On March 16th, a 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader was beaten to death by her father after he had discovered that his daughter had "infatuated with a British soldier" in Basra, southern Iraq. The murder took place after her father had heard his daughter had been seen in public talking to a Christian "invader", who, according to Rand's fundamentalist Islamic beliefs, was the enemy. To add to the horror of this inter-familial murder Rand's two brothers are also accused by their mother as being involved in the killing. Her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, said that she had called Rand's two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to "restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in." It then was reported that, "her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncle’s spat on it in disgust." Murders like Rand’s are, unfortunately, quite prevalent across the globe as accepted parts of Muslim tradition called "honor killings." These honor killings are perpetrated usually committed by male family members onto family members, usually women, in the act of taking vengeance and clean removing the stain of dishonor they have set on the family. Women are usually targeted by family members for violent retribution, leading many times to death, if they have been perceived to have acted in a way that brings dishonor to her family.
However, issues like honor killings are definitely not at all cut and dry as they have been heavily knitted into Arab culture. Some parts of Arab culture cause men to enforce their complete dominance over what is acceptable in their family. Through honor killings it is reinforced in Arab society that males are the reproductive power and that women simply play the roles of facilitating the process of creating more men. Family members at times feel that they have no acceptable alternative but to perform honor killings in clearing their families name and restoring honor because of this tradition in Arab society. As her father Abdel-Qader said, “I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honors his religion.” The idea that such killings were simply following religious and societal obligation and that it was, in fact, not a crime, was almost absurdly supported by the local police themselves. Abdel-Qader told said that was released from the police station “because everyone knows that honor killings sometimes are impossible not to commit” and that “the officers were by my side during all the time I was there, congratulating me on what I had done.”
Are these honor killings ethically immoral? There could definitely be a strong argument that honor killings break the law and that perpetrators should be punished judicially as murders, however, conversely, one could argue that these men were only doing what they believed was morally right and that to punish them would be an attack on their religious beliefs and traditions. Western culture would be arguing their point of these murders in the name of religion being ethically erroneous due to their traditions and schema taught to us by a society that condemns such actions. As Abdel-Qader even admits that “people from western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters that can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying.” He then follows his appeal to tradition in justifying his actions by saying that “our girls should respect their religion, their family and their bodies.”
Another tragic case of an honor killing is that of Noor al-Maleki by her father in Peoria, Arizona. Noor had been alienated by her parents who disapproved of what they called her obsession with “American ways”. The resulted in the “honor killing” of Noor was due to the abandonment of her father’s proposed arranged marriage to a man in Iraq and her involvement with another man in the US. Noor’s father had eventually ended up running her over with a jeep which resulted in the death of his daughter and his eventual conviction of second degree murder for the honor killing. Like Rand’s father Faleh al-Maleki committed this horrendous crime in the name of tradition and societal beliefs.
Jack's article involves the areas of knowledge and ways of knowing in ethics, history, reason, and emotion. The Aztecs, an ethnic group in Central Mexico back in the 14th-16th centuries, practiced human sacrifice as part of their cultural tradition and beliefs. For example, according to Wikipedia, the Great speaker Ahuitzotl reported that for the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs had sacrificed 84,400 prisoners over the course of four days. What comes into question is, is this ethical? The moral question of both the Aztecs and the Muslims can be traced back to history. The religious and cultural beliefs of these two groups of people have long since been practiced for centuries. Hence, do we outsiders, who were not born into the same culture, have the right to use our own schemas to condemn their practices as unethical? We use reason and emotion to try to figure out if their practices in human sacrifice are morally correct; however, our reason and emotions are shaped by our own cultures, traditions, and beliefs. Hence, this article calls upon ethical questions, but also outlines the question of how far we should respect cultural differences.
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