Harry Potter Star Afshan Azad Attacked by Father, Brother in attempted Honor Killing

Not sure what you're intending to argue here: that she was attacked to protect the family's honour? I think we'd agreed that was an arbitrary label, generally. As for why she was assaulted, one of the articles that I linked describes the attack as being because she was dating a Hindu.

The articles are linked on this post.

Also: the point was your question about whether these attacks were of equivalent frequency in the Muslim and non-Muslim population. I don't know the answer, but I'm suspicious that it would be higher in the Muslim population because of lagging social attitudes from the legal situation in at least several Islamic countries. I suggested that we just compare statistics, although I don't know where such stats would be collected.

Also: why do you spell "honour" like an American?

I think I mentioned the "circle" above: but by circle, you mean her "mosque group"? ...actually, I've never heard of this in religious families, and certainly not in Britain. And why does this debate sound so damn familiar? Must be deja vu, I suppose.

Ah: I see where you were going, above. However, there's not much difference - as I think we'd agreed - between what people call an "honour crime" and simple domestic assault. As to whether or not they tried to kill her, or how bad her injuries were, I couldn't say. It certainly sounds like more than a simple slap, however. I don't think it fits into that category.

You're also postulating that it wasn't that she was dating a Hindu, specifically, but rather any (presumably) non-Muslim, or in extremis someone outside her socioreligious group: however, your example above has the seed of my point also, in which the specific religion of the third party is relevant. I don't know that the difference between those points is significant, really.

I agree. But do such crimes carry implicit legal leniency? And if so, on what basis? The religious basis for reduced sentencing is clear in the ME: perhaps this does make them a special case after all. Or rather: maybe it would contribute to higher frequency in families from the ME.

 

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Pure denial of a ubiquitous feature of Muslim culture.

 

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i shall, henceforth, advice any middle eastern type chick i encounter to arm themselves and cast a suspicious eye towards her family

it is the moral thing to do

i shall also avoid hitting on these chicks in case i accidentally get them killed

 

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i shall, henceforth, set my pitbull on any middle eastern type male i encounter

 

I don't know about Brazil or Columbia, but compare Muslim with non-Muslim families in countries like Zimbabwe, and it's only the Muslim men who try to exert this kind of control. I'm sure you can find exceptions, but it's a well-known phenomenon.

The Hindus have traditionally controlled their women in the same ways.

 

Funny you should mention that.

My cousin served with the UN peacekeeping force in Egypt for a while after Suez. While he was there, he met a local Arab Muslim girl. Saw her for a while; turned out her family didn't approve. Someone threw something round into his barracks one dark evening. Turned out not to be a grenade; it was her severed head.

 

Why should we care? After all these simple people have a rich folklore...

 

And colourful dancing, or not.

 

Maybe they can join the modern age, and use GPS devices to track their women. Or laser beams to decapitate them in case they stray.

 

Looking around

Bells did mention and cite this in a prior post:

In Syria, Morocco, Brazil, Colombia, and more than sixty other countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America, men are permitted to kill female relatives in honor killings, as long as it was a crime of passion and not pre-meditated.

(Arms)​

In 2002, National Geographic reported:

Reports submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights show that honor killings have occurred in Bangladesh, Great Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Uganda. In countries not submitting reports to the UN, the practice was condoned under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan, and has been reported in Iraq and Iran.

But while honor killings have elicited considerable attention and outrage, human rights activists argue that they should be regarded as part of a much larger problem of violence against women.

In India, for example, more than 5,000 brides die annually because their dowries are considered insufficient, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Crimes of passion, which are treated extremely leniently in Latin America, are the same thing with a different name, some rights advocates say.

"In countries where Islam is practiced, they're called honor killings, but dowry deaths and so-called crimes of passion have a similar dynamic in that the women are killed by male family members and the crimes are perceived as excusable or understandable," said Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

The practice, she said, "goes across cultures and across religions."

(Mayell)​

Additionally, NG notes:

There is nothing in the Koran, the book of basic Islamic teachings, that permits or sanctions honor killings. However, the view of women as property with no rights of their own is deeply rooted in Islamic culture, Tahira Shahid Khan, a professor specializing in women's issues at the Aga Khan University in Pakistan, wrote in Chained to Custom, a review of honor killings published in 1999.

(ibid)​

In 2007, a blogger at The Independent Voter (Indie Castle) explained:

In several of the overwhelmingly Christian nations in Latin America one can find similar honor killings. Mexico in particular has a culture which places a very high value upon family honor in the context of women and sexuality. And even where there are laws against such gender-based violence the courts are often reluctant to do anything to enforce those laws.

