“Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole.”
— Jim C. Hines
On Oct. 17, in Federal Way, Wash., Jamie W. Larson attacked his cab driver after commenting on his turban. The cab driver, a Sikh, was barraged with anti-Muslim slurs, had his teeth loosened in the attack by Larson and had chunks of his beard tore out. Randy Linn, a former Marine from Indiana, admitted on Dec. 19 that he broke into a mosque in Ohio and set fire to a prayer rug because he wanted revenge for the killing of American troops overseas.
In August, neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page entered the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, and — confusing Sikh for a form of Islam — killed six worshippers and injured four others. In October, Randolph Linn, 52, of St. Joe, Ind., was charged for the arson fire at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo. While being booked on the charges, Mr. Linn repeatedly said to an officer, “[expletive removed] those Muslims.”
Earlier this month, Pamela Geller, the conservative blogger and executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, purchased a number of advertising spaces in subway stations and Metro-North platforms within New York City. The ads include a panorama of the sky and the World Trade Center the moment it exploded in 2001, with a Quran quote beside the image, “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers.”
The MTA, who owns these advertising spaces, however, choose to run disclaimers on all of the ads that take up 25 percent of the advertising space. The disclaimer reads, “This is a paid advertisement sponsored by American Freedom Defense Initiative. The display of this advertisement does not imply MTA’s endorsement of any views expressed.” The MTA started their disclaimer policy after Mona Eltahawy, 45, was caught spray-painting another AFDI advertisement, which equated Muslims with savages.
In response to the offensiveness of the ad campaign, Gellar told the New York Observer, “I refuse to abridge my free speech so as to appease savages.”
This nation has been besieged by a wave of Islamophobic thought since 9/11. In almost every state and in almost every community, a heavy veil of racial and religious discrimination has distorted and obscured open conversations on public policy, civil equity and simply the common rights a person is entitled to. Shows such as “24” and “Homeland” — which, in a recent Salon article, Laila al-Arian calls “the most Islamophobic show” — argue the “deviousness” and “non-American qualities” of all Muslims, and the protests over showing Muslims as regular Americans — as seen after the broadcast of “All-American Muslim” — show that many in this country are xenophobic and prejudiced.
Islam — an Abrahamic religion (Judaism and Christianity are the other two major Abrahamic religions, or religions that can trace their lineage to Abraham) — is the following of the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, who is considered to be the last prophet of God, as well as the teachings of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Islam is the second-largest religion in the world (only Christianity is bigger) with more than 25 percent of the world’s population, or more than 1 billion people, adhering to the religion. As such, Islam is a multicultural, multi-faceted religion with only religious commonalities to link the divergent Muslim communities.
Only 20 percent of the world’s 1 billion Muslims lives in or identifies with the Middle East. One-quarter of all Muslims live in South Asia.
The use of “one size fits all” descriptors on the Muslim community, therefore, is about as apt as using such descriptors on Christians. For example, the Westboro Baptist Church is a highly intolerant, highly bigoted organization that uses the name of Christ to promote hate. If one was to use this example and say that all Christians are bigots, that would be vastly inaccurate and slanderous.
Yet, this is what’s happening to the Islamic community today. Incidents taken from a small subset of the community are being used to describe the entire community. Such actions help to “dehumanize” the community and serve to expand the intolerance gap toward Islamic-Americans. An example of this is “honor killings.”
On Dec. 11, at the University of Rochester (N.Y.) Medical School’s Psychiatry Department, an event “[t]o shed sorely needed daylight on the complex issue of honour crimes in our community” was held. While the University of Rochester is attempting to make itself a leader in honor killing studies, the sudden interest in honor killings emerged after a string of familial murders involving Middle Eastern individuals, one being the case of Faheem Abdul Jaleel, who stabbed his 13-year-old cousin, Samina Qasim, to death in “self defense.” Many in the media quickly jumped to the conclusion that these were honor killings, when, in reality, all evidence — when taken objective and away from racial identification — points to domestic violence.
