Murder in the Name of Honor

by Rana Husseini

  I started my tape recorder and drove off as soon as they’d climbed in. Um Mohammad began her story. ‘My daughter Amneh, who was twenty-one, came to me one day complaining that she had stomach pains and was bleeding. I thought it was her appendix so I took her to the doctor.

  ‘Imagine my horror when the doctor told me the last thing I would have expected – my daughter was pregnant! I simply couldn’t believe it. I started crying and beat her. She said it was against her will; that the next-door neighbour had raped her.’

  Um Mohammad stopped talking as she tried to control her emotions. She looked extremely tired and ill. I’d soon discover that this mother of five had in fact developed cancer. As she told the rest of her story, I felt her sense of helplessness and confusion increase.

  ‘The moment I got back home, I told my eldest son Mohammad the news. He flew into a rage.’

  Amneh’s sixteen-year-old sister, Sana, interjected, ‘I knew he wanted to kill my sister the moment I heard them arguing. I dragged her away and into our room and tried to calm her down. I was still trying to get the full story when Mohammad stormed in. He shouted at Amneh to tell him what had happened.

  ‘I tried to stop him; I said that Amneh should marry the neighbour but he pushed me aside and beat her up, using his fists. I left the room knowing something really bad was about to happen.’

  Mohammad was originally going to a wedding and had a gun put by for the occasion. Some Jordanian men liked to celebrate weddings by firing live rounds from shotguns – though the practice is illegal and anyone caught is generally prosecuted.

  Mohammad raced back into the room with his gun. While her mother watched, Mohammad shot his younger sister. Um Mohammad fainted.

  ‘When I heard the gunshots I ran back into the room and saw my sister fighting for her life,’ Sana continued quietly. ‘I could not believe she was shot. She asked my brother and I to take good care of our sick mother. She died in my arms while my brother stood watching, the gun still in his hand.’

  Mohammad turned himself in, claiming that he had killed his sister to cleanse his family’s honour. He also handed officers the gun he used.

  Tears marked Um Mohammad’s cheeks as she continued. ‘My heart burns every time I think of Amneh’s last words. I feel pain whenever I see her photo. I will never forget her. She is always in my mind and my broken heart. I visit her every now and then at the cemetery.’

  We sat silently in the car for a few moments. I went over Um Mohammad’s story in my mind and then asked her what would seem to most people to be a very strange question – whether she thought that the killing of her daughter had solved a problem.

  Amazingly, Um Mohammad started to try to excuse and even justify her daughter’s murder. ‘She worked every day. She left the house in the morning and came back around 3pm. We did not know anything about her. She was mature enough to know what she was doing.’

  She added that there was a chance that the rapist might marry her, adding, ‘We should have married her off to the neighbour instead of killing her. It was his mistake and he should have married her immediately and not waited until she was exposed. She is dead and he is alive, enjoying his life.

  ‘If she told us from the beginning what had happened to her we would have reacted differently. But it was a total shock for the entire family. My daughter made a mistake and had to bear the consequences. We live in a society that offers no mercy once a mistake is made,’ she said.

  Even Amneh’s father, who abandoned the family almost fifteen years ago and had taken a second wife, was apparently relieved when he heard the news of his daughter’s murder. Apparently, all their neighbours also agreed that she got what she deserved.

  I was amazed that Um Mohammad, obviously traumatized by her loss, was trying to excuse her daughter’s murder. ‘I am satisfied with her death because it is her fate, but I am worried about my son and the kind of punishment he might get. They say he will get a reduced sentence and will be released soon but I am not so sure. He should return to his wife and children. When his children ask us about his whereabouts, we tell them that he is travelling and should be back soon.’

  Sana told me confidently that her sister deserved to die and blamed her for being raped. ‘She destroyed our family, our honour and did not think of us or her family’s fate when she did it. She was mature and understood what is right and what is wrong. What she did was out of her free will. She deceived us,’ said Sana. ‘My brother killed her and cleansed our honour. If he did not kill her he would have died of shame and disgrace.’ Sana also admitted that she missed Amneh and sometimes felt bad about her death and wished that her family had instead married her off to her rapist.

  These surprising attitudes were not uncommon. I had previously interviewed an illiterate sixty-year-old mother of seven for an Arabic article in Al Hayat newspaper. She told me: ‘Sinning women should be killed and their murder should be announced on the radio. They should also be hung in a public yard so that all the women would see them and be scared so that they would know in their own eyes what would happen to them if they decide to go astray.’ She also told me she was prepared to kill her own daughter: ‘I would hang her on a tree. It is easier and much better for us and her as well.’

  This attitude does not belong solely to the poor and uneducated. Manal, a twenty-five-year-old woman with a Masters degree in Economics, told me she did not consider so-called honour crimes a barbaric act because they help keep the number of ‘deviant women’ low. ‘Women are the source of seduction for men and if all women are chastised then men would become good on their own. We are in a Middle Eastern society and I am for punishing women more than men because men cannot resist the seduction of girls who are dressed improperly ... When women are punished, fear of their families will build up among them and they will think twice before committing any immoral mistake.’

