Murder in the Name of Honor (7 page)

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.

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.

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.'