In Brazil up until 1991 killing one's wife for any reason or for no reason at all was legally considered "noncriminal." In just one year nearly 800 Brazilian men killed their wives. In Columbia, until 1980, a husband could legally kill his wife for adultry without any legal onus to prove her guilt. Legislative decisions allowing a partial or complete "honor" defense could be found in most Latin American countries as recently as 2002 and perhaps still can be today.​

Statistics on these crimes are a difficult to come by, as this sort of act, at the hands of a Christian, doesn't seem to inspire the same sort of disgust or outrage. But this does not change the fact that they do, in fact, occur, and if people operate under the impression that this is somehow a strictly Muslim phenomenon, they are victims of either their own distorted judgment or a general media bias against things that just aren't sensational enough for the market.

This indicts consumers on two points: First, that domestic violence just isn't that important to them, and, secondly, that they'll lap up like hungry dogs anything that casts Islam in a sensationally bad light.

The problem is not inherent to Islam, but, rather, a feature of poverty, traditional values, and a lack of enlightened education, all mixed just right. Over generations, such conduct becomes institutional, and if we expect people to wake up and join the twenty-first century, we need to give them a reason. Curiously, for all our first-world virtues, the one thing we've never figured out is how to transmit our successes to other parts of the world. Indeed, in many cases, we prefer to argue among ourselves whether progress is progress, right is right, or people are people. Even now, we argue over how to exclude certain groups of people from the benefits of enlightenment when what we ought to do is figure out how we achieved what successes we have, and explore ways to transmit these virtues to others without so many potholes, detours, and general roadblocks.
____________________

Notes:

Arms, Sasha. "Honor Crime". Suite 101. September 30, 2009. Crime.Suite101.com. July 6, 2010. http://crime.suite101.com/article.cfm/honor_crime

Mayell, Hillary. "Thousands of Women Killed for Family 'Honor'". National Geographic News. February 12, 2002. News.NationalGeographic.com. July 6, 2010. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0212_020212_honorkilling.html

Kevin. "Honor Killings and TheoConservatism". The Independent Voter (Indie Castle). January 26, 2007. TheIndependentVoter.com. July 6, 2010. http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...m/2007/01/honor-killings-and-theoconservatism

See Also: http://theindependentvoter.com/2007/01/honor-killings-and-theoconservatism (This page is not presently loading correctly.)​

 

Accepted by whom...? Surely not the people who are being honor killed. Muslim women are VICTIMS here, in every sense of that term. When you say it is their culture to do honor killings, what you really mean (without even realizing it) is that it is the MEN'S culture to perform honor killings. They force (and enforce) that culture upon the women.

Those women have been bullied, brutalized and brainwashed for a thousand years. They have been forcibly forbidden to become educated about alternate ways of living their lives. They have been murdered for even daring to ask questions. Many of them have had their genitals mutilated when they were little girls (infibulation), to prevent them from enjoying orgasms as adults. They have been forced to hide beneath a burqua whenever they are in public... as if they were something evil and shameful that needed to be hidden from view. What do you expect them to do..? How the hell do you expect them to think..? How would YOU think if you were raised that way..? Muslim women do not "thrive on abuse;" they simply do not know any other way of life (and death).

The destruction of Islam would no doubt terrify most of those women... at first.

 

AND religion AND especially Islam. I know it's the traditional liberal view to ignore religion, but I feel that's a mistake. Traditional values are religious values centering on sin. I believe that these values did predate religion, and were codified in religion, but that factor makes it very difficult to overcome, even if the other factors were accounted for like poverty.

Ending these honor killings would also be the end of Islam, as these values are integral to it's patriarchal nature. If you can't control your women, then you aren't in control at all.

 

Bigotry isn't beige, but it's still a stupid color

Codified where? (This isn't actually that tough a question.)

You do realize how difficult it is to even pretend to take such arguments seriously?

 

u

Look up something called "Sharia law." It is said by muslims to be derived from Islamic texts. Either they use their religion to design these misogynistic systems of law or they pretend to.

As well, did you know that the Quran teaches that islam is supposed to be made victorious over all other religions, even when followers of other religions are adverse to changing?

 

That was almost impressive

In other words, it's an invention after the fact. That's the point: It's a cultural phenomenon, not a religious one.

And?

 

Tiassa: without the religion, they would have no scriptural warrant for Sharia. The religion is the basis for systems of Sharia so without the religion, those who were hurt by Sharia would rise up against it. Without the religion, Sharia could not sustain.

 

As well, if you don't want to blame the religion: that is okay. That just means that it is their culture (or at least that part of it) that we need to eradicate instead. When it is a society's culture to torture and kill, then it isn't culture at all. It's just barbarism.