Women in Dark Times (26 page)

The cultural defence might therefore seem to be on the side of the wretched of the earth, but on closer inspection this turns out to be something of an illusion. A woman is murdered. Her killer is partly exonerated on grounds of honour. This is in fact the legal reality which Rana Husseini has played such a key role in struggling to change in Jordan and which holds across much of the Arab world (it is also the central target of Lama Abu-Odeh’s essay). In whose interest is such a verdict? Clearly not hers. There is always a risk that the plea for culture will blind itself to the hierarchy of power, most often gendered, within it. In
Generous Betrayal – Politics of Culture in New Europe
(2002), Wikan makes this argument herself, when a report she had been commissioned to write on children and youth in immigrant communities is watered down by Norwegian authorities unwilling to confront ‘the power of men to define the good of women and children’.
87
Often these are men who have ascended to positions of authority way beyond that enjoyed in their countries of origin. Part of the problem in the UK is that the British government and the police rely on such intermediaries, often the most conservative men in the community, who then become tools in managing minority communities on behalf of the state. ‘A lot of imams will go to the government and media, giving a very positive view of the community and of sharia law,’ states Mohamed Baleela, team leader at the Domestic Violence Intervention Project in Hammersmith, West London. ‘I am a practising Muslim but we have to say there is a problem.’
88

In Tayside, one community leader, Mohammed Arshad, a Pakistani, founder member of the Tayside Racial Equality Commission and chairman of the local Islamic Council and mosque, initiated an attempted honour killing against his daughter’s husband for marrying without his permission. In its appeal for his seven-year sentence to be reduced to community service, the Tayside Islamic and Cultural Education Society described him as ‘a very highly respected and honoured member’ of the community.
89
The community leader consulted by Robina Sanghera the day before she killed herself told her to return to her abusive husband: ‘When a pan of milk is boiling up, it is a woman’s job to settle it down again’. Jasvinder Sanghera was eavesdropping at her sister’s request.
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When Jasvinder decided to have the death investigated, she chose a firm of solicitors from the Yellow Pages that did not have an Asian name.
91
In
Crimes of the Community
, John Paton, manager of the Lancashire Family Mediation Service, acknowledges that if he sends Asian women to local community workers or agencies, there is every chance they will be reported back to their families. In one story a woman fleeing her home in a taxi was returned by the cab driver and then killed. Gina Khan, a Birmingham woman of Pakistani origin who publicly denounced local Islamists’ teaching on women, was the target of a campaign of intimidation against her and her children (she was forced to flee and now lives in hiding in another part of the UK).
92
‘They are dominant males,’ states the chairperson of a women’s project in Bradford who prefers to remain anonymous, ‘who are trying to bully us.’
93

For the feminist critique of multiculturalism, this is an un­answerable complaint.
Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?
is the title of a 1999 anthology edited by Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard and Martha Nussbaum. ‘I failed her,’ Mona Sahlin, the Swedish Minister for Integration, stated after Fadime Sahindal’s death, ‘because I was afraid of fanning the flames of racism.’
94
The same charge was made in the case of Shafilea Ahmed, with the suggestion that the police let go of the case out of fear of being seen as racist. With reference to such cases, Sunny Hundall has commented: ‘Caught between attacks from the right on multiculturalism and fears that speaking out would be racist, we became paralysed into inaction and now find ourselves living with an epidemic of systematic abuse and violence against British Asian women, to which our response ranges from ineffectual to marginal.’
95
Southall Black Sisters, the first group to raise the profile of honour-based violence in this country, have long argued that cultural defences are a tool used by men to justify violence against women. For Radhika Coomaraswamy, United Nations Special Rapporteur on such violence, multiculturalism is being used to excuse the violation of women’s rights. Crimes of honour potentially violate: the right to life, liberty, bodily integrity; the prohibition against torture or cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment; the prohibition on slavery; the right to freedom from gender-based discrimination and sexual abuse or exploitation; the right to privacy; the duty to modify discriminatory practices against women.
96

Seen in these terms, culture becomes another word for the unequal distribution of pain – the formula comes from Indian anthropologist Veena Das.
97
Nasim Karim, a Norwegian-Pakistani woman, barely escaped a forced marriage with her life. In an address to Norwegian members of parliament in 1996, she put it even more graphically: ‘When a man is subjected to violence, it is called torture, but when a woman is subjected to violence, it is called culture.’
98
The strong version of this argument – voiced for example by Berlin-based feminist activist Seyran Ates, who has campaigned against honour killing – is that multiculturalism contributes to the slavery of women.
99

It then remains a question as to whether, as a feminist, you should split open any one culture into its male and female components, tear the cover off the apparent neutrality of the term, and expose the violent power quotient nestling within it (your task then to expose how this one culture oppresses its women); or instead discard the concept of honour killing altogether (your task to insist that there is no culture in which women are not oppressed). Logically, at least, it does not seem possible to do both. For Unni Wikan, and she is not alone, honour killing has its own ‘iron logic’, and must be treated as a specific case.
100
For Rana Husseini, on the other hand, honour crimes are acts of violence against women that transcend any one culture – ‘control crimes’ in another definition – part of a pattern that stretches across the globe. As a term, she insists, ‘honour killing’ is a mistake:

Crimes of honour are just that: crimes pure and simple. For me, wherever their roots are supposed to lie, they are nothing to do with tradition, culture or religion. They are all about control – an effective method of regulating the freedom of movement, freedom of expression and sexuality of women.
101

