Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law. In this case, of course, the victim was the murderer’s wife, a victim to the culture of violence and intimidation that such laws help create.
The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’” And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”
Until the encouragement Islamic gives to honor killing is acknowledged and confronted, more women will suffer.
“Brooklyn cabbie convicted of plotting Pakistan ‘honor killings,'” by Nate Raymond, Reuters, July 3, 2014:
NEW YORK, July 3 (Reuters) – A New York cab driver was found guilty on Friday of conspiring with relatives in Pakistan to commit “honor killings” of family members of a relative he believed helped his daughter escape back to the United States.
Mohammad Ajmal Choudhry, 61, was found guilty by a federal jury in Brooklyn on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, transmitting of threats to injure, and visa fraud.
Prosecutors said that for more than three years, Choudhry’s daughter, Amina Ajmal, was held against her will by relatives in Pakistan at her father’s direction, and forced into an arranged marriage to help a man get a U.S. visa.
With the help of a cousin and the U.S. State Department, Ajmal eventually escaped and returned to the United States in January 2013, prosecutors said.
Back in the United States, Ajmal did not tell her father her whereabouts, but spoke with him in recorded phone calls.
In those calls, prosecutors said Choudhry threatened to orchestrate the murder of her cousin if she did not return immediately to her family home in Brooklyn.
“I will not end this, until I find you,” he said on Feb. 21, 2013, according to court records. “I will kill their entire family.”
Four days after the call, the cousin’s father and sister were shot dead in Pakistan and a third relative was severely injured, prosecutors said.
In court filings, prosecutors said an eyewitness observed Choudhry’s brother “standing over the murdered victims, holding a gun, and desecrating the bodies.”
In a call that day between Ajmal and her father, Choudhry said he would “not leave a single member of their family alive.”
“My name is tainted everywhere in newspapers, on TV channels, that I am a man with no honor, my daughters are whores,” he said. “I have no place to show my face with dignity.”
Choudrhy was arrested later that day outside his home in Brooklyn. Neither his brother nor anyone else in Pakistan was charged, according to a spokesman for Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, who confirmed the verdict.