Nomad

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  The killer is usually the father or brother, someone the girl has grown up with and knows well. Imagine the skulking, fearful life of a girl who knows that if she so much as meets a boy she likes without a chaperone, this may be her fate. Imagine the terror of seeing your own father walk up to you with a gun, a knife, or a cord. Imagine the killer: a man tortured so powerfully by his daughter’s shame that in order to live up to his clan’s twisted sense of right and wrong, he takes up a gun or a knife and kills the girl he has raised, whom he once dandled on his knee and helped to take her first steps.

  This is not an ancient custom, long forgotten, like medieval witch burning. Every year at least five thousand honor killings are committed around the world, according to the United Nations Population Fund, which adds that this is a conservative estimate. Most of them take place among communities from or in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, all of them Muslim countries. Not all the victims are Muslim—honor killings do also occur among Sikhs and non-Muslim Kurds—but most of them are.

  This is the crucial element in honor killing, what distinguishes it from random, individual crimes of passion: it is most often approved by the wider community. As a parent, you will be excluded from society if you “permit” your daughter to “misbehave;” mothers will be sneered at, fathers will be seen as impotent, weak, freakish. You will be redeemed only if you put an end to your daughter’s misbehavior.

  In 2006, in a BBC poll of five hundred young immigrants in Britain (many of them Muslim, but also some Hindus and Sikhs), one in ten said honor killings could be justified. No such poll has been taken in America, and I am not trying to say that Muslims who live in the United States necessarily would say the same. But the fact remains that honor killings do happen in America.

  Five months after Amina and Sarah Said were killed, in the town of Henrietta in northern New York a twenty-two-year-old Afghan man stabbed his nineteen-year-old sister because she had disgraced their family and was a “bad Muslim girl,” according to court documents. She was going to clubs and wearing immodest clothing, and planned to leave the family home. As I read more about it, I learned that the case was the second in four years in the same county in which a Muslim man had killed or tried to kill a family member in order to restore his own honor. In April 2004 Ismail Peltek, an immigrant from Turkey, stabbed and beat his wife to death and wounded his two daughters at their home in Scottsville, five miles from Henrietta. He told investigators that he was attempting to restore his family’s honor after his wife and one daughter were sexually assaulted by a relative and the other daughter was “sullied” by a medical examination.

  In July 2008 in Jonesboro, a suburb of Atlanta, police investigators reported that Chaudhry Rashad, a Pakistani man, who owned a pizza parlor, admitted to strangling his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Sandela, with the cord from an iron, because she wanted to leave the husband he had arranged for her to marry in Pakistan. According to the police, Sandela had refused to continue living with her husband in Chicago and had returned to her parents’ house, where she told her father she wanted a divorce. According to one report, “When the police arrived, he stated that he did nothing wrong.” A photo of the victim posted on the Internet showed a pasty-faced, uncomfortable-looking girl with a look of anguish in her eyes.

  In February 2009 in Buffalo, New York, a forty-seven-year-old Muslim businessman who had set up a cable TV station to “promote more favorable views of Muslims,” beheaded his wife, who was seeking to divorce him. Muzzammil Hassan had previously been very violent, and Aasiya, the mother of his two young children, had just obtained a protection order banning him from their home.

  In every case American police, officials, and reporters seemed to bend over backward to avoid the heinous words honor killing, as if a change of label could transform these horrific killings into ordinary domestic crimes. It made me wonder: Were there no organizations in the United States that could look at these issues? Not that I planned to start one at that time—I had had my fill of politics. But, I thought, someone needs to do something; there should be some kind of activism under way, some kind of visibility, some kind of group.

  Honor killing is not a random expression of a personal madness. The murders of Amina and Sarah Said in Irving, Texas, were punishments for those two girls’ perceived infringement of a cultural order. Although that order is old and brutal and comes from far away, it can operate in Dallas or Henrietta or Atlanta as lethally as anywhere else.

  * * *

  When I read about honor killings I am haunted by the certitude that something, many things, could have been done. There were plenty of signals that, in hindsight, could have set alarm bells ringing in Irving long before Yaser Said picked up his gun. A clear and well-established pattern of beliefs and behavior is involved in all these cases. Is there an urgent need to try to recognize this pattern and prevent these killings? Yes. Are we talking about how to do this? No.

  Why not? Why the hell not?

  When Muslim women face not just oppression but violent death, why aren’t the feminists out protesting these abusers? Where are the great European and American campaigners who powered the contemporary movement for women’s equality in the West? Where, to take just one example, is Germaine Greer, author of such classics of Western feminism as The Female Eunuch? Greer believes the genital mutilation of girls needs to be considered in context. Trying to stop it, she has written, would be “an attack on cultural identity.” She goes on:

  The African women who practice genital mutilation do so primarily because they think the result is more attractive. The young woman who lies unflinching while the circumciser grinds her clitoris off between two stones is proving that she will make a good wife, equal to all the anguish of child-bearing and daily toil …. Western women, fully accoutered with nail polish (which is incompatible with manual work), high-heeled shoes (disastrous for the posture and hence the back, and quite unsuitable for walking long distances over bad roads) and brassieres … denounce female circumcision without the shadow of a suspicion that their behavior is absurd.