  I have been asked many times by people who (understandably) can’t fathom how a mother and/or sister is able to assist or justify the butchering of their daughter or sibling. From my experience, it is clear that many immediate female relatives simply go along with the male members of the family out of the fear that the same thing might happen to them. When they speak publicly to a journalist such as myself, then they may also feel compelled to tell me what their male relatives would want to hear them say.

  Sometimes, women do carry out honour killings on their own, but I am certain that their motives still stem from the same fear. I reported on one such case for The Jordan Times in July 2006. A sixty-nine-year-old mother waited until her twenty-six-year-old daughter, exhausted from giving birth to her illegitimate baby boy, fell asleep. The mother fetched her other daughter and together they murdered the victim with an axe as she slept, turning themselves in to the police immediately afterwards.

  Amneh’s fifteen-year-old sister, Salma, was at a wedding when the incident took place. She was more sympathetic. ‘I felt sorry for her because she died. I love and miss her. We were good friends and she used to help me with my school studies and we went shopping together. My sister is a good and honest woman but she never told us what happened to her,’ Salma said.

  She went on to insist, as her sister and mother sat silently, that killing was not the solution. ‘There is no justice in this life. The neighbour who caused my sister to become pregnant is relaxed and alive and my sister is dead.’ She paused for a moment. ‘If I saw him, I would try and hurt him.’

  Salma’s mother took her out of school after the incident because her family was concerned about her reputation and they wanted her always to be within their sight in case the same thing happened to her. ‘I am upset that I am no longer going to school. I had dreams of becoming a doctor when I grew up, but now I do not know what my future is.’

  As for the man who caused the pregnancy, Um Mohammad told me her son was planning to kill him. However, the authorities had taken him into custody shortly after Amneh’s murder on adultery charges. Um Mohammad bowed her head. ‘May God forgive him for
what he did. He ruined our life and caused the imprisonment of my son.’

  The court certainly seemed to forgive Mohammad, thanks to Article 98. The judge agreed that he committed his crime in a moment of rage and was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. Of course, his mother dropped the charges, so he was a free man six months later.

  Um Mohammad later told me that her son had been suffering from depression since he had been released. ‘He refuses to talk to anyone. He told me he acted hastily after becoming enraged and that it solved nothing.’

  Her son visits Amneh’s grave every now and then and prays for his sister’s soul, Um Mohammad added. Since the killing, his uncles and neighbours, who had said he had done the right thing, had turned their backs on him.

  I was unable to speak to Mohammad myself; his mother told me that he’d sworn never to talk to anyone except his immediate family. ‘The killing did not solve anything,’ she told me tearfully. ‘On the contrary, it has destroyed our family. If I went back in time, I would defend my daughter. She was a good girl. What happened to her was not her fault. It is not fair that she died.’

  The confused and miserable outpourings from this poor girl’s mother only galvanized me further into action. If I ever needed encouragement to continue our battle, then this experience provided it. I hoped that after hearing Amneh’s story many others would join us. And they did …

  CHAPTER 6

  We Fought the Law …

  During the first four non-stop weeks of our campaign, we managed to collect eight thousand signatures. Then in September, the Jordanian Women’s Union (JWU) organized a seminar entitled ‘Honour Crimes … Any Improvements?’ Abdul Hadi Majali, the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, attended the seminar and warned us that, as we expected, any attempt to amend Article 340 would face strong opposition. The JWU’s vice president Nadia Shamroukh announced that she had received anonymous pamphlets that accused the JWU of encouraging adultery.

  At the end of the conference the JWU issued a statement calling on Parliament to cancel Article 340 and to place restrictions on the application of Article 98. They also called for punishment for people who incited false rumours about women, and for an increase in the severity of the punishment for adultery (believing this would add some balance to their call for reforms of Article 340).

  Many moderate religious scholars, mostly Muslim leaders, such as King Abdullah’s former adviser on Islamic affairs and Chief Islamic Justice, the late Sheikh Izzedin Al-Khatib Al-Tamimi, backed the statement and spoke openly about honour killings for the first time.

  Al-Tamimi said, ‘If the punishment for crimes of honour is detainment in a five-star prison, I believe we cannot stop these crimes or this bloodshed. A tough punishment must be implemented. Many men and women have been killed because of their relatives’ ignorance … Killers think their victims’ blood is a medal representing their act of heroism of honour. They do not know that God’s anger and curse will remain with them.’3

  But despite our regal and rapidly increasing public support, we faced real opposition from the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, along with conservative deputies, who strongly denounced our activism. As was to be expected, they accused us of corrupting public morals and imposing western values in order to appease international human rights organizations. The solution, they argued, was to end this problem by calling for the full application of Islamic law in Jordan.

  The then IAF Secretary General, Abdul Latif Arabiat, said, ‘This is a western plot to destroy and corrupt our society … [The west] has occupied us militarily and politically, and now they want to destroy society, our last remaining fortress.’