In this, the law at least partly bears her out. In English law, the defence of provocation, alleging a sudden or temporary loss of control, bears a strong family resemblance to the defence of honour (both used in mitigation of sentence for acts of murder). Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code, the target of Husseini’s campaign, allows for exemption or reduction of penalty for any man killing, wounding or injuring any female relative he discovers in a situation of adultery. Article 98 allows for such a reduction if he commits any such crime in a ‘fit of fury’. We are close to the Western defence of ‘crimes of passion’. ‘Is it not an unacceptable paradox,’ asks law professor Ian Leader-Elliott, ‘that the progressive restriction of a husband’s power to exert lawful control over his wife has been accompanied by a progressive enlargement of a partial excuse for killing her?’
102

Both the critique of multiculturalism, that respect for cultural difference allows violence against women, and the case that violence against women is a general, even universal, phenomenon have more than a grain of truth. The problem with the first, however, is that it can and will be used, or rather misused, to pander to prejudice against immigrants (in the UK the call to drop the agenda of multiculturalism has hardly been a progressive call). The problem with the second is that it promotes a vision of men – who are also the targets of honour killing – as the unfailing oppressors of women, for all time and everywhere.

There is of course another reason for refusing the term ‘honour killings’. There is no honour involved. Husseini therefore refers consistently to ‘so-called’ honour crimes. ‘No Honour in Murder’ is the slogan of the London-based NGO Kurdish Women’s Action Against Honour Killing; ‘No “honour” in domestic violence, only shame!’ is that of the Southall Black Sisters. Or in the words of PC Cox, a family liaison officer in Lancashire: ‘Honour is completely the wrong word. What is honourable about this?’ He had just pulled from the flames a father who had set fire to his whole family in 2006.
103
In saying this, he is of course tearing the concept up from its roots, planting it in different soil. Why on earth in such a moment would you pause to ask whether you have the right to do so?

*

It is here that feminism has to be especially alert to how its demands can be misused for other agendas. The place of honour crimes in debates about immigrant communities, their use to the detriment of those communities, cannot, post-9/11, be underestimated. For that reason, some would suggest, wrongly, that they should not receive undue attention or even be talked about. When
Crimes of the Community
was published in 2008, the
Daily Telegraph
seized on one remark by Nazir Afzal, that the location of ‘Islamist groups – or terrorist cells’ and the incidence of honour-based violence in the UK were a more or less exact mirror of each other: ‘We are dealing with a threat to security as well as freedoms.’
104
In a twist, which oddly dispatches or at the very least downplays the threat honour killing poses to
women
, the perpetrator of the crime becomes an al-Qaida infiltrator, an agent against the state and by implication everyone. The article was a perfect demonstration of how the reality of honour crimes can be put to the service of a post-9/11 agenda targeted against Islam (‘hate the crime, let go of your hatreds’ would be a better rallying cry). But it also revealed how this move against minorities, which is prevalent across Europe and the US, is grounded in a self-serving vision of modern time. These are ‘societies [
sic
]’, the
Telegraph
commented, ‘that are scarcely recognisable as part of twenty-first century Britain.’
105
‘We’, it is implied, are the custodians of modernity, with everyone else, notably immigrant communities, trailing behind. According to this way of thinking, honour killing can be taken to reveal that, even if most of their members were born in the UK, such communities are in fact still living in another world.

In
Frames of War
Judith Butler shows how this vision has been used to pressurise migrants to the Netherlands to demonstrate how sexually modern they are (they were asked to react to a photo of gay men kissing, although the requirement was recently removed for minorities whose faith might be offended).
106
The same set of associations has appeared in relation to honour crime. In February 2005 in Berlin, Hatun Sürücü, a young woman of Turkish background, was murdered, allegedly by her brothers. When few from the migrant community showed up at a memorial vigil staged by a lesbian and gay organisation a few weeks after her death, the fact was seized on by the German press as indicating the community’s support for her murder (rejecting honour killing and solidarity with gay rights became somehow equated). This suggests that the human rights agenda in relation to honour killing is more complex than it might first seem. It is not to exonerate homophobia to suggest, for example, that a minority community’s hesitancy about modern sexual freedoms should not be taken to indicate that, en masse and with no reservations, they support honour crimes. When the sister of the dead woman filed for custody of her son, there was uproar. One senior Christian Socialist Union politician was reported as having suggested the whole family be deported, even though the court had found that a younger brother was solely responsible for the murder. ‘As the bearer of Turkish culture’, writes Katherine Pratt-Ewing in her study of the case, the entire family ‘was to blame’.
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In this instance, honour killing ceases to be a crime and becomes a stigma (Pratt-Ewing’s book is subtitled ‘Stigmatising Muslim Men in Berlin’).

The April 2003 Resolution on ‘So-called “honour crimes” ’ of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe attributes them to ‘archaic, unjust cultures and traditions’ (amended from ‘unjust cultures and traditions’ in the first draft).
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The Resolution, since refined and strengthened in the Resolution of June 2009, is exemplary for the action it calls for against honour-related violence, but the word ‘archaic’ lifts the crime, and entire cultures – ‘archaic, unjust cultures’ – out of the complexities of modern life, indeed out of the heart of Europe, where the rest of the document is very careful to situate them. Writing on forced marriage in the
New Statesman
, Ziauddin Sardar describes it as ‘this obnoxious tribal custom’ (his article uses the word ‘tribal’ seven times).
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What seems to be unthinkable is the idea that honour crimes, even if like any form of violence they can boast a long and dishonourable history, might be part of the stress and strain of the modern world. And nowhere more so than as its different parts – none strictly more modern than the rest since after all we are all alive at the same time – inseparably, and increasingly, interlock with each other.