Women in Dark Times

by Jacqueline Rose

  Underscoring the ambiguity of who Iskender is in the gendered scheme of things, Shafak appears on the cover of the Turkish edition of her novel dressed as her male character (on the back cover she is dressed as a modern-day street hero, an Alexander for today). Sadly, this stunning, disquieting image did not make its way on to the English edition, whose cover instead fulfils just about every cliché in the book: an image of a partly veiled woman with downcast eyes, looking as if she carries the world’s sorrows and is surely bound to die. Apparently the first image suggested by the English publishers had the woman completely veiled. Shafak had to fight to get rid of that picture, but they saddened the woman’s eyes without consulting her. Shafak’s drag photo, one of the strongest possible statements of a novelist being her character, brilliantly performs her own proposition: that we will get nowhere if we do not get into the minds – and bodies – of the men who perpetrate these crimes. ‘One of the jobs of the novelist,’ writer Maggie Gee observed during a discussion of Shafak’s novel, ‘is to imagine the murderer.’58 In which case honour killing presents the novelist with one of her most challenging, even perverse, opportunities – how often, outside fiction, are we invited to understand the perpetrator of violence? But by the same token we could say that honour killing also confronts the novelist with one of her most typical, almost banal and self-defining, tasks.59 Maggie Gee’s point was that you cannot be a novelist unless you are willing to become someone wholly other to who you think you are.60

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  One of the biggest disputes around honour killing is whether it can be safely assigned to non-Western cultures, which would mean there is no trace of such ideas to be found inside the legacy of Europe’s cultural and literary past. But while killing one’s daughter for honour has not historically been part of European codes of conduct, the idea of death as the only way for a woman to redeem her sexual transgression has. In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio is told by Don John on the eve of his wedding that Hero has been unfaithful to him: ‘It would better fit your honour to change your mind.’61 Wrongly accused at the ceremony, Hero faints to the ground apparently dead. When she revives, her father Leonato exclaims:

  Do not live, Hero; do not open thine eyes:

  For did I think thou wouldst not quickly die,

  Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames,

  Myself would on the rearward of reproaches,

  Strike at thy life . . .

  Hero is stained, like a piece of white silk:

  O, she is fall’n

  Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea

  Hath drops too few to wash her clean again.62

  More, in Hero’s own eyes: if the charge is true, it would justify her death. ‘Refuse me, hate me, torture me to death!’ ‘If they speak but truth of her,’ Leonato responds, ‘these hands shall tear her.’63 It is enough to convince the Friar and Benedick, also present at the scene, that there must be some dreadful mistake. But neither one of them challenges the basic assumption – that a violent, torturous death at the hands of a father would be the just reward for a daughter’s sexual offence.

  Even more powerful in this context is Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, based on the true story of Giovanna d’Aragona, daughter of the royal house of Aragon, consigned to prison by her enraged brothers for marrying beneath her and conceiving three children without their knowledge – it is not clear whether the transgression or the secrecy was the greatest offence (they also murdered her husband, and she and her children were never heard of again). In Webster’s version, the offence is against noble blood: ‘Shall our blood . . . be thus tainted?’ proclaims one of her brothers, but the true outrage – as with so much we have seen – is the affront to who they are as men:

  Foolish men,

  That e’er will trust their honour in a bark

  Made of so slight, weak bulrush as is woman,

  Apt every minute to sink it.64

  Lodge your honour in a woman, Webster seems to be saying, and most likely you will drown (as we have already seen, the very concept of honour conceals a fatal dependency).

  It is crucial therefore that we do not fall into the trap of seeing honour killing, for all its horrific nature or rather because of it, as the expression of an alien culture, religion or tradition that has no resonance in the West. Examples can be found across the world, from the United Kingdom to Jordan, from Sweden and the United States to Pakistan. It is no less crucial to insist that honour killing cannot be equated with Islam. The first known honour killing in Sweden involved a Christian Palestinian family. Nor do honour cultures necessarily oppress women, as Unni Wikan insists, drawing on her own experience from her field work in Oman: ‘A Muslim society in which to be honourable means to honour others.’65 Rana Husseini herself has been at the heart of the struggle to change the Jordanian law on crimes of honour. Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code exempts from penalty any man who kills a wife or any female relative, and lover, whom he discovers committing adultery. Often assumed to have some basis in Islamic sharia or tribal law, it can in fact be traced back to Article 324 of the French penal code of 1810 (abolished in France in 1975).66 The founding petition of the Jordanian National Committee to Eliminate So-Called Honour Crimes calls on the authorities to protect women ‘victims of traditions and social norms that have no basis in Islam, the Jordanian Constitution or basic human rights’. Such crimes, it continues, violate Islamic religion, which requires four witnesses to testify to any act of adultery and assigns to the state or ruler the only power to inflict punishment on the guilty.67 ‘It must be clear to society and its various institutions,’ stated Prince Hassan of Jordan, uncle of King Abdullah, ‘that crimes of honour have no religious justification.’68 He was speaking at the opening of a conference on violence in schools where Husseini had been invited to speak (he had been following her work). When the Netherlands circulated a draft resolution on crimes of honour at the UN in 2000 the chairman of the UN Islamic Group submitted a letter to the Secretary General, appending a statement:

  Member States of the Organization of Islamic Conference, like other States Members of the UN, in keeping with their obligations under the universally accepted instruments on human rights, have all committed themselves to opposing any use of arbitrary or extrajudicial killing of any human being, particularly women, in the name of passion, honour or race.69

  They were responding at least partly to a documentary on honour crimes, screened internationally as well as at the UN, which opened with the image of a mosque and the sound of a call to prayer.70

  Whether Fadime Sahindal was a Muslim became the subject of fierce dispute. The Islamic Council in Norway pronounced that she was not. But others saw her family, although they were not active worshippers, as part of an immigrant Muslim community whose identity relied on religious precepts, even if these were not strictly observed. You are born and remain a Muslim throughout your life unless you declare your desire to leave Islam. For those adhering to this view, Sahindal’s state funeral in the cathedral in Uppsala, a media event attended by Crown Princess Victoria, the archbishop, two government ministers and numerous other dignitaries, was an affront (even if, out of respect for Islam, the canon took any reference to the Trinity out of her address). There is a tightrope to walk here. The Islamic Council was most likely repudiating Sahindal, rather than intervening to protect her family from racial hatred in response to her death. But the tacit condemnation, if that is what it was, should not be taken to mean that Islam condones her killing – or, according to one common but mistaken argument, requires it. Honour killing is not a religious act and no justification for it can be found in the Qur’an. In the Qur’an, life is sacred and can only be taken in pursuit of justice. Slave girls must not be forced into prostitution ‘when they themselves wished to remain honourable’;71 if they are, they will be forgiven by God (compare this with the cases of women killed after they have been raped, often by a family member). Men and women are punished equally for adultery. Denigrat
ion of females, to the point of infanticide, is the practice of the pagan, whose folly is demonstrated by the fact that he imputes daughters to God while valuing only sons for himself. On the Day of Judgement, the baby slaughtered at birth will be resurrected and asked for what sin she was killed.

  The point is not to suggest that the Qur’an is a progressive text for women. It famously assigns men to ‘a degree’ above women (how far that degree extends is a matter of dispute).72 It exhorts the husband to beat a disobedient wife. Spiritual equality between men and women is not matched by equality in relation to marriage, child custody or divorce. But nowhere in the Qur’an is it suggested that women who are raped, have sex outside marriage, choose their husband against the wishes of their father, or in fact do none of these but are simply talked about as if they do, should be killed. According to a 2002 report of the Egyptian Women’s Centre for Legal Assistance, the mere suspicion of indecent behaviour was the grounds for 79 per cent of all crimes of honour.73 ‘I know that killing my sister is against Islam and it angered God,’ states Sarhan, a Jordanian interviewed by Husseini – he is introduced to her in his cell by a prison official with the words: ‘This is Sarhan, he killed his sister to cleanse his honour’ – ‘but I had to do what I had to do and I will answer to God when the time comes.’74 Honour takes precedence over Islam.75

  Feminist commentary on the Qur’an draws the most scrupulous distinctions between Islam as ethical principle and Islam as a set of diktats based on an increasingly oppressive interpretation of law. Honour killing is not an Islamic practice, but violence against women can be sanctioned by a literal reading, many would say misreading, of sharia law. In sharia law, zina (adultery or sex out of wedlock) is harshly punished – public lashings for unmarried girls, stoning for men and women adulterers. But only on the testimony of four witnesses, which means no guardian is sanctioned if he acts on suspicion alone.76 For Leila Ahmed, it is institutional and legal Islam, determined by the politically dominant class, that has veered consistently against women. Ghada Karmi reads the Qur’an itself as two texts, one regulatory, which arises out of the conditions of the time, and the other universal, spiritual and philosophical, a guide to the inner life, which by definition cannot be grounded in law. In both cases a wedge is driven between Islam as practice and as word. ‘A reading by a less androcentric and misogynist society,’ writes Ahmed, ‘one that gave greater ear to the ethical voice of the Qur’an could have resulted in – could someday result in – the elaboration of laws that deal equably with women.’77

  Before Islam, it is often argued, women were freer – the Prophet’s first wife was famously an independently wealthy older woman. According to al-Bukhari, the hadith compiler, earlier marriage customs included a woman being invited by her husband to co-habit with another man in order to secure a child, and women having several sexual relations, the paternity of any child being decided by a gathering of her partners on the basis of which one the child resembled most. Institutional Islam can be fairly charged with sanctioning the loss of those freedoms and playing its part in their demise, although whether it initiated or legitimised these changes is, according to Karmi, a question with no definitive reply.78 In the debate over Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code, the Islamists split in two, with one group arguing for its abolition for contradicting sharia and the other for its retention as a check on promiscuity (in 1999 the scholars committee of the Islamic Front in Jordan issued a fatwa against its abolition).79