  What, you may wonder, does Greer have to say about honor killing? In December 2007, at a lecture she was giving in Melbourne, Australia, on Jane Austen, an Australian writer named Pamela Bone asked Greer if she saw any parallels between the concept of family honor in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and the concept of family honor in Middle Eastern societies today. She then asked why Western feminists seem so reluctant to speak out against things such as honor killings. According to Bone, Greer answered, “It’s very tricky. I am constantly being asked to go to Darfur to interview rape victims. I can talk to rape victims here. Why should I go to Darfur to talk to rape victims?”

  When Bone answered, “Because it’s so much worse there,” Greer asked, “Who says it is?”

  Bone explained that she had been to Darfur and assured Greer that the situation there was worse. Greer responded, “Well, it is just very tricky to try to change another culture. We let down the victims of rape here. We haven’t got it right in our own courts. What good would it do for me to go over there and try to tell them what to do? I am just part of decadent Western culture and they think we’re all going to hell fast, and maybe we are all going to hell fast. But we do care. We do oppose these things. We are all wearing white ribbons this week [a reference to an international campaign to eliminate violence against women], aren’t we? A lot of good that will do.”

  In her article about the incident in The Australian, Bone shrewdly observed, “Behind Greer’s enthusiastically received comments is the dreary cultural relativism that pervades the thinking of so many of those once described as on the Left. We are no better than they are. We should not impose our values on them. We can criticise only our own…. Odd that so many old feminists think racism is worse than sexism.”

  I read and reread the piece, which a friend forwarded to me, and thought, Tricky? “It is very tricky to change another culture”? What h
as happened to Greer and her core values? It is truly absurd for someone like Greer, who is schooled in philosophy, not to see that the element of choice is crucial to distinguish between the behavior of an adult “victim” of the pain of fashionable shoes and the pain of a child who is truly a victim of violence. It is unconscionable for her to refrain from speaking out against honor killing because it would be “tricky” to challenge the culture that condones it.

  Feminism developed in the West. It is a child of the Enlightenment, the period that developed ideas of individual liberty. But even before the Enlightenment, even at its darkest, Western culture was kinder to women than the tribal Islamic culture of the Arabs. To be sure there were practices in Europe and America such as labeling women “witches,” then torturing, drowning, or burning them. Domestic violence, stigmatization, and the exclusion of women from public roles and participation in government were also common. Reading the lives of the women of the past frequently makes me speechless with rage and pity. The belief that women are fickle, irrational, and unreliable appears to have once been almost universal, as was marriage as a practical business transaction between families, conducted by male guardians. Western history is full of the tragic stories of child brides.

  But there are differences between Western culture and that of other civilizations. Women and men in Arabia, China, India, and Africa may have dreamed of liberation from their respective shackles. Perhaps they discussed ways of changing the minds of their oppressors and even organized and rebelled against subjection. But it was only in the West that the ideas, words, organizations, and successful revolutions of liberty actually saw the light of day.

  The story of feminism, or at least feminist thought, is also, at first, largely a story of aristocrats. Young men and women were permitted to mingle (although under strict rules and with chaperones). In many European societies following the Middle Ages daughters were permitted to learn to read and write, to study history, music, even philosophy, if only to be capable of conducting witty conversations on social occasions. Rather than memorizing traditional stories and poems, which was my grandmother’s and her grandmother’s education, with the rigid moral aim of preserving the habits and customs of our forefathers, Western women could go one decisive step further: they could construct logical arguments and ideas of their own.

  Western women during and after the era of the Enlightenment were able to lament their inferior position. They were able to do this in a language and a manner that made perfect sense to some of the men of their time, notably John Stuart Mill. Daughters of the Enlightenment, like the English Mary Wollstonecraft and later the American Margaret Fuller, were pioneers of feminism in the West. Among the original feminists’ first demands was the plea that the institutions of higher learning be open to women, or at least that colleges be established and reserved for women.

  Sadly, some Muslim women who are now lucky enough to benefit from a high-quality education at these same institutions choose to defend the image of Islam over the rights of women. Such educated women (and I have met many) are still the lucky few. High-quality education is closed to millions of their fellow countrywomen. They boast of their privileges: their university education, their experiences with liberal fathers and brothers, their designer accoutrements, and their freedom to travel without the watchful presence of a guardian. But they ignore those underprivileged masses with whom they purport to share a religion and a culture. Some take it one step further: they claim that the subjugation of Muslim women is “folklore,” that it happens only in remote, obscure villages, in just a few countries. All this, they claim, is on its way out, a leftover from history, nothing serious, nothing to worry about.

  When slavery divided their nation, American feminists grasped the immorality of the arguments used by the slaveholders. They denounced slavery, but they took their reasoning one step further to also indict the values that justified the treatment of women as property. It is ironic that many educated Muslim women are so well able to condemn the principles used by foreign imperialists a century ago to dominate colonized countries but shy away from addressing the moral framework that underpins injustices against their own Muslim sisters.

