Why Honor Killings Are A Religious Issue

It’s always nice to have white people speak for you and over your experience. Authoritatively.

Much to my disappointment, this white American who has recently moved to the Middle East, is using her platform on a “big feminist blog” to tell people that honor killings really have nothing to do with religion. I point out that she’s a white American because white people have an elevated status in the Middle East and in other majority-brown countries. In case readers need reminding, I spent 20 of my 25 years — 20 years of my life — in Saudi Arabia, as a third (or fourth, or fifth) class non-citizen expatriate. The hierarchy was Saudis first, white people second and everyone else after. I was paid less, as a matter of policy, than white people and was ultimately fired so a white person could replace me.

So it’s not “reverse racism” that makes me call out the race of the person writing this post defending Islam; it just stings that people who are privileged because of their skin color even in countries that are supposed to be more hospitable to brown people, turn around and defend those brown people because their experience is positive.

OF COURSE your experience is positive. You’re white.

Why should what I say matters? After all, I’m only a brown woman who spent most of her life trapped against her will in a Middle Eastern theocratic dictatorship who left Islam and her family seeking freedom and never will be sure if it’s safe to meet her parents because they might kill her.

Let me repeat that just so we’re clear. No matter how many times my parents tell me they love me and accept my new life — and they have started to do that recently — I can’t let myself forget that many before me have been fooled by this display of affection and have agreed to see their parents, and then gotten murdered in cold blood.

Let me repeat that one more time just so everyone gets it. I am afraid my parents will kill me to cleanse their honor.

I know they love me. I know they care about me. And I know that that doesn’t matter one bit. The only thing that matters is that I shamed them by growing legs and acting like I was an autonomous human person.

But sure — if an American liberal goes on a feminist blog that promised to lend its platform to diverse, especially non-white, marginalized voices and tells everyone that religion is actually innocent, that’s probably the truth. What does Saudi Arabia have to do with Islam anyway? They might order their government and every detail of their life by Islam, but Islam doesn’t have anything to do with it really. No, that’s just Islamophobic propaganda trying to smear Islam. Pakistan might have been created in the name of Islam, and its society structured to support an explicitly Islamic lifestyle, and its constitution might be Islamic, but hey! Nothing to do with Islam, not really. Not if liberals tell you so.

All the traditional Muslims (hint: not the ones born in Utah) might think they’re following Islamic guidelines and strict rules derived from the sunnah when they treat their sons differently from their daughters and restrict the freedom of women, but if liberals think that’s kind of off and they want to make false-to-fact claims about equality between the sexes in Islam, then all those traditional Muslims — like my parents — are simply delusional.

What does honor killing have to do with a patriarchal religion like Islam?

Well, let me put this in simple terms because it’s very difficult for liberals to grasp basic facts sometimes when brown people are involved. Islam is a patriarchal religion. Fact. Islam is misogynistic. Fact. Islam pathologizes sex. Fact. Islam subordinates women to men. Fact.

“Islam” and “culture” are not two separate things. They are interconnected and arise out of and in relation to each other. Islam IS Arab culture, to a very great degree. Arab culture IS Islam to a very great degree. The one supports and reinforces the other. Religion codifies culture. Such is the case with all religions and cultures. Most cultures have been or are misogynistic and religion is one of the biggest tools used to keep misogynistic practices in place. In other words, if a society is misogynistic, the religion of that society enforces the misogyny.

Muslim societies are largely misogynistic, in large part because of Islam. Islam prevents pro-woman progress, just as other patriarchal religions in their time have prevented pro-woman progress. Islam also institutionalizes and entrenches misogynistic beliefs and practices. Islam’s hold on people’s behavior and consciences is strong enough that all of this may as well be codified and put on the books as written law. The fact that it sometimes isn’t is meaningless. Unless you have lived a thousand daily details of Islamic regulation of your life and body as a woman, you have no idea how deeply embedded Islamic misogyny is in our lives.

Misogyny — hatred of women — and the shame of “illicit” sex, is what is behind honor killings. If a society’s social morality is being derived from a religion and they consistently invoke the religion when doing something that is completely in line with the ethos of that religion — and misogyny and sexual shame are in line with the ethos of Islam, as lived and experienced by millions of Muslim women not born in Utah– then that action is connected to the religion. No matter how much liberals want to tell you otherwise, they are simply full of shit.

And let’s call them honor killings. Let’s not pretend that the notion of male honor is not typical of and indicative of patriarchal societies, which Islam seems to consistently produce (what a surprise, right? A patriarchal religion produces, without exception, patriarchal societies in which men’s honor is paramount, even over women’s lives). Let’s not try to whitewash this issue — it’s about honor. Why pretend it’s not about honor? To me, it underlines and emphasizes how disgusting and immoral these crimes are, how ironic their evil is. Calling it an honorless crime is a trick, a verbal slight-of-hand coined by one Ali Eteraz, a bundle of Muslim Male Privilege and misogyny.

But hey! What do I know? I merely spent most of my goddamned life in the birthplace of Islam, 45 minutes away from goddamned Mecca. What the fuck do I know? Let’s have the white ladies lecture us about what is and isn’t Islam. Let’s let them enlighten us on how Islam liberates women.

I almost don’t want to use my “feminism” tag on this post. For what is feminism to me? Feminists of the third wave are busy courting Muslim-apologists born in Utah and white feminists who move to the Middle East with their Arab boyfriends. Who cares that there are women like me trying to connect feminism to their Islamic backgrounds, hell, who found their strength in feminism to be able to escape, to even want to escape? Who cares that I’m part of a mostly silent minority of an already severely oppressed class? Who cares that I have a blog on which I’m writing about things that feminists are supposed to care about?

Everyone knows it’s those outspoken practicing Muslim women who’re in real danger. I’d like to know the last time my sister or my mother — both good little Muslimahs — did something that put their lives in jeopardy. I’d also like to know when they last let a feminist sentiment escape their pious lips. But doubtless, their points of view — their patriarchy-conformist points of view — would be more welcome on feminist blogs than my lived experience of patriarchal Islamic oppression.

Whither feminism?

Fuck this.

And they wonder why Ayaan Hirsi Ali works for the Enterprise Institute.