.’
One of the main criticisms levelled at us that day had been voiced by Islamist Deputy Abdullah Akayleh, who was quoted in an article written by my colleague Dima Hamdan for The Jordan Times in February 2000: ‘I find it strange that people should be grouped for such demonstrations. Tribal leaders did not join the march on their own accord, they were driven to it.’
Prince Ali said that he saw many tribal leaders who were fully aware of and fully supported what we were trying to achieve. One of the reasons for holding the march, he said, was ‘to show that this custom was not a tribal tradition. This is an excuse that has been used by a lot of people before the demonstrations: that this was Jordanian culture.’
I was still buzzing after the march and was still furious that the MPs had refused to listen to the people, to its voters and to the royal family. Something in my gut told me to head over to the Criminal Court, that something would be happening there that day.
I wasn’t wrong.
CHAPTER 8
Opening the Floodgates
The month before our march, on 4 October, thirty-four-year-old Samir Ayed saw his sister Hanan walking in the street in the company of two men at around 8 a.m. in the town of Zarqa. Apparently, he ‘became enraged’, drew a gun and shot her three times in the head. He then calmly sat and smoked a cigarette, gazing at his sister’s body while he waited for the police to come and arrest him.
The defence argued that the thirty-two-year-old victim had been divorced twice for her ‘poor conduct’ and ‘immoral behaviour’. I arrived at the courthouse just in time to catch the verdict. The court decided to amend the premeditated murder charge to that of a misdemeanour because he committed his crime in a fit of fury to cleanse his honour. He was sentenced to six months in prison. The court ruled that he benefited from Article 98, and not Article 340. This verdict, given on the day of our march, was a clear message from the judges of the Criminal Court to campaigners like me.
Also on the same day, the IAF held a press conference at which they claimed the government had banned them from holding a counter-march to voice their objection to our campaign. They announced that their scholars committee had issued a fatwa [religious decree] calling for the maintenance of Article 340 because ‘it was the last fortress that would protect the morals of our society, and cancelling it was against the Islamic Sharia.’9
The fatwa said: ‘Muslims in this country were surprised by a witty and misleading campaign which was aimed at scrapping Article 340, to destroy our Islamic, social and family values, by stripping men of their humanity when they surprise their wives or female relatives committing adultery, a right that was valued by the Islamic Sharia.’
‘This article does not encourage killings as much as it encourages preserving one’s virtue and the honour of the family,’ it continued, and also called on Muslims to stop the ‘suspicious campaign’ targeting deputies.
The fatwa also questioned what would happen if Article 340 were scrapped. ‘What do they expect from a man who is surprised and saw a man committing adultery with his wife or one of his female relatives? This man should not be angry and instead should control his temper and head to the nearest police station and complain, during which time the crime would have ended and no longer can be proven.’
The fatwa said this was against what God stipulated; that cancelling this article would encourage the spread of fornication and constitute a call to kill religious beliefs and Islamic fervour. ‘Since foreign legislators also valued the fit of fury status for men and male relatives and offered them leniency in such crimes, and they are the ones living in a lewd atmosphere that allows relationships between men and women, then why should we not give the same excuse in our Islamic, Arab and Jordanian society?’
The Jordanian Ifta Department at the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, the highest religious authority in the Kingdom – the only body endowed with the authority to issue a fatwa in Jordan – remained silent when the IAF issued its fatwa.
The next day a local newspaper reported on a fatwa issued by the Al-Azhar Ifta Council, which was represented by Sheikh Mohammad Said Tantawi, one of the most respected Ifta institutions in the Sunni Muslim world. They said that no individual has the right to take the life of a female relative caught committing adultery or found in an adulterous situation: ‘Instead, applying the punishment should be up to the ruler, because if individuals are allowed to take the law into their own hands, then it will create chaos.’ The fatwa also said that if an individual stated the reason for his killing, then he would be slandering his victim and would be in violation of the Islamic Sharia which ordered people to keep these issues hidden in order to protect the dignity and honour of families.10
The Jordanian government took three months to respond to the IAF’s fatwa. The Legislative Bureau at the Prime Ministry ruled that the issuance of fatwas in Jordan was the sole jurisdiction of the Ifta Council.
