Murder in the Name of Honor (13 page)

One day early in 2003 I arrived at work and, as usual, checked my in-box. I receive emails from all over the world, but I was interested to note that on this occasion there were some from Australia. The first I read was from a woman called Lauren J:

I wish to express my disgust and horror at the ‘honour crimes' in Jordan … I am especially outraged that girls and women in Jordan are treated with such disrespect and disregard that it is considered acceptable by society that they are murdered for such innocent behaviour as talking to a man … If society and the Parliament allow it to continue, Jordan will soon be seen as a merciless, evil killer of its own people.

There was another from a woman called Tanya:

It is shocking enough to hear all about the Arab culture and how women are treated like prisoners having no freedom at all and are treated like dirt, let alone male family members killing them when they have done nothing wrong!! All the men in this country are chauvinist, sexist, self-centered ANIMALS with no feelings whatsoever … My heart goes out to all Arab women. I wish something could be done and they could all be rescued and brought here to Australia to live. I can certainly say that I live in the best country in the world. At least women are safe here.

Another wrote: ‘The Middle East is somewhere I have not yet been to and Jordan in particular was on my wish list of places to go. However, I refuse for my tourist dollars to be spent in a country where male family members kill their own female relatives for any purpose whatsoever, let alone for falling in love.'

I was worried by these emails, as they were so aggressive and unrepresentative of the reality of Jordanian life. Of course we suffer with so-called honour killings but, thankfully, they remain comparatively rare and Jordan is largely a progressive, modern society in which the majority of women, such as myself, are able to speak out. These people were writing to me about a Jordan that I did not know – a country full of evil men who butchered hundreds of women every year. More and more emails continued to arrive from Australia and New Zealand and I was baffled as to why.

I soon received an explanation. Yasmine Bahrani, an Arab-Iraqi journalist, who was working as a features editor for
USA Today
, told me about a book that had just been published and had hit the bestseller lists in Australia. Called
Forbidden Love
in Australia and later published as
Honor Lost
in the USA, by Norma Khouri, it was about so-called honour crimes in Jordan.

Yasmine shocked me with what she had to say next. ‘Rana, you have to read this book and do something about it. It's filled with huge mistakes, false accusations and slander directed at Muslims and Arabs. What is worse,' she added, ‘is that the book has been translated into fifteen languages and is selling well all over the world! Khouri says that Jordan is bordered by Kuwait and Lebanon and that Arab women do not have a say in what to study and that they are oppressed in every aspect of life.'

Unable to believe what I was hearing, I got hold of a copy.

Forbidden Love
tells the story of Khouri and her childhood Muslim friend named Dalia. Khouri, who describes herself as belonging to a strict Christian family in Jordan, claims she ran a unisex hairdresser's shop with Dalia. According to Khouri, Dalia
was killed by her father after he discovered she was in love with a Christian (one of her male customers). Khouri also writes that she had to flee Jordan in 1996 to escape death after speaking out against the murder. She says she ran away to Greece and started writing her book in an internet café.

I visited the street in Jabal Hussein where Khouri claimed to have lived with Dalia, the honour crime victim. No one I spoke to had ever heard of these two women or their hairdresser's shop, nor had there been a murder in the name of family honour in that neighbourhood for over twenty years.

There were also gross historic, geographic and demographic errors. On page two, Khouri states, ‘Unlike the Jordan River, no longer strong enough to flow down to Amman …' The Jordan River never passed through Amman; it has always flowed through the Jordan Valley.

On the same page, it is stated that Jordan is bordered by many countries and mentions Lebanon, Egypt and Kuwait, among others. The countries bordering Jordan are Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel.

The description of women's lives in Jordan was the thing that really disturbed me the most. Khouri said that the situation of women in Jordan is ‘a stifling prison tense with the risk of death at the hands of loved ones and [they] had no right to argue with men in their families'.

