Extenutating Circumstances

" Honour" Murders and Islam

"Honour" murders are in the news again.  In Canada.  The nation is reportedly shocked. Here is a summary of the case:

Zainab Shafia's crime was to run off to marry a man her parents hated. Middle sister Sahar's crime was to wear revealing clothes and have secret boyfriends. Youngest sister Geeti's crime was to do badly in school and call social workers for help dealing with a family home in turmoil.  The punishment for all three teenage Canadian sisters was the same: death.

Their executioner: their brother, acting on instructions from the father to run their car off the road.  Another family member, their father's first wife in a polygamous marriage, was also killed.

Hamed Shafia, his father, Mohammed, and his mother, Tooba Mohammed Yahya, were sentenced to life in prison for murder, with Judge Robert Maranger excoriating their "twisted notion of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honor that has absolutely no place in any civilized society."

CNN and other media outlets are rushing to assure everyone that honour murders are not Islamic.
  One of the more positive things is that some Islamic scholars are denouncing the practice.

Leading Muslim thinkers wholeheartedly endorsed the Canadian judge's verdict, insisting that "honor murders" had no place and no support in Islam.  "There is nothing in the Quran that justifies honor killings. There is nothing that says you should kill for the honor of the family," said Taj Hargey, director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford in England.

"This idea that 'somehow a girl has besmirched our honor and therefore the thing to do is kill her' is bizarre, and Muslims should stop using this defense," he said, arguing that the practice is cultural, not religious in origin.  "You cannot say this is what Islam approves of. You can say this is what their culture approves of," he said.  

Yes, and no.  The problem is that Islam struggles to be separated from its cultural manifestations.  There is no separation of church and state in Islam: there is no church, period.  Islamic traditions (hadith) are just as important as the Quran.  Sharia law and Islam and the culture that produced the Quran, the hadith, and sharia are pretty much inseparable.  Consequently, throughout much of the Islamic world, honour murders are treated more lightly--almost as justifiable homicide, or murder with extenuating circumstances. 

Several Arab countries and territories, including Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Yemen and the Palestinian territories, have laws providing lesser sentences for honor murders than for other murders, Human Rights Watch says. Egypt and Jordan also have laws that have been interpreted to allow reduced sentences for honor crimes, the group says.

The is a direct reversal of the Christian legal tradition where killing family members is regarded as a particularly aggravated and heinous form of murder.