While the general descriptor honor killings apply to violence to both men and women, and while there have been documented cases of men being “honor killed” — such as the case of a teenaged couple being killed in Greater Noida, India or the case of an Afghani couple that was stoned by the Taliban in 2010 for accusation of adultery (the man was married, the woman engaged to be married) — honor killing is seen to be a crime against women.
In an article for the Middle East Research and Information Project, Sharif Kanaana, a professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, says that honor killing is:
“A complicated issue that cuts deep into the history of Arab society … What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power. Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. The honour killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What’s behind it is the issue of fertility, or reproductive power”
What should be made clear here is that honor killings have little to nothing to do with Islam. Honor killings are tribal actions, tied into the traditional identity of a handful of Indian and Western Asian communities. Christians, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus have been involved in honor killings, as have Muslims; there is no connection between religion and those who participate in this act. It should also be made clear that, just because something is labelled a honor killing, it isn’t. “The label ‘honor killing’ is subjective and requires a judgment call, and as such, the term could be abused and used offensively to discriminate.”
So, what is an honor killing, anyway?
Human Rights Watch defines honor killings as:
“… acts of vengeance, usually death, committed by male family members against female family members, who are held to have brought dishonor upon the family. A woman can be targeted by (individuals within) her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce—even from an abusive husband—or (allegedly) committing adultery. The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that ‘dishonors’ her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life.”
At the core of all honor killings is the concept of namus, or virtue. Namus can both represent the sexual integrity of the women in a family and the honor and integrity of a man’s extended family against outside threats. A man’s namus is a direct reflection of the namus of all the women in his family. In some cultures, the namus extends to the plarina, or the arm of a tribe that shares a common ancestral father. For women in the Middle East, namus is based on obedience, modesty and faithfulness. For an unmarried woman, her namus is based foremost on her remaining a virgin until marriage.
Namus can be lost for any number of reasons: a daughter is born instead of an expected son, trespassing on a person’s land or generally feeling that a daughter is not behaving appropriately. These all constitute a perceived slight that — while not actually having any true impact on the man’s societal standing — weighs heavily on the psyche of men indoctrinated to this way of thinking.
The regaining of lost namus is a tricky proposition. According to those who subscribe to the theory of namus, losing control of the women in a man’s life is a great offense. A loss of control reflects a loss of namus in the eyes of the community, and the only way that lost namus can be restored is through a cleansing of his or his family’s honor. This is done via abortion, murder or forced suicide.
Phyllis Chesler is a professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at City University of New York. A feminist leader, Dr. Chesler has lectured on women’s and human rights issues and is an expert witness in honor killings and Middle Eastern issues. In an exclusive conversation with MintPress, Dr. Chesler shared her thoughts on the phenomenon of honor killing:
MintPress News (MPN): What are honor killings? What is the precedent behind them (religious, cultural, etc.)?
Phyllis Chesler (PC): A classical honor killing involves a conspiracy by a girl’s or woman’s family of origin. It is very different from Western-style domestic violence which does not involve one’s parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles in the decision to kill a girl or woman for the perceived “dishonoring” of her family. She might dishonor her family by refusing to marry her first cousin, refusing to veil properly, choosing to have infidel friends, wanting an advanced education, wanting to live away from home, wanting to choose her own husband, leaving an abusive marriage or in any way being seen as “disobedient.” These victims are teenagers or young women whose average age is 18. Another, smaller group of honor killings concerns married mothers whose average age is 36, who are killed by their husbands; 40 percent of the time, their own family of origin helps with or approves her murder. The highest torture-murder rate exists in Europe where immigrant Muslim girls and women are tempted by Western freedom. An example has to be set so that other girls and women do not choose freedom over family obligations.
MPN: How prevalent are honor killings? Are they specific to a certain sect or region?