But one of the most disturbing statements was: ‘Life in Dalia's home was basically like life in all Muslim homes in Amman, regardless of class, money, or neighbourhood.' To illustrate this statement, Khouri claimed that Dalia was not permitted to eat at the same table with, or at the same time as, the men in her household. Dalia was to cook the meal and quietly serve it to them. Only when they had finished and left the room were she and her mother allowed to eat the leftovers. While this family lifestyle could be the case for a few individuals, this sweeping generalization does not in
any way reflect the reality of life in the vast majority of Muslim homes in Jordan.

Khouri also said that Dalia was only one of thousands of women who are victims of honour crimes yearly in Jordan, again a gross exaggeration that left my head spinning. Perhaps her most blatant giveaway was Khouri's claim that she ran a unisex hairdresser's shop in Jordan with her friend Dalia; the whole story revolves around this fact. The Hairdressers' Union in Jordan, in charge of issuing operating licenses, informed us that they had never heard of such a hairdresser's, and that it was against the Union's regulations to issue licenses to unisex hairdressers – so none existed in Jordan. Nor did the Greater Amman Municipality have any record either of this shop or of the owners. In addition, families who had brought up their daughters so strictly would never have allowed them to work in a unisex salon, had it existed, let alone handle men's hair.

Khouri also stated that Christians were oppressed in Jordan and had to live according to Islamic law. In reality, all citizens abide by the civil laws that govern the country. When it comes to religious laws, these mostly govern family issues; Muslims abide by a certain set of laws while Christians abide by laws drafted by their own churches.

Khouri wrote: ‘We [Christians] must not build new churches or temples, or sound church bells. We must not build any building taller than one belonging to a Muslim, as this would disgrace our neighbours.' Not only are these false statements, they are ridiculous. The bells of Christian churches ring on every religious occasion in Jordan, such as weddings, holidays and Sunday prayers.

Khouri also claimed that from the moment she defended Dalia publicly she became a legitimate target for an honour killing. I never came across any murder whereby the friend of an honour crime victim has been murdered.

There are dozens of other small details: the mention of a 50JD bill (these were introduced four years after the story took place);
she went to a café that did not exist at the time of the story; a cigarette brand was mentioned which was introduced years later; she claimed that
The Jordan Times
is a weekly newspaper when in fact it is a daily. The list is very long and I will spare you the majority of the errors, as I'm sure you will have got the idea by now.

The timing of the book's publication (six years after she started writing it) raised some important questions. It was first published in 2002, not long after the attacks against the USA on 11 September 2001, and during the build-up to the war in Iraq.

Yasmine Bahrani wrote an important article in
USA Today
on 24 February 2003, entitled ‘
Honor Lost
troubles knowledgeable reader', a month after the book started receiving extensive coverage in the western media and entered the bestseller lists (it went on to sell several hundred thousand copies).

Bahrani wrote:

One way to end this despicable practice [so-called honour killings] is to call attention to it, and Khouri's tale has some valuable aspects. As the United States prepares for a possible invasion of Iraq, Khouri focuses on a tragic aspect of that region's culture … Khouri asserts that the kingdom's Christians must pay a special poll tax. Such a tax on Christians and Jews is well known in Islamic history, but it hasn't been imposed in Jordan in decades … Honour killing is a serious and wrenching issue in the Middle East. It is certainly helpful to examine such a tragedy, but the context and details of Khouri's case make it appear atypical, if not unique.

Back in Jordan, people began hearing about the book from friends and relatives living in the countries where it had been published. They told of how the book had had a negative impact on their lives, especially in the case of friends and relatives who lived in the USA and Australia.

It is vital to understand the incredible amount of damage Khouri has done by writing this book. She ruined our cause. Those who opposed change, who suspected that a western agenda lies behind our activism, were suddenly presented with ‘evidence' that crimes of honour were a fiction and exaggeration and sought to link our campaign to Khouri's book.

