Modern law
The legal regulation of honor killings in various
Arab and Islamic countries varies from complete
prohibition of the crime, to partial tolerance, to
indifference through either lack of regulation or
lack of prosecutorial enforcement. Judges often
interpret the gaps, conflicts, and ambiguities in the
rules with an eye of sympathy for the male perpe-
trator of the crime. Arab criminal codes (originally
legal transplants from Europe) vary in their atti-
tudes toward honor killings, each offering a differ-
ent kind of excuse (total exemption from penalty or
partial reduction in penalty) to different kinds of
male perpetrators (father, brother, husband), de-
pending on the particular code. Which kind of
excuse offered to which kind of male relative deter-
mines the extent to which the particular code is
tolerant of the idea of an “honor” defense, or alter-
natively, that of “passion.” Most criminal codes
represent a compromise between the two ideas.
Arab judicial practice in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt
has the tendency to reinterpret the criminal codes
of their respective countries to increase the legal
tolerance of these crimes.Bibliography
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law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, Berkeley 1998.Lama Abu-OdehSub-Saharan Africa: Northern NigeriaDiscussion of gender and violence in Muslim
societies in Sub-Saharan Africa quickly brings to
mind the issue of stoning to death for adultery in
the northern states of Nigeria. Because this is such
an important region, and because it has been the
scene of such well publicized issues, this entry
focuses on northern Nigeria, and on the relation-
ship between legal practice and violence, with com-
ments where relevant on other centers of Muslim
population south of the Sahara.
Observers might conclude from the public sup-
port for restoring Islamic penal law in the northern
states of Nigeria that this region offers a graphic
example of Islamic values underwriting patriarchal
violence against women. However, a close exami-
nation can lead to different conclusions. While at
least one sentence of lashing has been carried out,
the sentence of stoning to death in the widely dis-
cussed case of Amina Lawal was rejected by a
Muslim court in September 2003. Moreover, “honor
killing” is not a common phenomenon in northern
Nigeria. Indeed, as a conservative Muslim region
where honor killing seldom takes place, the north-
ern states of Nigeria offer an important compara-
tive case to help in assessing the roots of “honor
killing” in other predominantly Muslim societies.
The northernmost tier of Nigerian states, which
includes much of the former Sokoto Caliphate and
the Sultanate of Bornu, comprises one of the most
heavily Muslim areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, with
the proportion of Muslims in many localities being
90 percent or more. Islamic penal law, with the ex-
ceptions of stoning for adultery, amputation for theft,
and death for apostasy, was applied in the region
under British rule up until the implementation of
the Northern Region criminal and penal codes in- This is a pattern found in no other area of
Sub-Saharan Africa, and in few other areas of the
Muslim world. While civil and commercial law
were handled by Muslim judges (alkali, pl. alkalai),
criminal law was in the hands of the emir’s judicial