During our interview, Prince Ali described the Front as a very well-respected political party with a generally decent agenda in Jordan, but said, ‘They are politicians and nobody has a monopoly on religion, especially if they are politicians. You can agree and disagree with them and they can agree and disagree with you but because they put the word “Islam” at the front of their name this does not mean they represent in any way anything more than any other Muslim, Christian or other religious person in this country.’
Jordanian political analyst Adnan Abu Odeh said the IAF be
lieved that opposing change was a sure-fire vote-winning policy, while former Prime Minster Fayez Tarawneh said, ‘The IAF use certain holy Quranic verses to scare voters into supporting them … The IAF issued a fatwa. They were not supposed to. Fatwas are for the rulers to issue.’
It was clear by now that those who opposed change were a small but powerful minority. A great many events took place and a great many groups spoke out in the wake of the march, including soldiers, politicians and sportspeople. A war veterans association wrote a public letter to King Abdullah, saying, ‘There is no shame in talking about our mistakes and backwardness, but what is a shame is to cover it up as if nothing is happening. Crimes of honour are only inflicted on women, and with our respect to the opposing opinions, we believe it is time to cancel Article 340.’ I couldn’t have agreed more with their sentiment and it was such a boost to see this coming from a highly respected body of army officers.
Centrist Al-Ajial from the Generations Political Party also issued a statement condemning Article 340, which they said was used as ‘a pretext for killers to commit all sorts of crimes against innocent women. Justifying a murder that occurred in a fit of fury could not be tolerated by an Arab and Muslim man who was brought up on virtue and preserving his honour, home and religion.’
In an editorial, Al Rai sports editor Samir Janakat called on all sports federations to take a ‘positive and active role towards a phenomenon, which, according to statistics, mostly victimizes young females’.
Despite this tide of popular opinion, many deputies remained defiant. The fact that two princes had led the march had irked many of them, and they argued that the royal family should not interfere in Parliament’s job. Many MPs cited this as the main reason why they had voted against the bill a second time.
On 23 February 2000, some fifty-five MPs signed a petition calling for Islamic Sharia to govern life in Jordan ‘to rid the nation of the burden of a bloated bureaucracy, favouritism and dereliction the country is presently suffering’. They also made it clear that they believed the royal family should not meddle in politics.
There was a huge and unexpected public outcry against this petition, which caused thirty of the fifty-five signatories to withdraw their names. Suddenly they started to argue among themselves over how the petition had been worded. Clearly they had not expected it to cause such controversy.
Some deputies stated they had changed their minds on reflection or because they had not paid sufficient attention to the text of the motion. Others said they decided to retract their statement on the motion because it had been ‘misinterpreted’ by the media. Still others said they had not read the petition before signing it, and some admitted as Muslims they had been ‘embarrassed’, and had felt obliged to sign when MP Mohammad Bani Hani asked for their support.11
A week after our march, the Senate reviewed the draft for the second time and upheld its previous decision, forcing a joint session of the Upper and Lower Houses to vote on the draft law once and for all. But after various delays, the joint session was never held and Parliament was dissolved for the summer vacation in June 2001. It seemed as though the opposition would, like us, never consider giving up for a moment.
This now meant that a joint session could be held only if the King summoned Parliament for an extraordinary sitting. According to the Constitution, in an extraordinary sitting, lawmakers are limited to the discussion of drafts specified in a Royal Decree.
On 22 February 2000, the Islamist weekly newspaper Al-Sabeel announced it was conducting what it claimed was a ‘comprehensive’ three-day survey aimed at determining the public’s attitudes towards the cancellation of Article 340.
The questionnaire asked:
Are you for or against the cancellation of Article 340?
Is honour killing a major problem and does it deserve all the attention it has received from the government?
Had you heard of Article 340 before the recent campaign?
Do you believe that these crimes happen because Sharia laws on adultery are not applied in the Jordanian Penal Code?
Do you believe the movement to cancel Article 340 was based on international pressure or internal political strategies?
The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Assef Jolani, was very honest about expressing his bias. ‘Our position is clear on this issue. We are against all this attention and we felt that this movement was not based on the needs of people,’ he wrote in his editorial. He said most Islamists opposed the draft law because it was the result of international pressure.
He emphasized that Muslims are opposed to shedding the blood of innocent women and that the government was at fault because it did not apply the Islamic Sharia. ‘That is why some people take the law into their own hands, because they know there is no punishment for adulterers,’ he explained.
