OverviewRecently, human rights activists and feminist
scholars have turned their attention to crimes of
honor and have mobilized their efforts to combat
this social practice, especially in the context of
some Arab and Islamic countries. Surveying the lit-
erature on crimes of honor that Western as well as
non-Western feminist legal scholars and human
rights activists have produced, it is clear that the
kind of feminism the particular activist or scholar
adopts influences the way she frames crimes of
honor conceptually. The framing determines the
way the feminist understands the wrongs of the
crime, the way it relates to other cultural phenom-
ena, and the particular remedies she proposes to
abolish the crime. It is important to note, however,
that since the fight against crimes of honor consists
of an alliance between local activists and activists
involved in international human rights organiza-
tions, the feminist discourse deployed to fight those
crimes has been trafficking back and forth from the
international to the local and back again. This tra-
jectory affects the discourse’s internal coherence, as
users mix and match ideas between different theo-
ries of feminism. It also loses memory of its place
of origin, so that what is “Muslim” and what is
“Western” about these feminist discourses becomes
lost along the way.
Liberal feminists
Liberal feminists, for whom “equality” is the
main analytical category, argue that the trouble
with the legal regulation of honor killings is that it
discriminates between men and women. According
to these feminists, not only are the social norms
more tolerant of men’s extramarital sexual conduct
where men are rarely killed for honor, but the legal
norms themselves rarely punish men for such con-
duct. This is evident from the criminal codes of
Turkey, the Arab states, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
Moreover, criminal codes fail to award the same
kind of procedural protection to women as they do
to men. When a woman is tried and executed pri-
vately by her family for dishonoring them and the
legal system tolerates such private acts, what this in
effect means is that extrajudicial trials are allowed
when they involve female victims. This would
never happen if the victims of the homicides were
Honor: Feminist Approaches to
men. Such discrimination, liberal feminists argue, is
a violation of a woman’s right to life.
Liberal feminists typically evoke the language of
international human rights to support their claims
of discrimination against women. They argue that
domestic laws are in violation of international laws
such as the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
and need to be reformed to bring honor crimes in
line with other homicides. Killers of women should
be given as harsh a treatment as killers of men.
For some liberal feminists, passion as a motiva-
tion for crime is seen as different from that of
honor. Killing for passion, as when a man kills his
wife and her lover when he catches them having
sex, is different from killing for honor, as when a
father kills his daughter for sexual misconduct to
erase the shame she has brought upon him. For
these feminists, an honor killing is instrumental in
nature; it is calculated murder to avoid shame.
Passion, in contrast, is driven by jealousy and rage,
and is inherently involuntary. A possible liberal
feminist response therefore is to maintain that
when it comes to passion killings women should be
awarded the excuse as well, because women have
feelings too.
Regarding matters of sexuality and sexual prac-
tice, liberal feminism is generally libertarian in its
attitude. A given sexual practice is legitimate as
long as it is based on the consent of the parties
involved. Generally though, liberal feminist activ-
ists tend to say little about the disciplinary function
of crimes of honor on women’s sexuality. Instead
of protesting at the crime as a violation, say, of a
woman’s right to consent to sex, they resort to the
liberal arguments outlined here: right to life, right
to equal access to due process, and so forth. There
are two reasons for this kind of avoidance: right to
life arguments work better than right to sex in more
traditional societies such as the Arab and Islamic
ones. Moreover, “right to sex” evokes fears of
“Western cultural imperialism” in many. Indeed if
matters of sex have to be referred to, the “right to
privacy” and the “right to bodily integrity” are
usually evoked, as in the case of state virginity con-
trols in Turkey.
Against the grain of this practice, some Muslim
feminist scholars called for the equalization of sexual
mores in Arab societies: either virginity is eliminated