And yet the denial from Islamic spokesmen in the West is all-pervasive and never challenged by the mainstream media -- which only ensures that more women will be victimized. "No More Honor Killings," by Melik Kaylan for Forbes, January 29:
The news from Bangladesh is that a teenage girl was recently punished with 101 lashes after she was raped and impregnated. Village elders apparently decide such matters in rural Bangladesh where Sharia law prevails. The girl's family quickly married her off but when the pregnancy emerged her husband demanded a divorce and reparations. So the elders issued a series of fatwas against the girl's family, fining the father and expelling the family from the village. Oh, and they pardoned the rapist.You may feel that we have no business worrying about what happens in remotest Bangladesh, but since we are at war on multiple fronts against such people, or rather they are with us, we'd do well to know our enemy. Why do these outrages occur so consistently in the Muslim world, you might ask, and does it tell us some ineradicable truth about the nature of Islam? Abuses like these are not exclusive to Islam but in no other culture these days are they actually upheld by authorities citing formal tenets of justice.
Turn it up, down or sideways, you may find it hard to discern any hint of moral symmetry in the judgment. You may wish to blame it on the universally evident wonkiness of Islamic scriptural law or even the absence of such in a remote village. But let us try for a moment to follow the logic. The girl kept the rape a secret, it seems, because she was terrified. Perhaps her family colluded with her silence. The quickly married husband felt duped. Fair enough. But 101 lashes for the girl whose life was ruined? How about sympathy and support? And by what code of social or divine casuistry do they pardon the rapist? [...]
In Syria, as elsewhere, many conservative Muslims--including women--see any creeping sympathy for rape victims as the beginnings of westernization by stealth, the tip of the iceberg of feminism. In plenty of Muslim countries--Morroco, Yemen, Bangladesh--honor killings are often not punishable by law if they're deemed "justified," and not infrequently the rapist benefits from customary codes of mercy in place of the victim. This is especially true where a weak central state gives way to tribal law in remote regions or even in overcrowded and unpolicable urban areas. In some places the problem barely exists--in Iran,for example, and in Turkey outside of the Kurdish areas. But everywhere this central principle applies: tribalism equals Islamic conservativism equals bad news for women. [...]
A strange truth often prevails in such cases: the more innocent the girl, the greater the need to martyr her, for at a certain point appearance is everything--the shame has spread so far and deep that nothing else will suffice but the harshest display of public purgation. One can imagine that in the Darwinian conditions of Arabian life where Islam first prevailed and then was later repeatedly reinforced, by other warrior races from elsewhere down the centuries, right up to Saudi Wahhabism, rumors of females running loose denoted weakness in the tribe. And soon, no doubt, other tribes might begin to probe for those weaknesses--an invitation to disaster. Without going into the nuances of Suras, Hadiths, Fiqh, Adat and the like, we can safely say that a large chunk of Islamic scripture explicitly cites custom and tradition as a perfectly valid, often the only, authority in matters of jurisprudence. It was always done this way, and anyone trying to effect a change is contravening the divine scheme.
Sure there's a contradiction here, because Islam also teaches that before the Prophet's message the world lived in Jahilliya, a profane state of ignorance, so what about traditions that Islam inherited? Let us leave such perplexities for the Imams to fight over. In talking about honor killings, we are talking about customs so ancient they predate the scriptural religions of our era, indeed to a time of pagan or animist superstitions. Ancient civilizations often believed that undue attention from the gods invited catastrophe, not least as provoked by the form of a beautiful daughter. The male gods were forever zooming down to copulate with a mortal girl, from which there followed inevitable myriad disasters. Back in the 1990s when I collected an antique textile from the Caucasus, a Kaytak, I took a trip into Daghestan and found that Kaytaks were used to cover the faces of infants in order to keep them from attracting negative attention from the gods. In ancient times there was no greater curse than the arbitrary curse of the gods who suddenly singled you out for ineffable reasons of their own.
And so we get to Islam and the honor killing of innocents. A much older code than Islam is at work here, one that Islam doesn't entirely repudiate as it tries to accommodate and sanctify tribal tradition. The more innocent the victim, the more she must be sacrificed because the curse is all the more palpably divine for being arbitrary. Muslim conservatives often try to retro-justify the situation by assertions that the girl no doubt behaved lewdly or failed to follow parental rules. Even if true, what law was the rapist following? The answer you will get, literally, is this: He was following the law of nature. He was possessed with desire, spontaneously and irretrievably, couldn't curb himself, shouldn't be blamed. In effect, he was possessed by the gods, or the Djinns, and became their instrument. He deserves merciful understanding....
The first part of this article is very good, especially the passage noted by Mr. Spencer above:
Abuses like these are not exclusive to Islam but in no other culture these days are they actually upheld by authorities citing formal tenets of justice.
............
Unfortunately, the author wanders rather off-topic toward the end, nattering on about tribalism and "the Gods".
How many people here, if you go back far enough, have a "tribal" background? Probably pretty much everyone. How many of us are descended from the Vikings, or the Britons, or the Celts, or the Teutons, or the Cossacks, or the Huns—I could go on, but why bother?
Now, how many of you are *guided today* by tribal superstitions and codes of conduct? But Islam reinforces such superstitions, as it does the "warrior code".
The author even gives Islam an out—albeit a small one, when he writes:
You may wish to blame it on the universally evident wonkiness of Islamic scriptural law or *even the absence of such* in a remote village. [emphasis mine—GI]
........................
