Our petition read:
We are a group of Jordanian citizens who have no personal, political, or racial interests, but are gathered with one unifying issue as free individuals, which is our right to a good and safe life, free from violence in a society that protects the rights of all, which abides by the Constitution that assures equality to all in front of the law in rights and duties.
Through the years, our country has witnessed abhorrent crimes that appal every clear-thinking and honest Jordanian. These crimes were committed in the name of honour, and those who have committed them have received soft sentences, which in turn encouraged their belief and that of others that the crime they committed is socially acceptable.
Since the victims no longer have a voice to raise, and since we jealously guard the life and the safety of all Jordanian citizens and the right of each Jordanian to live in peace and harmony based on respect for human dignity, individual rights, justice, security, fair trial and defence and because these crimes contradict Islamic law (Sharia), the Constitution and the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), we express our support of the decision of the Minister of Justice Hamzeh Haddad and the government, who, in moving to abolish Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code, have acted according to the spirit of His Majesty King Abdullah’s directives to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women.
Based on these principles, we decided to organize this campaign to practise our civil rights to demand that legislative, judicial and administrative authorities and the various national official sectors take all necessary measures and use all legal, democratic means at their disposal – judicial, legislative, educational and media – to eliminate this ugly phenomenon.
In the name of our sisters, daughters and mothers who do not have any voice, in the name of those who this minute unjustly suffer different forms of violence and injury to protect honour, with no one to protect them and guarantee their human rights, we raise our own voices.
We call for the immediate cancellation of Article 340 in its entirety, which reduces penalties and exempts those who kill or injure in the name of honour.
We stress the need to implement the law so as not to waste any chance to punish killers and to show society that these crimes will not be tolerated. We stress the need to enforce a fair and preventive punishment against anyone who commits crimes against women in the name of honour.
We call on all concerned citizens of this country to share our work to ensure that this initiative is a national effort which will allow Jordanians to express their opinions so that the authorities will take the necessary steps to protect the safety of innocent women who are victims of traditions and social norms that have no basis in Islam, the Jordanian Constitution or basic human rights.
We have prepared numbered petitions [for those who wish to raise their voice against these crimes].
Jordanian citizens who are legally eligible to vote may sign these petitions.
Our aim is to collect thousands of signatures to emphasize the desire of a large percentage of voters to cancel Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code and to work intensively with all means available to abolish this inhuman practice.
We launch our campaign by appealing to all citizens to take the initiative and sign this petition.
We also prepared a pamphlet, which was designed for us for free by Ani Orfali. It was simple but eye-catching, with a bold black, white and red design. It included over eighty names of women recently murdered in Jordan in the name of honour, along with murder statistics and information on Article 340 as well as other laws used to discriminate against women.
Whenever we enlisted the support of a respected public personality, we made sure their name was at the top of our petitions – in this way we were able to persuade many more people to join us. Most people were very wary of us and were fearful of what would happen if they signed our petition. Discussions would sometimes last for thirty minutes before someone finally decided to sign. It was a hard, slow process and we often wondered whether we would ever get the fifty thousand names we hoped for. This was a very tall order, considering Jordan was a repressive country, with only four million people back then.
A month before our campaign was due to be officially launched, a special committee at the Ministry of Justice announced that it had decided to abolish Article 340. In its place, it suggested another law to toughen the punishment against adulterers, ‘to prevent people from committing adultery’, and referred its recommendations to Parliament for voting.
The committee listed four justifications for amending Article 340:
1. The existence of the article violated the constitution since it allowed individuals to take the law into their own hands.
2. It discriminated against women since the leniency in the punishment was only granted to men.
3. It violated the Islamic religion since four witnesses of good reputation are needed to testify to an act of adultery and the state or the ruler are the only ones entitled to inflict punishment on the ‘guilty’.
This sounded very promising. We hadn’t even officially launched our campaign, and a government committee had already decided to change the law. But, and this was a big but, the committee included a fourth and final justification:
4. The law needed to be changed in response to western human rights organizations’ constant criticism of the existence of Article 340.
Conservatives in Jordan have often successfully used the excuse of so-called ‘western influence and interference’ and ‘the west meddling in the internal affairs of Arab countries to destroy the structure of its society’ to reject or attack the work of activism, as well as to raise people’s doubts as to the motives and intentions of campaigners like those in our group.
This fourth justification gave the conservatives all the ammunition they needed to attack us fiercely. Their anti-western view was widely supported by many ordinary people and I could understand why people might react this way if it were true – but it was not.
On 23 August 1999 we gave our first news conference, appealing to the public to join and support our campaign by signing our petition. Our slogan was ‘Right of life and the right for fair trial’.
We announced that around 380 petitions had been distributed in the Kingdom and that we’d managed to collect around three thousand signatures in just two weeks.