PC: Honor killings are perpetrated by Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. However, Hindus and Sikhs rarely do so in the West. They perpetrate them far more often in India proper; their motive is mainly the violation of caste-purity through marriage to someone from the “wrong” caste, and Hindus will also kill the men involved at least 40 percent of the time. Muslims perpetrate honor killings in Muslim-majority countries and in the West. They mainly kill the girls and women. No one knows how prevalent honor killings really are. I give statistics for Pakistan in my most recent honor killing study which compared Muslim and Hindu honor killings.
When asked about the prevalence of honor killings in the United States, Dr. Chesler shared:
“There are absolutely no reliable statistics on honor killing, not in America and definitely not in Muslim-majority or Hindu-majority countries. What we have are precedent setting cases; high profile cases; feminist groups trying to keep a head count of those cases that make it either into the media or into an actual courtroom. Most such cases go unrecorded, untried and unpunished.
“As Muslim immigration increased in Europe, honor killings began to appear in the media and in courtroom cases. Britain finally enacted legislation that would allow the British police to look for and bring back girls and women kidnapped or tricked into going to Pakistan where they were then held against their will in forced arranged marriages. Britain also has the equivalent of a federal witness protection program for those who have escaped being honor killed and for those who testify in such cases against their own families.
“Perhaps because there have been fewer honor killing cases in America, our legal procedures are not yet as ‘advanced’ as in Britain. The father who killed both his daughters in Texas, Yasir Said, has never been found. The mother who assisted him by persuading her daughters to come home after they had run away, has never been seen as an accomplice. The mother in the Nour al-Maleki case who cursed her daughter and who drove her husband’s getaway car in Phoenix, Ariz., has never been tried either. The 1989 case in which both a mother and father perpetrated a hands-on murder of their 16-year-old daughter, Palestina, saw both parents tried and sentenced; this was because her father was a prominent Palestinian terrorist and member of the Abu Nidal group whom the FBI had been watching and taping. The entire murder was captured on tape and the jury got to hear it.
“You have not asked me whether ‘Islam’ is responsible for honor killing. No, it is not. Hindus also perpetuate honor killings. However, few mullahs preach against it and fewer still are willing to excommunicate families who perpetrate or support human sacrifice or femicide. Some scholars say that since apostasy is seen as a capital crime in Islam that some Muslims therefore believe that other acts of ‘dishonoring’ Islam or Muslims also deserve to be treated as traitorous acts worthy of execution. Many Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists and dissidents with whom I work oppose honor killings and other features of gender and religious apartheid.”
In 2000, the United Nations gave a conservative estimate of 5,000 for the number of honor killings performed worldwide. While no federal, state, local or non-governmental agency has counted the number of honor killing cases that occur in the United States, the fact that they exist at all warrants serious discussion and debate. However, it is as much a mistake to deny that honor killing even exist — as it has been argued, a component of tribal tradition not compatible with Western understandings — as it is to classify all cases of domestic violence in the Islamic community that result in death as honor killings. While honor killings, female genital mutilations and bride burnings are all traditionally held parts of the cultures that celebrate them, simply writing them off as a “foreign custom” belittles the agony of the victims.
Honor killing is a unique phenomenon that is not universally shared throughout the Islamic community. By dismissing it as simply “a barbaric practice performed by a barbaric people” and falsely attributing this to Islam, those who wish to practice and celebrate Islamophobia are emboldened. John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”
Islamophobia, ‘Sharia law’ and xenophobia
As reported by NPR, Aasiya Hassan was beheaded by her husband, Muzzamil Hassan, in Buffalo, N.Y. in 2009. The media moved quickly to claim that this was an honor killing, but the Islamic community in Buffalo took the extraordinary stance of decrying this as what it really was: a case of domestic violence — none of Hassan’s family knew about the killing beforehand or sanctioned it.
