Honour today is therefore part of the modern world of nations (a pathology of modernity, we almost could say). Migrant communities to the UK bring these histories with them. Often they entrench their conservatism, notably towards their daughters, when they arrive on foreign soil, first in response to Western sexual freedoms (the commercialisation, exploitation and display of sex), but also – we can assume – in response to inequality, discrimination and prejudice. The problem therefore belongs here. The hand that kills the daughter in Acton, West London, is not the same as the hand that would have done so in Kurdistan. The point is that it wants to be. That is the delusion, the killer, as we might say. In the passage from there to here, something has been lost, something else, worse even, has been put in its place. Honour killing can then be seen, metaphorically speaking, as a doomed attempt to bring the family home – even if in pieces.
‘The white police are interested in us Pakistanis,’ comments Kaukub in Maps for Lost Lovers, ‘only when there is a chance to prove that we are savages who slaughter our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters.’119 Racism in this country is, we could say, the sleeping partner of honour crimes. This is neither to excuse nor forgive unforgiveable violence against women but to situate it. In one of its asides, the novel mentions a family who decide to return to Bengal after their son dies in a racial attack by whites (the radio announcement of fifty-six Haitian migrants drowning on their way to Miami is another). Friends in Pakistan advise the family involved in the murder not to tell the truth: ‘The West is full of hypocrites, who kill our people with impunity and say it’s all a matter of principle and justice, but when we do the same thing they say our definition of “principle” and “justice” is flawed.’120
It may then be right to read honour crimes in terms of a pull between the traditional values of a migrant community and life in the metropolis, but this does not have to involve giving the West a monopoly of the forward march of history, nor assigning immigrant communities to its backwaters. These are two halves of an equation that does not add up. How, in any case, one might ask, are you meant to distribute the values on either side of the divide? On the night Fadime Sahindal died, her mother went to meet her, reaching out to her against the edicts of her husband whom she had previously obeyed – she is also alleged to have grabbed his hand and cried out: ‘Shoot me instead, shoot me!’121 After the death, she pulls back and refuses to testify against him (at the appeal she supports his story about the man in the woods). Elif Sahindal’s ultimate betrayal of her daughter is one of the hardest things to penetrate. But only prejudice, not to say racism, would read the kindness as a sign of her integration into Swedish values. ‘Elif would probably’, writes Wikan, ‘have done the same in Kurdistan.’122
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In the UK there is no question that the cry against honour crimes is part of an anti-immigration agenda which worsens by the day. It is precisely here, as we will see in the next chapter, that sculptor and video artist Esther Shalev-Gerz’s latest work begins. Following the 2001 race riots in northern cities in the UK, then Home Secretary David Blunkett called for tougher immigration controls. Specifically alluding to ‘backward’ views which perpetrate oppressive practices against women, he attributed the riots to failed integration on the part of young Asian males (he was supporting Labour MPs like Ann Cryer who had called for more immigration controls as a way of dealing with forced marriage).123 Immigration control then becomes a test case for women’s freedom. This is a bit like claiming that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was waged on behalf of women. An almost surreal example of honour killing doing service for such an agenda is provided by Norma Khouri’s best-selling Forbidden Love (2003), published as the true story of an honour killing in Jordan, whose image of Jordan, Islam and all Arab men as violently oppressive towards women by all accounts played a key role in swinging Australian opinion towards support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – at one point a character suggests that Arab men are raising their sons to be ‘the next Arab Hitlers’.124 Rana Husseini spends several pages discrediting the book, which was eventually withdrawn from sale by Random House. In the case of Hatun Sürücü in Berlin, the killing contributed to a purging of national memory. A free and civilised Germany, and an idealised German manhood, could walk away from the past – it is the Turks, not the Germans, who are concealing a secret world of horrific crimes. Across Europe today, the far right is using a ‘culture of fear’ – to use the title of an essay by Pankaj Mishra – targeted against Muslims to ‘repackage’ its foundational anti-Semitism.125 In which case we can fairly say that, at a deep level, hatred of Muslims has nothing to do with culture – honour killing in bed with terrorism, for example – whatsoever.
Needless to say, for those who have been at the forefront of campaigning to raise the profile of honour crime, none of this has been part of the aim. ‘The state was now using the demand for women’s rights in minority communities,’ writes Hannana Siddiqui with reference to Blunkett, ‘to impose immigration controls and justify a racist agenda.’126 Violence against women is easily co-opted into such an agenda, which leaves women more vulnerable. This has been clearly demonstrated by responses to the sexual grooming of young women by Asian men in a case which first came to light in 2012: ‘An excessive focus on some kinds of sexual exploitation with a primary focus on ethnicity rather than the exploitation itself,’ commented Marai Larasi, chair of the End of Violence Against Women Coalition, ‘is misleading and fuels racist attitudes which ultimately won’t help women and girls.’127
The discrimination is part of a pattern. In his famous speech in March 2008 to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, David Cameron praised the chair Trevor Phillips for his critique of multiculturalism and concluded that Britain should become ‘a cold place’ for those refusing to integrate (for many this speech is seen as laying down the race agenda of the Coalition).128 For good measure, we could also add from the 2009 Tory party conference the recruitment as military advisor of General Sir Richard Dannatt, who immediately called for a national Christian revival to combat Islamic fundamentalism; the proposal to cut the benefits of those fleeing persecution from £42 to £35 per week; and the 2013 proposed cuts in benefits to asylum seekers, which provoked an outcry and cross-party opposition.