Funny, then, that the *absence* of Islamic law would lead to the same brutal, unjust consequences as its enforcement. The fact is that not only does Islam not "entirely repudiate" these vicious "traditions", it sanctifies them in Shari'ah law and the baneful example of "the Prophet".
Nonetheless, at least Kaylan addresses the terrible issue of "honor killing", and at least partially indicts Islam in its prevalence in the Muslim world. Good for Forbes Magazine for publishing the piece.
Didn't the perfect Moslem man Muhammad display sympathy towards a contrite young woman that found herself pregnant, out of wedlock? What did the child raping prophet do? Why after the woman's child was born he had her stoned to death. What a foul stench of a man Muhammad was. Why would anyone expect sympathy from a society that reveres that filthy monster?
An excellent book digest of "Murder in the name of Honor" can be found at http://www.annaqed.com/en/content/show.aspx?aid=16277
We must not allow cultural sensitivity to make us blind to moral deprivation.
Honor killing has no place in the twenty-first century. We are not primitive savages.
The root of 'honor killing' has more to do with male supremacy machoism than with religion, although the religion of Islam readily accommodates it...The woman somehow offended the man...His machoism becomes aroused, Q 4:34...If her offense is serious enough macho action is required...Beating her 'lightly' is too light...For very serious violations, death is required...His 'honor' is affected, because as the 'macho dominant' it is his job and duty to keep the woman in a state of obedience...If she strays and he does nothing, his brothers will tell him all about it and maybe kill the woman themselves, especially if she is an apostate. If the parent neglects this duty, the ummah may start eyeing him...The Rifqa Bary case is an example where the Noor mosque Imams gave the parents 'advice' on what to do...CAIR insinuated itself, and Rifqa received death threats from strangers...
Islam is a patriarchal macho system of control of the 'other'...The 'other' in this case, women...
An excellent article, many thanks to Robert Spencer for bringing it to our attention.
No WE are not primitives but unfortunately a large proportion of 1.4 billion Muslims are. Even the more educated ones.
I would make two points. First, Islam, unlike Christianity and Judaism, reinforces the worst of tribalism and primitivism from long ago. It should be interesting to all sensible folk how easily compatible with one another Islam and primitive tribal customs often are. Says a lot about Islam for all but the obtuse (which, unfortunately, would include a hell of a lot of people).
Two, the author use the word "conservative" when he should be using the word "reactionary." There's a HUGE difference between conservatives and reactionaries and it's getting very tiresome to see this continued misuse of language. It has been my experience that those who use the word "conservative" when they should be using the word "reactionary" are invariably those to be found on the left side of the political spectrum and are very likely as well to engage in at least some moral equivalency thinking, which gravenimage already touched upon when she mentioned how the author wandered off topic, "nattering on about tribalism and 'the Gods.'" The way one uses words often says a lot about a person, such as here I believe.
From the report:
...let us try for a moment to follow the logic. The girl kept the rape a secret, it seems, because she was terrified. Perhaps her family colluded with her silence. The quickly married husband felt duped. Fair enough. But 101 lashes for the girl whose life was ruined? How about sympathy and support? And by what code of social or divine casuistry do they pardon the rapist? [...]
In Syria, as elsewhere, many conservative Muslims--including women--see any creeping sympathy for rape victims as the beginnings of westernization by stealth, the tip of the iceberg of feminism. In plenty of Muslim countries--Morroco, Yemen, Bangladesh--honor killings are often not punishable by law if they're deemed "justified," and not infrequently the rapist benefits from customary codes of mercy in place of the victim...
These are the kinds of indications we have seen from thousands of reports like this over the years. This is exactly what I was talking about when I dismissed the official statistics of our formerly persistent pro-Islam troll, "dave742": in the case of these kinds of societies, official statistics-gathering that works in nice orderly humane suburban communities of the West (or even less than nice and orderly, but still light years more so than in these backward cesspools of sociopathology) are utterly useless for gleaning the true picture of stats about rape and abuse of women (let alone stats about any other sociopathology). It is reasonable to assume that 90% of the abuses and rapes are going unreported and covered up both by family members and by officials (officials, of course, including Islamic clergy); and that furthermore the victims are harshly ostracized and/or terrified into silence, when not simply eliminated.
graven image:
The first part of this article is very good
...Unfortunately, the author wanders rather off-topic toward the end, nattering on about tribalism and "the Gods".
The author is merely using one of the many cogs of the mechanism of the PC MC paradigm by which the problem of Islam is neutralized: in this case, the "it's not Islam, it's culture" trope. That said, he at least includes remarks that advert to Islam and to Muslim societies (e.g., "Abuses like these are not exclusive to Islam but in no other culture these days are they actually upheld by authorities citing formal tenets of justice"), but even there, he has recourse, as Wellington notes, to that other cog in the mechanism of the PC MC paradigm, the "conservative Muslims" are the problem -- meaning that minority of conservative meanies who are basically Jerry Falwells in Arabic robes dictating their "conservative" values to the nice decent common Muslims moms and pops.
Wellington:
Even "reactionary" is comically inadequate, I'd say, to convey what we have here: basically ultra-fanatical and regressive sociopathology -- and even that doesn't do justice to full grotesque catastrophe of Muslim sociology.
That would be my point, guess I was being too subtle or obtuse.