OverviewDefinition
While it was anthropologists and sociologists
who studied the cultural construct “honor” (and its
corollary “shame”) in Muslim countries, it was
mostly human rights activists and lawyers who took
on the phenomenon of crimes of honor. “Crimes of
honor” refers to the legal regulation of a cultural
practice known as “honor killings.” In some Mus-
lim cultural contexts, an honor killing takes place
when a woman is killed by a male member of her
family for engaging in, or for being suspected of
engaging in, a prohibited sexual practice before or
outside marriage. The spilling of the blood of the
victim is seen as necessary to erase the shame she
has brought upon her family by her sexual miscon-
duct. Sometimes an honor crime is merely an
attempt to mask a more serious crime that has
taken place within the family, such as rape or in-
cest, or is carried out with the intent to disenfran-
chise the woman of her property or inheritance.
The most common relation the male perpetrator
has to his female victim is that of either father or
brother. Husbands and lovers commit “honor
killings” too, although in this instance, their action
tends to be understood as driven by a different cul-
tural idea, namely, “passion,” or rage of sexual
jealousy. Which countries to include in the list of
those where honor killings occur depends on the
understanding of the relationship between honor
and passion: is an honor killing the same as a pas-
sion killing, continuous with it, or sharply distinct
from it? Should Brazil, where passion crimes occur,
be treated as not dissimilar from Jordan, where
honor crimes occur, or should they be treated as
distinct because a culture of passion is distinct from
that of honor?
Honor killings often occur within immigrant
communities living in the West where the country
of residence is usually more at home legally with
the notion of a crime of passion than that of honor.
Such killings raise the issue of “cultural defense”
for the particular Western legal system: should the
immigrant killer be allowed to appeal to the culture
of origin to justify his killing and to get sympathetic
understanding from the court/jury?
Honor: Crimes of
Islamic law
Most schools of Islamic jurisprudence treat as
legitimate the killing by private individuals of a
married person caught committing adultery red-
handed. They argue that since death is the ™add
punishment assigned under Islamic law for adul-
tery committed by married persons, an adulterer
has made his blood ™alàl. The same is true for
killing an unmarried person caught fornicating,
even though the punishment assigned under Islamic
law for fornication is a mere one hundred lashes.
Some jurists justify legal tolerance for the killing in
this case on the basis of “provocation” and they
limit it to women the killer is related to. Most
jurists, however, justify killing on the basis of “the
duty to fend off sin,” which they treat as a religious
duty. In this case, the killing is tolerated whether it
includes women the killer is related to or not. It is
important to note that if a later court judgment
determines that adultery/fornication did not in fact
take place, the killer is punished for murder. It is
also a rule of Islamic jurisprudence that retaliation
is not inflicted against a parent who kills his/her
child in the course of correction. Killing for honor
is seen as such an instance. There is evidence to
suggest that the Ottomans, rulers and jurists alike,
tolerated the practice of honor killings and left it
to the domain of self-help. In contrast, sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century muftis of Syria con-
demned the practice as un-Islamic. Contemporary
Saudi Arabia, which characterizes its own legal sys-
tem as Islamic, allows the killing of females if they
disgrace their family on the basis of custom (≠urf).
≠Urf is treated as one of the sources of the law.
The contemporary liberal Muslim response to
this cultural practice insists that honor killings are
un-Islamic. It argues that there is no such sanction,
whether in the Qur±àn or ™adìth, that allows a per-
son to take the life of another. When a woman or
a man is accused of zinà(illicit sexual behavior),
the Qur±àn requires that four men must actually
have witnessed the act of sexual intercourse taking
place. If guilt is proven, the same punishment is
inflicted on men and women. Moreover, if a person
accuses another of such a crime and the accusa-
tion transpires to be baseless, then the accuser is
punished.