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.
“Outrage after man tortures and murders 10-year-old daughter,” by Saeed Al Batati, Gulf News, December 30, 2014 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
Sana’a: A Yemeni father callously tortured and killed his daughter, 10, for allegedly committing adultery in the northern Dhamar province, a local official who questioned the man told Gulf News on Tuesday.
On the weekend, Yemenis on social media widely circulated a photo of a tortured girl who was found dead by shepherds in a rugged area in the northern province of Ibb.
Within hours, police found out that the girl was killed by her father.
Colonel Mohammad Qassem Al Hadi, the director of Dhamar’s Criminal Investigation Department, said that the man admitted that he brutally tortured and shot her four times with his rifle.
“We found a video clip in his mobile phone asking his daughter to confess to her mistake. The girl was bleeding and crying,” he said.
The official told Gulf News that the father used different methods of torture to force her into admitting having sex with another man, including putting an iron to her skin.
During the investigation, the man admitted that he threw his daughter off a cliff in the Samara Mountains in Ibb province after severely beating her….