‘Integration’ is not, of course, an innocent term. It can be, as Wikan puts it, ‘misleading, bewildering, deceiving’, driving a wedge between public behaviour and feeling (an empty performance breeding resentment underneath), or calling on minorities for a complete makeover.129 What does it mean, for instance, when Philip Balmforth, vulnerable persons officer for Asian women for the Bradford police, talks of ‘the completely different type of Asian person’ he encounters in London as the way forward: ‘I see them causing little if any problem to anyone in the establishment.’130 Should that be our criterion for a better, more integrated world?
In the UK, a ‘no recourse to public funding’ ruling prevents women suffering domestic violence from claiming benefits, including housing and the use of publicly funded refuges, unless they have been resident for two years. Southall Black Sisters have long campaigned to overturn this rule, which increases the vulnerability of immigrant women to their men. In its recommendations, Crimes of the Community suggests that language training should be a condition of its abolition. Wikan criticises Sweden for not making language learning a condition of asylum. In April 2013 the UK Home Office announced tougher language requirements for British citizenship. ‘British citizenship is a privilege, not a right,’ stated immigration minister Mark Harper. ‘We are toughening up language requirements for naturalisation and settlement to ensure that migrants are ready and able to integrate into British society.’131 The requirement to speak English (or Swedish) is, however, no more neutral than anything else. It all depends on the climate, on who is asking for it and why. In Maps for Lost Lovers, the mother of the alleged murderers goes to visit her sons in prison: ‘The prison guard kept telling me not to talk to them in “Paki” langua
ge each time I felt like saying what I truly feel. “Speak English or shut up,” he said.’132
It is not always easy to avoid these vocabularies. Crimes of the Community is the most informative and meticulous source I have read on honour-based violence in the UK. Nonetheless its title – Crimes of the Community – could be read as implying, against the evidence of the document itself, that the community, rather than consisting of individuals – some condoning, others hating these hideous acts carried out in their name – harbours such crimes in its very nature.
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The question remains how to think and write about honour killing, what form, or style, is best suited to the task. Throughout this book I have suggested that only an intimate vocabulary – not severed from public life but its indispensable companion – is equal to the complexities of politics and the mind (honour killing would be another stunning instance of how the lines between the two are blurred). Towards the end of Maps for Lost Lovers, we discover that one of the two brother killers, Chotta, had discovered his lover, Kiran, in bed with another man on the night that he murdered his sister and her lover for living openly with each other. Kiran, who had never married, had spent most of her life mourning a lost love she had been prevented as a young woman from marrying by his family because she was a Sikh. It is this love, returned to England to seek her out after an absence of decades, who she has taken into her bed the night of the killing. ‘He saw us and went away, shouting abuse, pulling off and shattering all those mirrors I have hanging in the staircase. A thousand broken mirrors: there was an eternity of bad luck in his wake.’133 Kiran has no doubt that it is this rage that Chotta then unleashes on his sister.
It is the peculiar density and quality of Maps for Lost Lovers that it can burrow beneath an honour killing and draw up, in the minutest, lyrical detail, the undercurrents of a whole life. That it can be so precise in its judgements – of the killing, of the values that sanction and require it, of the injustices of this Muslim community towards its women and of British life towards the Muslims – while opening out each narrated life into a web of endless complexity, which defies just about every generalisation about Muslims, their lives and their thoughts. How much discussion of honour killing is actually interested in either of these? A Muslim spinster turns out to have not one but two lovers. A pillar of the same community is embroiled in an illicit love affair. The woman he loves must find a temporary husband, according to Muslim law, before she is free to remarry her first husband and the father of her child in Pakistan who divorced her in a drunken rage (the novel never makes clear whether she is merely using him to this purpose or whether it is something more). A killer in the name of honour is raving, not against an ‘impure’ sister but against another woman who belongs at the heart of the storm that is his own sexual life. In Aslam’s writing, all the available clichés fade as if they had been placed under hot glass. Perhaps you need something like poetry – remember Luxemburg’s poetry of revolution – to make your way through the morass of honour crime.
Ayse Onal’s book, Honour Killing, which is subtitled Stories of Men Who Killed, also takes the not inconsiderable risk of asking us to enter into a killer’s mind (like Freud’s case studies, her chapters resemble short stories or romances and ‘lack the serious stamp of science’).134 As Elif Shafak stated in discussion of Honour, ‘Without understanding masculinity, there is no way of solving the problem.’135 In one particularly powerful story told by Onal, a young boy, Hanim, sits in prison telling of how he was his mother’s only son and her favourite child. She had been abused as a young girl by her cousin but then becomes the same cousin’s willing lover after years of a forced, loveless marriage to an older man. The son turns mute and depressed when he discovers them together and overhears his mother using to her lover the same terms of endearment he thought she used only for him: ‘My lion, my hero, my ram.’136 But he only kills her, at the prompting of his uncle, when he realises that her affair, which he thought was his secret alone, is the talk of the whole community.