  The civil rights movement in the United States provided another opportunity for American feminists to side with African Americans who were denied their rights because of the color of their skin. And again these feminists stretched the argument beyond discrimination on the basis of color. They stood up to their husbands, fathers, brothers, teachers, and preachers; they argued that, if discrimination on the basis of color was wrong, then it was equally wrong to discriminate on the basis of sex. If the laws of the land were going to be changed and policies adopted that protected the civil rights of blacks, then the laws should be changed and new policies adopted to protect the civil rights of women too.

  In passionate debates on decolonization in Europe, many European feminists stood alongside the “freedom fighters” who strove for nationhood and independence. The reasons for self-rule were clear to them. And they did not waste the opportunity to point out that, if once-colonized people could be trusted to govern their collective destinies, then so could women be trusted with their individual destinies.

  All these were conflicts of principle. All of these struggles addressed the consequences of denying men and women their freedom. All these struggles were won essentially by revealing the immorality of the opposing arguments, whether they invoked the Bible or long-held feudalistic traditions. (Those who wanted slavery, civil rights abuses, and misogyny to continue all used religious arguments.) These arguments were revealed, reviled, and ridiculed, and eventually the laws that institutionalized inequality were repealed.

  Yet, paradoxically, because these struggles were all fought against white men they helped fix in the minds of most people the simplistic notion that blacks, women, and colonized peoples can be victims only of white male oppression. Having sided with other movements of social revolution, such as the movements for national independence in Southeast Asia and minority rights of all kinds, particularly the fight against apartheid and for the Palestinians, feminists began to define white men as the ultimate and only oppressors. White men had engaged in the slave trade, apartheid, and colonialism as well as in the subjugation of women. Nonwhite men were, almost by definition, seen as members of the oppressed.

  As a result, the plight of Muslim women—indeed all third-world women who are oppressed in the name of a moral framework of custom or creed created and maintained by men of color—has largely gone unchallenged. A few nonprofit organizations address it, to be sure; the World Bank, for one, has grown more self-confident in condemning the subjugation of Muslim women. But the massive public effort to reveal, ridicule, revile, and replace old views has not yet begun.

  In fact a certain kind of feminism has worsened things for the female victims of misogyny perpetrated by men of color. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Christina Hoff-Sommers, calls this “the feminism of resentment.” This is the position of “feminists [who] believe that our society [read, Western society] is best described as a ‘male hegemony,’ a ‘sex/gender system’ in which the dominant gender [read, white male] works to keep women cowering and submissive.” These feminists of resentment refuse to appreciate the progress Western women have made, from the right to vote to the punishment of those who try to harass women at work. They see only the iniquity of the white man and reduce such universal concepts as freedom of expression and the right to choose one’s own destiny to mere artifacts of Western culture. They thus provide the men of color with an escape route. If the king of Saudi Arabia is questioned about the laws in his land pertaining to women, he merely demands respect for his faith, culture, and sovereignty, and apparently this argument suffices.

  Because these Western feminists manifest an almost neurotic fear of offending a minority group’s culture, the situation of Muslim women creates a huge philosophical problem for them.

  There are 13.5 million women
in Saudi Arabia. Imagine what it’s like to be a woman there: you are essentially under permanent house arrest.

  There are 34 million women in Iran. Imagine being a woman there: you may be married legally when you are nine; on the order of a judge, you may be lashed ninety-nine times with a whip for committing adultery; then, on the order of a second judge, you may be sentenced five months later to death by stoning. This is what happened to Zoreh and Azar Kabiri-niat in Shahryar, Iran, in 2007; after being flogged for “illicit relations” they were then tried again and found guilty of “committing adultery while married.” The punishment they were to receive for adultery was death by stoning. Their sentence was recently confirmed, on appeal.

  There are 82.5 million women in Pakistan. Imagine being a girl there: you grow up knowing that if you dishonor your family, if you refuse to marry the man chosen for you, or if someone thinks you have a boyfriend, you are likely to be beaten, ostracized, and killed, probably by your father or brother, who has the support of your entire immediate family. You’re also liable to be jailed on the grounds of the Huddud, laws of Islamic transgression.

  Imagine being a girl in Egypt, Sudan, Somalia—any one of twenty-six countries around the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific. Your clitoris has been cut, as well as your inner labia, and the opening of your vagina has been sewn together. Even though excision is not mentioned in the Quran, most of the 130 million women alive worldwide who have undergone this brutal ritual are Muslim women.

  Virginity is the obsession, the neurosis of Islam. Wherever there is a Muslim community, forced or coerced marriage, even child marriage, is common, even in families who are relatively educated. Like domestic violence, most people consider it normal. Men are the guardians of their daughters. A girl is therefore the property of her father, who is entitled to transfer that property to the husband he selects. Child marriage is also a logical outgrowth of the Muslim fixation on female purity: if you marry her off early, as soon as possible after menstruation, she won’t have time to damage your reputation and devalue your goods. The reality of this can be extremely bitter: imagine a thirteen-year-old girl transferred to the arms of an old man she has never seen before.