Artificially attributing a qualifier to an event distorts it. While it may be easy to look at related Muslims killing each other as a honor killing, once the religious descriptor is lifted, it becomes easier to see that such a case may not be so atypical after all.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” While it is easy to point to a people different from yourself and say the wrongs they do are exceptionally wrong because they are not like you, doing so only serves those who are strengthened by another people’s demise.
Let’s take, for example, Zionists, or those who solely support a Jewish national state on Palestinian territory. In the current struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Israelis are facing a massive amount of ill will and bad publicity based on its history of human rights violations, violations of international laws and excessive use of military force against the Palestinians during their occupation of Palestinian land. If, however, the Israelis could claim that the Palestinians were inhumane, that they kill their own people without rhyme or reason, this would justify the Israelis’ need to “defend” themselves against “barbarians.”
While 1,400 Palestinians died under Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2009, it is more attractive to Israel to talk about the 25 Palestinian women who were alleged by Israeli authorities to have died of honor killings over two years, in which they most likely died in domestic violence cases.
In an August essay from FrontPage Magazine, a neo-conservative publication, it was claimed that “honor killings have long been a staple byproduct of Palestinian society.” The article claims that “this pervasive violence has been laid at the feet of the usual suspects, namely the Israelis,” that “in Muslim countries throughout the Mideast, South Asia and Africa … men more often than not treat women little better than livestock” and that “[c]hanging that dismal equation will take more than just a cultural revolution.”
In other words, FrontPage is justifying Israeli force for an issue not concerning Israelis or the occupation of the land. The United Nations (U.N.) and international law recognize that Israel is illegally occupying the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip; if this problem is truly being laid at the feet of the Israeli government, it is because the Israeli government placed it there.
But, in more simplistic tones, America is a Zionist nation. As America has, since its inception, identified heavily with Protestantism, and as Protestant Christianity recognizes Judaism as a component of its dogma, America has always thought well of the Jewish faith and of the concept of Israel. This created an aura of distrust and disdain that was exaggerated by different dress, different customs and a different approach to worshiping.
From Terry Jones, the pastor of Dove World Outreach Center — whose threats to burn Qurans nearly set off a global conflict — to Newt Gingrich, who compared Muslims wanting to build an Islamic center in New York City to Nazis who would erect a sign next to the Holocaust Museum, interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians in this country has been held hostage to whims of politics.
According to a recent study conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 30 percent of all Americans have a favorable view of Islam, compared to 38 percent who don’t. This is a marked decrease from 2005, when most Americans had a favorable view of Islam. Respondents under 50 had a more balanced take on Islam, while older respondents more uniformly were of negative opinions.
Organizations, such as the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum and the Investigative Project on Terrorism, and individuals, such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer — who together created Stop Islamization of America, a group that the Anti-Defamation League has cited “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam … the group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy ‘American values’” — are contributing to a toxic atmosphere of misinformation, as reported by the Center for American Progress.
These groups and individuals feed fears of “creeping” Sharia law in the United States, proliferation of honor killings in the nation and fears of American-born Islamic extremism.
Vernon Schubel, professor of religious studies at Kenyon College and author of “Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam,” told MintPress:
“Fear of ‘Shariah law’ in the U.S. exists for a variety of reasons. The most important is the promotion of that fear by Islamophobic organizations and politicians, primarily but not only Republicans, who see the promotion of the fear of Muslims as useful to their agendas and elections. There is no danger of ‘Shariah Law’ in the USA. No one wants it.
“Do Muslims want the right to perform marriages and funerals and conduct weddings according to Islam? To have halal options for their kids in the school cafeteria? Sure. Same as any minority community. Would some of them like time off from work or school for their religious holidays? What community doesn’t? Do they want to force their religious views on others by changing the fabric of American life? That is just silly. People come here in part because of a culture of religious liberty that allows them to practice their faiths or not practice them as they see fit. They certainly don’t want to take those rights away from anyone else. And even if they wanted to — which is definitely not the case — how in the world would they do it?
“Basic point: Americans have nothing to fear on this issue.”