  But simply by opening the question, widening the gap between potentiality and history, between the inner message of a faith and religion in the vice of political power (and serving it), or more simply between a text and its interpretation, you make it impossible to lay the worst – and honour killing has a fair claim to be described as the worst – at Islam’s door. Such forms of questioning, at which of course feminism excels, have always been the strongest riposte to the brute conviction of any power or law. Feminism is never served by seeing any religion or culture, immovably, as a monolith which leaves no one, especially no woman, with any room to breathe. Here the significant opposition is not between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ (which always works to the advantage of the culture making the distinction), but between those who go on reading and those who do not. Assign honour killing to Islam as a type of fait accompli and you strip away the chance of seeing it as a practice, not reflective simply of a coherent social order or belief system, but of one that is torn and unstable, which precisely requires violence to secure itself. Crimes of honour are meant to be a solution: ‘The problem is over now,’ Sahindal’s father stated after her death.80

  To which one answer is to place such crimes under the prism of multiple, shifting, conflicting points of view, to tell the same story over and over again. In In Honor of Fadime, everyone’s version, including the father, Rahmi Sahindal’s, is told. And if Wikan comes down against Rahmi, she otherwise hovers, giving voice, for example, to Nebile, the thirteen-year-old sister who insists that Fadime lied to the media: ‘We aren’t into that kind of culture . . . She lied and lied . . . I know, I know . . . whatever I say, that I know for sure.’81 We are up against not just different stories but hearts torn, violently, against themselves, for which the case of Shafilea Ahmed provides one of the most vivid, painful examples. How do you go on living in the home when a parent has killed your sister? What would it do to your mind? Certainly lying – which makes interpretation even more precarious – seems to be part of the frame. Both Mevish and Junyad Ahmed lied in court (although whether they any longer knew they were lying we cannot be sure). When Alesha Ahmed, fourteen at the time of the murder, told friends at school what had happened, she appears to have embellished and distorted her account, saying her father had hacked her sister to pieces. Then she goes quiet for nine years. In court, the defence tried to use Alesha’s exaggerations and the robbery to discredit her testimony: her accusation was a ‘wicked’ concoction designed to get her out of trouble. ‘It didn’t get me out of any trouble,’ she simply replied.82 Missing in the courtroom, in pretty much any courtroom, was the idea of how we all make our lives bearable by elaborating stories about ourselves. These hugely complicate the picture, requiring us to be readers before we are judges, alert to the complex nuances of the world before anything else, willing above all to question the paths of monolithic truth (this, I have been arguing throughout this book, is something of special relevance for women and at which they can be particularly adept). In fact, for all these siblings, lying had been a way to survive. Alesha Ahmed was not alone in being torn, as she put it, between her dead sister and her parents (nor surely in having been ‘haunted’ by what happened for years).

  The seeming transparency of these crimes, once brought to light, is therefore deceptive. In Maps for Lost Lovers, the crime is the beginning not the end of the story – a bloody mark on the page around which reader and characters painfully circulate, uncertain of what they see: ‘They [the murdered lovers] have become a bloody Rorschach blot: different people see different things in what has happened.’83

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  If not in terms of religion, how then can crimes of honour be explained? In a discussion I held with British Muslim women students at Queen Mary, University of London, they were adamant that it was not religion but culture that is to blame. But, as they too were aware, invoking culture is also freighted with risk. Abdullah Yones did not make a cultural plea of honour, even though the case was classified by the Metropolitan Police as an honour crime. Nor was honour put forward in the defence of Fadime Sahindal’s father, Rahmi. He preferred to plead sickness – that is, before he changed his plea and denied the killing altogether by claiming on appeal that it had been carried out by some unidentified man from the woods who forced him to take the blame (the appeal not surprisingly failed and he was sentenced to life). He prefers, that is, to impugn his own mental health, even if he of course blames his illness on his daughter’s conduct, than appeal to what has come to be known as the ‘cultural
defence’: a plea for mitigation based on the defendant’s cultural codes. In Florida in 1974, a Greek immigrant was acquitted for the murder of his daughter’s rapist partly on the grounds that no Greek father would be expected to wait for the police. In Los Angeles in 1985, a Japanese American woman who survived after wading into the ocean with her daughters on hearing of her husband’s infidelity was spared the death penalty (oyako-shingu, or parent-child suicide is illegal in Japan but recognised as a response to an unacceptable social predicament). The cultural defence challenges the idea of ‘objective reasonable behaviour’, adhered to in US law, an idea itself freighted with cultural baggage. ‘Judges and juries’, writes Alison Dundes Renteln in The Cultural Defense (2004), from which my two examples are taken, ‘are asked to weigh a person’s actions in the light of what such an “objective” person would do under similar circumstances . . . There is no such person.’84