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 law gives to honor killing is acknowledged and confronted, more women will suffer.
“Syrian gang rape victim who fled to Germany after her ordeal is stabbed to death ‘in honour killing ordered by her own mother because she was seen as unclean after her sex assault,'” by Allan Hall, MailOnline, October 7, 2015 (thanks to Blazing Cat Fur):
A woman whose family branded her ‘unclean’ after she was gang-raped in her Syrian homeland has been found murdered in Germany – allegedly on the orders of her own mother.
Police believe the victim, named only as Rokstan M, 20, was stabbed to death by her father and brothers in the twisted logic that she had brought disgrace on her family through the sex attack.
Shortly before she was found dead in an allotment garden in the eastern German city of Dessau, she apparently had a premonition of her fate.
Writing on her WhatsApp profile, she said: ‘I am awaiting death. But I am too young to die.’
Rokstan had been living in a house for single women before returning to her family a few days before she was murdered and buried in a shallow grave.
The killing has served to pull into sharp focus the cultural gulf between Germans and the more than one million refugees expected to arrive in the country this year.
Rokstan had arrived in Germany two years ago following her ordeal.
Authorities say she was well integrated into society and worked as a translator for asylum seekers navigating their way through German bureaucracy.
Author Mark Krüger, who employed her to interpret interviews he conducted with refugees for a book he is writing, said: ‘Rokstan told me her terrible fate after she had helped me with translations.’
He listened to a tape she made in which she said: ‘I was taken by three men. Ever since that time my family have regarded me as unclean.
‘My mother and my brothers mistreat me. They say that I deserve to die.’
Her body was found on Friday in the family’s allotment in Dessau. An autopsy showed she had been stabbed several times.
Local prosecutor Christian Preissner said: ‘There is the suspicion that the act was carried out by persons in her close circle with a culture motive in the background.’
The father and brothers are wanted for questioning but are nowhere to be found.
The Federal Police believe the father, Hasso, has fled Germany and is now in either Turkey or Syria.
But author Krüger claimed the mother actually ordered the killing and once tried to hire a hit man to carry it out….