Things had already been hard enough for us without this. And then, incredibly, Khouri had the nerve to put my name and email address in the back of the book – and urged people to send letters of objection to me! She had also included, without permission, the Jordanian National Commission for Women (JNCW) and the Jordanian National Campaign to Eliminate So-Called Honour Crimes. We had been well and truly tarnished by this dreadful account.

I had had it with this book. I could not stand by and watch years of work by journalists, activists and NGOs being sabotaged. I grabbed it, marched down to my favourite café and studied the book for several days, listing every single factual error it contained (I eventually had a list of eighty points).

With the help of my colleague Nisreen Alami, I prepared a letter and sent it to the publishing house along with the list. The publishing house responded by saying that they did not plan to consider the points on our list and that they stood by Khouri's story.

Of course, this just made me all the more determined.

The harsh and angry emails from New Zealand and Australia continued to fill my in-box. One person wrote on 22 July 2003: ‘Jordan and the royal family claim to be modern, while these crimes still take place in Jordan.' A woman named Natasha H. wrote: ‘Jordan is not a society of democracy but one of brutality and its leaders should be ashamed.'

Another person named Ellie from Australia wrote to me three days later: ‘We have just had a case here of a paedophile who has
indecently assaulted up to six hundred girls from the age of one to 15. Under Islamic law all six hundred girls would have to be killed, while the real criminal walked free.'

Keristi D. wrote an email during the same period saying she had just finished reading Norma Khouri's book and declared that she was puzzled – she had visited Jordan in 2001 and found it to be a very enjoyable and vibrant place with helpful people – it was nothing like the decription in the book. ‘Before reading the book
Forbidden Love
I told many people that if given the chance they should discover the wonderful country of Jordan, but now I would consider not even mentioning I went there due to the disgust I feel at the laws and crimes against the women of the country I so enjoyed.'

She continued: ‘If I knew then what I have been aware of now through Norma's book, what went on behind the great façade they have built for tourists, I would not have gone. I plan on advertising Norma's book to as many people as I can to make them also aware of the wrongs that are occurring in a country I thought far superior to its neighbours.'

Another woman from Australia wrote on 8 November 2003: ‘I am too angry to express my feelings on this particular book, plus I may get into trouble by expressing what I would like to do to Muslim men (Oh yes, I would love to stoop to their levels and show them what they do to these stifled, prisoned [
sic
] women).'

I received emails from children, which made me sad to think that their first understanding of the Middle East was a book full of fictional daily horrors. Sarah, a nine-year-old girl from New Zealand, wrote me an email on 22 May 2003, thinking I was Norma Khouri. She found the book in her mother's car; the minute she looked at it she knew straight away that it was ‘the right book for me … when I found out it was true I was shocked and it must have been scary to you. I do not know your friend. I bet she was wonderful … I think it was good to write about that awful story and
now you can tell the world your feelings and different religions and what they believe.'

This book was doing irreparable damage both to our cause and to Jordan as a whole. It also had a major impact on the debate about invading neighbouring Iraq, especially in Australia where the book eventually sold 200,000 copies. Ihab Shalbak was a member of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and member of the No War in Iraq committee. Shalbak, who lived in Australia, sent me the following email: ‘As you are aware the debate about the morality of the war against the Iraqi people is a major issue in Australia and western countries, in Australia even the conservative right wing constituents came out to speak against the war, strangely and suddenly Norma Khouri appeared in these very conservative constituents to speak about the oppression of Jordanian, Arab and Muslim women and the need to liberate them.'

Khouri had indeed held a series of readings in Australia (where she now lived) that had ‘moved festival audiences to tears'. It was clear that her book succeeded in further embedding the stereotypical image of ‘Arab' men. This book was perpetuating the generalizations and misconceptions that ‘all Arab men are chauvinists', ‘all Arab men terrorize women', ‘all Arab women are oppressed', ‘Arab women do not have choices', and so on.