The survey was conducted randomly in the cities of Amman, Zarqa and Irbid, as well as being available online. Two days later, the newspaper issued the results of the survey on its front page, stating that seventy-six per cent of the 163 respondents were against cancelling the article and nineteen per cent were in favour, while the rest were undecided. The survey found that seventy-eight per cent of the women and seventy-seven per cent of the men surveyed were in favour of keeping the article.
Fifty-eight per cent of those surveyed said the government’s campaign was the result of international pressure and eighty-one per cent said so-called honour crimes take place in Jordan because the Islamic Sharia on adultery is not part of the Penal Code.12
Other deputies, along with the local press, accused the Netherlands of blackmailing Jordan by threatening to cut aid if Article 340 was not changed. The Dutch ambassador to Jordan, Bernard Tangelder, denied these reports, claiming they were merely rumour based on misquotes. Others accused the government of succumbing to the USA, claiming that the USA was going to block a $25 million donation to Jordan.
Prince Ali brushed these accusations aside. ‘We are not a country that gets easily pressured by anybody. This is simply a ridiculous excuse. We are a small country and live in a tough neighbourhood. There are many times in our history when we have been besieged. We have been pressured by big and regional powers. But we are not afraid of taking stands that no other Arab country has ever taken. Be it an Arab or foreign embassy, we are much stronger than that.’
Prince Ali went as far as to criticize some foreign missions for their interference, or at least for their bad timing when I interviewed him. ‘The US Embassy said a few days before the voting that the law should be changed. That helped the opposition, who used this as the excuse they needed to say they would not be forced to do something because the west wants them to.’
Many people concluded that we failed in convincing the Lower House to cancel Article 340. That is of course absolutely true, but as far as I was concerned, the battle had just begun and we had already succeeded in improving women’s rights in many other ways. It was often brought home to me, however, that the opposition to change ran deep and moved in powerful circles.
The government began to promote the idea of introducing a quota so that women would have a voice in Parliament in the upcoming elections. My colleague Alia Shukri Hamzeh from The Jordan Times was the only female reporter who attended a debate with the Parliament Legal Committee to discuss the new draft election law with the heads of other women’s organizations.
A deputy from Amman Fourth District strongly opposed the idea. He said that being an MP was a man’s job; a woman can jeopardize her honour by going out late at night to take part in related social activities. If his daughter stayed out late at night he would shoot her himself, he added. He told the gathering that a woman’s presence in Parliament ‘would be damaging, since a woman in the house would distract male deputies and stir trouble when male deputies instinctively look at her breasts.’
At that moment, several of his colleagues pointed out to him that there was a female reporter in the room. He later told Hamzeh that had he known she was in the room
he would not have made these remarks, but he did not apologize. He also pleaded with her not to mention his name in the article.13
But perhaps the most disturbing statement of all came from former Justice Minister and current Deputy, Abdul Karim Dughmi. He told foreign journalist Eliza Griswold in an interview published in The Sunday Times on 7 August 2001, entitled ‘Death and dishonour’, on the topic of so-called honour crimes in the Kingdom: ‘All women killed in cases of honour are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die.’
* * *
In June and July of 2000, we went back to the streets of Amman and other cities to collect more signatures and to evaluate the level of awareness among ordinary citizens. We headed to Wihdat neighbourhood and entered shops located on the main road, Madaba Street, asking owners and shoppers to sign our petitions. To our delight the result was very positive; the majority of people we spoke to this time had better knowledge of the issue. Many voiced their objection and immediately signed the petition. This time, we didn’t find it as hard to convince anyone to sign, as people had already been informed about the subject.
Committee member Maha Abu Ayyash entered a shop in Wihdat where two men were getting ready for noon prayers. She said she was hesitant at first to enter because they seemed to be in a private conversation. But when she entered, one of the men looked at her and noticed the petitions in her hand. His first reaction was, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you!’ He explained that he had a business partner who had killed one of his female relatives only to use Article 98 to escape justice.
While many local NGOs, professional associations and political parties organized debates and workshops to discuss the issue and the efforts exerted in Jordan, opposing rallies continued. In a lecture organized by the Culture Committee of the Jordanian Professional Associations, former female senator and practicing lawyer Na’eyla Rashdan accused us of running a ‘misleading campaign’.
Murder in the Name of Honor Page 8