Like Maps for Lost Lovers, each of these interviews shows that any one honour killing arises out of a history, and that we can only begin to understand it as a phenomenon if that history, however confusing – indeed because so confusing – is told. This has always been a problem for the case for universal male violence against women – that it shuts down equivocation and, like the voice instructing them to kill, binds all men to the worst they are capable of: ‘A voice in your head tells you what you must do.’137 For more than one of the killers, the act is a matter of deepest regret, even as they are egged on, lauded and told to be proud. These young men, often chosen to enact the crime on the grounds that their youth will lead to a reduction of their sentence, mostly find themselves rejected and isolated by their families once in prison. ‘You too die with the person you kill,’ states Hanim in Onal’s book. ‘She is sure to appear before your eyes every time you lie in bed’ (given his story, a remark of stunning ambiguity). ‘When you think about it logically, there is always an alternative.’138 Every killer, whatever the pressure of family or community, has a choice. In a way, this makes it worse. The knowledge comes too late. But it also prises open a mental space between the murderer and his act, a sliver of freedom for generations to come. This is another reason why, beyond the immediate, legitimate outrage on behalf of women, we should listen carefully to the stories of these crimes. ‘Nobody’, states Sarhan in his interview with Rana Husseini, ‘really wants to kill his own sister.’139 At a key moment in Shafak’s Honour, the father of the murdered woman expresses his gratitude that he never had a son when, much earlier in the story, another of his daughters flees the village with her lover (she returns and commits suicide). He knows he would have asked him to kill his daughter ‘and clean our family’s good name’.140 Let feminism, then, proclaim honour killing as the violence against women which it is, while also seeing as its task to wrench open wherever it is humanly possible the gap, the space of reflection, however minute, between the perpetrator and his dreadful crime.
Is this, finally, a tale of progress? The answer has to be yes and no. The very fact that there is so much more writing, telling of these stories, should be taken as such a sign. Both Onal and Husseini have risked their lives by their work as campaigning journalists on honour-based violence – Onal also for implicating the Turkish government in the 2007 assassination of journalist Hrant Dink and three Christian Turkish publishers (in 1994 she was shot for linking the government and organised crime). In 2004, at the prompting of the European Council, Turkey introduced mandatory life sentences for those who carry out honour killings. But this is only part of the story. In Pakistan, a new Women’s Protection Bill brought rape under the Pakistan penal code, which is based in civil rather than sharia law, but according to the Asian Human Rights Commission there has been no reduction in the number of incidents of violence against women since the Bill became law in 2006. Tariq Ali’s 2008 account of the honour killing of a distant cousin would be a case in point.141 Another would be the 2011 gang rape of Mukhtaran Mai, assaulted on the orders of a village council after her brother was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan (not an honour killing but not unrelated, as his adultery became her violence-inducing shame).142 Husseini has not succeeded in overturning Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code, although the campaign has increased awareness and played a major role in destroying public indifference towards honour crimes. In England, the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act, which allows victims of forced marriages to pursue perpetrators through the civil courts, came into force in November 2008, although you might argue that such victims are unlikely to be in a position to do so. Everything I have read suggests, however, that, while the struggle to change the law remains crucial, and must be supported at every turn, it can only do so much. The problem goes deeper, into the darkest sexual recesses of the mind where – historical evidence suggests – neither love nor reason has ever found it easy to follow.
/> By the time I had finished reading these ghastly stories, for me it was the sisters who stood out as the heroines. Not the ones lamented too late – ‘Nobody really wants to kill his own sister’ – but the ones who survive and go on telling the story. Songhul Sahindal, Fadime Sahindal’s sister, took to the witness stand against the advice of her whole family, who were happy to dismiss her and her evidence as insane – ‘a mad woman’s tale’.143 Bekhal Mahmod, sister of Banaz, was the key prosecution witness at the trial of her father and uncle and the first woman in the UK ever to testify at an ‘honour killing’ trial. Undercover and in hiding ever since, she continues to speak out on behalf of her dead sister (you can see one of the interviews on YouTube). Alesha Ahmed, torn between her dead sister and her parents, eventually found her voice, risking the wrath of the rest of her family, especially – we can only assume – the wrath of her brother and sister, who held on to their deluded belief in their parents’ innocence to the end. Their futures will probably not be public knowledge, but they are each there as testimony to women’s fight for justice in the face of what might seem insuperable odds, showing us what even the hushed voice, the quietly spoken words of women can do. Trying to follow them, or perhaps just remembering the difficult nature of the lives they are now likely to be living, might be one way to keep this painful issue at the forefront of our minds, and to hold on to what happens next.
Women in Dark Times Page 20