‘Our aim is to gather a huge number of signatures which we will present to King Abdullah, [then] Prime Minister Abdur-Ra’uf S. Rawabdeh and the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament to emphasize people’s desire to abolish Article 340,’ I said.
Basil announced that many royal family members and former Jordanian officials had already signed the petition. Our regal supporters proved to be crucial. They really helped to persuade a great many people to sign our petition. Since ascending to the throne in 1999, His Majesty King Abdullah and Her Majesty Queen Rania have spoken out against so-called crimes of honour several times.
King Abdullah described honour killings as ‘a problem not only for Jordan but for all the Third World,’ adding, ‘Jordan is the first country to actually identify the issue and try to deal with it.’ The King also promised the leaders of Jordan’s women’s movements in August 1999 that they had his full backing.
Queen Rania, a strong advocate of women’s and children’s issues in Jordan, also spoke publicly, arguing that so-called honour crimes have no basis in religion: ‘It was not a practice that was acceptable to the late King Hussein, nor is it to King Abdullah.’
In 2008, Queen Rania addressed the stereotypes facing Arab and Muslim communities on YouTube and spoke out against honour crimes and violence against women, saying it was not exclusive to the Arab world and that it is a ‘worldwide shame’.
‘It is horrific. It is inexcusable. And there is absolutely no honour in it,’ the Queen said in her message, as she acknowledged that while honour crimes do happen, ‘It is not a prevalent cultural practice. It has nothing to do
with Islam. It is not at all indicative of the status and standing of women in our culture. And it is being challenged.’
Her Majesty Queen Noor has been a determined activist in the fight to end honour crimes and violence against women in Jordan. Ever since the issue began to surface, Queen Noor along with the late King Hussein pushed for a change in the laws that offers leniency to killers in honour crimes.
Her long-standing and outspoken support for my work has been utterly invaluable. One such instance was during an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour where Queen Noor spoke of the work done in Jordan to combat these crimes, making positive reference to my work, and providing me with a huge push forward. About these crimes, she said: “this type of violence against women is not consistent with Islam or with [the Jordanian] Constitution ... this [legal] area is being reviewed and amendments are being proposed to make these laws more consistent with Islamic law and the Constitution.” She added that she has “very strong personal feelings as a Muslim, as a woman, as a wife and as a mother about this form of violence and every form of violence against women.”
Most recently, in her book Leap of Faith published in 2003, Queen Noor spoke of the honour crime problem in Jordan and recognised my work again. She wrote: “The Jordanian journalist Rana Husseini almost single-handedly brought this problem to the attention of the public in a series of newspaper articles over a nine-year period. Many criticized her work and motives, and some of her detractors even sent hate mail and threats. But Rana persisted. Her achievements were given special attention when she was awarded the Reebok Human Rights Award in 1998.”
King Abdullah’s uncle, His Royal Highness Prince Hassan, was one of the first royal family members to address the issue. In August 1996, the sociologist Dr Sari Nasir told me that Prince Hassan was following my work at The Jordan Times and wanted me to prepare a paper on so-called honour crimes to be presented at a conference on violence in schools. Prince Hassan addressed the gathering at the opening and spoke about the important role families play in their children’s education.
Halfway through his speech, the Prince switched to the issue of so-called honour crimes. ‘It must be clear to society and its various institutions that crimes of honour have no religious justification, nor are they sanctioned by Arab patrimony. Should we continue to accept the present state of affairs … if we continue to condone the false concept of “crimes of honour”, which can only unravel the fabric of society, we would be abandoning the concept of civilized life.’
In 1997, the late King Hussein made a passionate plea for an end to violence against women in a speech given to the Jordanian Parliament. He said that women in Jordan were still being exposed to inhuman practices that deprived them of their basic essential rights and that ‘is why we must pay serious attention to some of the dangerous phenomena that remain a source of women’s suffering and which, unfortunately, constitute an inhuman violation of their basic rights … The most serious and dangerous of those is hidden violence … This does not befit our Arab and Islamic society, the society of solidarity.’
Princess Basma, sister of the late King Hussein, has championed women’s rights and their empowerment in Jordan, attending and speaking out at many local and international events that addressed the issue of violence against women. The first direct message from Princess Basma on the issue came during a ceremony to launch a regional campaign to eliminate violence against women conducted by the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in November 1998. She said that Jordanian society must face issues of violence against women, and ‘the issue should no longer be taboo. We should not hide our heads in the sand … and pretend it does not exist … the shame is to know that violence against women does exist and allow all forms of suffering to happen against women. The issue should be recognized and solutions need to be discussed, and as long as we do it with dignity and recognize the strengths in our society, the religions and the positive norms, we can make a change and fight it if we work together.’
Despite the royal seal of approval, I never anticipated just how overwhelming the response to our initial press conference was going to be. We were bombarded with supportive phone calls and emails. People were even faxing their signatures to us, asking us to add them to the petition. The most memorable email I received that same day came from a man named Nasri Tarazi who taught at Ahliyyah School for Girls. He wanted to know if his students could sign our petition. This for me was a real breakthrough – discussing the issue in schools would be one of the best ways of changing the mindset of what constituted family honour.