  Lower House MP Mahmoud Kharabsheh told me in an interview for The Jordan Times: ‘Women adulterers cause a great threat to our society, because they are the main reason that such acts [of adultery] happen. If men do not find women with whom to commit adultery, then they will become good on their own.’4

  Of course, apart from outright opposition, we also faced a great deal of apathy and laissez-faire from various parliamentarians. One deputy who previously occupied an important and influential government position said that he was in favour of cancelling Article 340, but added, ‘I am not willing to say it in public in front of my colleagues or to defend it … There are more important things to discuss in Parliament and surely I will not stand up and defend this article in front of 79 deputies.’ (The Lower House was then made up of eighty male deputies. The number has since increased to 110 seats, including six seats that are allocated to women, through a new quota system.) Another deputy said he enjoyed a good position in the party and so he was not ‘willing to risk his position to defend such an issue in Parliament’.

  Meanwhile, the Al-Tahrir Party (the Liberation Party, which is technically illegal because it has never been granted a licence by the government) issued a statement addressed to the Jordanian Parliament, which openly accused the USA of backing a global campaign to spread fornication in Jordan via our activism.

  The statement said: ‘Do not be fooled by the few thousands of signatures that were collected by the committee. If you really want to know what Jordanians’ opinion is, just organize an opposing campaign and you will collect thousands of signatures in a few days … People in Jordan do not waste or sell their honour for the sake of a misleading campaign that is run by a few people who are fascinated by western civilization and values.’5

  On 16 November, less than a week before Parliament was to vote on Article 340, the Al-Afaf Islamic Society organized a one-day lecture entitled ‘Preserving honour between Sharia and Law’ to express its opposition. The atmosphere was heated and the opposition to our work was strongly hostile. However, popular support turned the lecture into a public rally for our campaign.

  On 18 November, a survey we had conducted of twenty-two thousand people was published on a full page in the Arab Al-Yawm newspaper. We had by then collected fifteen thousand signatures (fifty-five per cent male and forty-five per cent female).

  Around seventy per cent of the people we approached had agreed to sign the petition. Of these, thirty per cent supported changing Article 340 enthusiastically and without discussion. Around fifteen per cent signed for the novelty of the experience and twenty-five per cent agreed to sign after researching the issue. Around eighty per cent of the people we met either did not know about the subject or did not have a clear picture of the size of the problem. Ten per cent of the remaining thirty per cent who refused to sign were afraid (unsurprisingly these were nearly all women), while fifteen per cent simply rejected the idea of cancelling the article. Some were apathetic about the whole issue and simply believed that nothing ever changes in Jordan.

  And then, having done everything we thought possible, 21 November 1999, the day Article 340 was to be debated, finally came. There were sixty-three MPs present when the session began. The chamber crackled with tension as many MPs leapt up to oppose virulently any change, describing the cancellation of Article 340 as ‘legislating obscenity’. Deputy Mahmoud Kharabsheh (Balqa), who was the rapporteur of the House Legal Affairs Committee, was the first deputy to speak. He told the assembly he had the support of twenty-seven of Jordan’s most senior MPs who were against cancelling Article 340. ‘This draft is one of the most dangerous legislations being reviewed by the House,’ he said, ‘because it is related to our women and society, especially in light of the threat of globalization.’

  Kharabsheh said that activists should focus instead on changing other articles in the law that have granted women lenient punishments, such as Article 341, which reduces the punishment for a woman who kills her child born out of wedlock to avoid being disgraced.

  Over a dozen deputies of the Parliament spoke, as well as key figures, including the Prime Minister, Abdur-Ra’uf S. Rawabdeh. The overwhelming message was that this was a western-driven campaign of misinformation aimed at destroying the morals of our society.

  One deputy described t
he draft bill as a document to legalize adultery and destroy Islamic ethics and lashed out at us, saying we didn’t represent Jordanian society or its Islamic values.

  This was the most heated session ever seen in our parliament. Despite some moderate voices, only one deputy, Nash’at Hamarneh, a leftist from Madaba, was courageous enough to speak directly in favour of the draft, and kept speaking even as opposing members tried to shout him down.

  ‘This article has become a sword over the necks of our women … we have never once heard of a man being killed in the name of honour,’ he said, struggling to be heard. ‘We must cancel any legislation that stands in the way of liberating our women.’

  By the end of the session, when it was time to vote, I peeked over the balcony to watch the voting. I thought they would count hands and cite names of deputies. I hoped I’d at least be able to question the deputies who claimed during their campaigns that they were in favour of women’s rights as to why they were voting against this change.

  But then one deputy shouted, ‘Why are we wasting more time? Seems to me the majority of the Lower House is against it. Let us vote.’

  The voting was carried out as quick as a flash, so fast that I almost missed it. The Speaker of the Lower House asked who was against the amendment. The majority of the deputies waved their hands. That was it. The bill was rejected without even the dignity of a count of hands.

  I returned to the newspaper to write the story; the news was already out because the voting session was aired live on TV. I watched my in-box swell as people supporting the cause wrote to express their anger over the deputies’ vote.

  I opened an email. ‘Please don’t give up,’ a woman had written, ‘you highlighted an issue that we really didn’t see. The number of killings is obviously going to increase, but you gave it a try, and we’ll still support you and fight to banish the murder of the innocent souls.’