Suddenly the subject was everywhere. Newspaper postbags bulged and columnists only wrote about one thing: Article 340. Of course, not everything was positive – far from it. The opinions of columnists ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Abdul Latif Zuhd wrote a column for the daily Arab Al-Yawm in August 1999 claiming that women were to blame for the ‘fornication’ in our society.
He conceded that religion did not allow people to take the law into their own hands, but argued that women were the ones responsible for ‘tainting their family’s honour and reputation’.
‘We are living in a society that does not allow the woman’s family to live in a normal manner if a daughter did something wrong. How would a father take care of his daughter after she has tarnished his reputation and tainted his face with mud and brought him disgrace, distress and hardship?’
He put the blame only on women adulterers because by their action of allowing men to sleep with them they violate the religion and defy society’s norms and family values. Therefore, women would anger God, cause their family grave catastrophe, and would contribute to spreading fornication.
Many people wrote to The Jordan Times claiming that we were exaggerating the seriousness and number of so-called honour crimes. Some even claimed that the problem was small when compared to the number of people killed annually in Jordan in traffic accidents (700–800 compared to about twenty-five honour killings). In support of this figure, Major Bashir Bilbeisi, a Jordanian police officer, analysed 503 murders that took place between 1990 and 1995 and concluded that 150 of them were honour killings.
The writer and feminist Zuleikha Abu Risheh responded sarcastically in her column almost a week later in Al Rai newspaper, asking whether we should wait until we’re burying women by the thousand before we admit that there’s a problem. She argued that we needed to bump the numbers up, and so if women failed to prepare the men decent coffee, or managed to awaken them when doing the housework, then they should be badly beaten and, if they failed to improve, they should be ‘given the coup de grace’.
Meanwhile we’d printed three phone numbers on our pamphlet and in the press, including The Jordan Times, which ran small daily advertisements for free, urging people to help us by collecting more signatures, an initiative by Amy Henderson, the then local editor. We headed to small villages and towns outside Amman. During our initial canvassing tour in Jerash, a small but busy mountain town popular with tourists and home to a bustling market, a young man approached us, desperate to sign our petition. He was so excited that he tried to sign twice. When I told him he could only sign once, he snatched the petition sheet and raced round the town, collecting signatures himself.
I stepped into a small shop selling cheeses where the old lady running the store said she could not sign the petition because she was illiterate. To make up for this, she made sure everyone around her in the small store signed instead.
Many people were convinced that we were doing the right thing and signed our petitions. Some were afraid to sign since such activities have always been banned in Jordan and many people had been prosecuted or questioned by the security forces. Fortunately, a lawyer voiced her readiness to provide legal representation for anyone who got in trouble for either signing the petition or collecting signatures.
Of course, many people were opposed to what we were doing and many simply told us that women who committed a ‘wrongful and immoral act’ deserved to
die while their killers needed to be legally protected.
We used every method we could think of to collect as many signatures as possible – the internet, faxes, free and paid ads in newspapers, as well as TV and radio interviews. It was tremendously exciting; we carried the petitions with us wherever we went and whatever we did, and we always caused a stir.
Most honour killings occur in poor and uneducated populations where word of mouth spreads fast. They also take place in rural areas, where economic hardship and daily struggles are the rule of the day, so we made sure we targeted these areas as well. Almost all of the men charged with these crimes come from working-or lower-middle-class backgrounds, including butchers, farmers, soldiers, bus drivers and civil servants as well as the unemployed. Sometimes they say that all they have is their honour, and if they lose that then they have nothing and are worthless. So we made a particular point of targeting these men.
I frequently went with my friends Sultan Abu Mariam and Najwa Ghannoum to restaurants where we approached diners (a captive audience!) and many gladly signed as we chatted. Then we asked the waiters, waitresses, cooks, cleaners and managers. Outside one restaurant I bumped into a garbage collector who asked me what I was doing. Once I explained, he said, ‘Of course I will sign. This is against our religion.’
My mother, Randa Saifi-Husseini, played a major role in collecting signatures. As a librarian she asked everyone who came into her building to sign. She had copies with her wherever she went. If she went to an art exhibition, to a restaurant, out with friends or to any public gathering, then the petition, a pen and her determination came with her.
It was around this busy, happy time that I was reminded just what it was we were fighting for when I discovered one of the worst cases of so-called honour killing I had ever encountered.
CHAPTER 5
Excusing Murder
I was waiting in my car, the engine running, waiting for fifty-seven-year-old Um Mohammad and her two young daughters to slip away from her family and neighbours. She had good reason to be fearful. She had decided that she wanted to tell me her story, something that would place her life in danger.
Murder in the Name of Honor Page 5
