'Like a match stick'

The taboo surrounding honour crimes is being chipped away. But whose honour are we talking about? Mariz Tadros examines the candidates
Last week, a man stabbed his sister-in-law to death because rumour had it that she was a woman of loose morals, and a court sentenced a man to a year's imprisonment for killing his sister -- for besmirching the family's honour with her ill-reputation.
Honour crimes now feature regularly in daily newspapers, but it is not clear whether that is because they have increased, or because they are more likely to be reported than before. A woman's honour is like a match stick, the popular saying has it, and any deviation from social norms and regulations can mean the loss of her honour. It takes far less than a pre- or extramarital relationship for a woman to be condemned as dishonourable and deserving death. There is no "typical" case one can speak of: honour crimes include a husband killing his wife for leaving the house too often, a son killing his mother to prevent her from remarrying, a brother killing his sister and her husband for marrying without the family's consent, a man killing his wife for refusing to wear the veil when leaving home.
While honour crimes are certainly not a daily phenomenon, judging from the frequency of newspaper reports, they are not exceptional either. And yet they are not high on the agenda of women's rights activists in Egypt. Why? Possibly because, as is the case for all social taboos, it takes time to break the culture of silence around them. Possibly because, unlike female genital mutilation, they do not affect millions of women every day. Possibly, too, because there is very little information about them, their frequency and the people likely to perpetrate them.
Another strong reason why activists and writers in Egypt may have avoided the subject is because of the West's Orientalist obsession with women's sexuality in the Arab world, and the tendency to use crimes of honour as an example of Arab male oppression of women. Egyptian feminists have had to fight back against sensationalisation and the tendency to blow such crimes out of proportion.
Last week, participants at a conference on crimes of honour trod cautiously as they discussed the matter. The conference was organised by the Centre for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance (CEWLA), an NGO providing legal services for poor women in Bulaq. CEWLA documented all the crimes of honour reported in the press from 1998 to 2001 and came up with some important figures: Suspicion of indecent behaviour is the reason behind 79 per cent of all crimes of honour. Nine per cent of honour crimes followed a discovery of betrayal. Six per cent of deaths were committed by lovers in a bid to prevent the relationship becoming public, and six per cent for miscellaneous reasons. "In most crimes of honour, there is no concrete evidence of adultery. The women are killed just because of rumours or suspicions that they may have crossed the line of decent behaviour. In cases where women are deemed to have dishonoured the family through their conduct, the husband is considered to have the first right to avenge, followed by the father, and then the brother," said Gasser Abdel-Gawad, director of CEWLA.
Most disturbing, suggested Abdel-Gawad, is that people choose to take justice into their own hands, indicating that they do not believe there is any other way in which justice can be done.
And yet the justice system shows much sympathy with perpetrators of honour crimes. Azza Soliman, manager of CEWLA, protested that legislation and the judiciary system have helped perpetuate violence against women through the laxity shown to the perpetrators. She argued that judges' interpretation of Article 17 of the Criminal Code, which gives them the prerogative to reduce a sentence according to their assessment of individual cases, is often very loose. Lenient sentences are passed on the pretext that the perpetrator was under extreme emotional pressure, that the victim had deviated from acceptable morality (by for example dressing inappropriately, meeting a male friend alone, etc.), and that the accused was seeking to "wash away" the shame that the woman had brought upon her family.
The state, too, has obligations to change distorted beliefs and practices, Soliman argued, since Egypt, she reminded participants, has signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Soliman demanded that "there be a public condemnation of crimes committed in the name of honour, that criminal legislation be revised, and that the use of Article 17 be revised."
"We cannot and should not repeal Article 17," retorted Awad El-Morr, former head of the Supreme Constitutional Court, adding: "We have to allow for the individualisation of punishment and we have to take into consideration the emotional state of the perpetrator when he committed the crime. This prerogative is given to judges in the West as well."
"It is rather ironic," noted Hoda Badran, head of Alliance for Arab Women, an NGO, that society denies women certain rights under the pretext that they are emotional beings, and may become irrational when under pressure, while resorting to the "emotions argument" as an excuse for men's behaviour in honour crimes. "If Article 17 cannot be changed, then we certainly have to change its arbitrary application by judges," she added.
El-Morr, however, conceded that the laws applying to women and men in cases of adultery are discriminatory. A man is not accused of adultery unless the act occurs in the marital home, and if there is proof of adultery, the punishment must not exceed six months' imprisonment. A woman, on the other hand, is subject to legal retribution irrespective of where the act takes place. If a husband catches his wife and her lover in the act and kills them, the maximum punishment is imprisonment (rather than the death sentence). The same applies if a woman is caught and killed by her father, brother or another close member of her family. The same leniency is not shown to a woman who catches her husband and his mistress in the act of adultery and kills them: she may face the death sentence.
Such bias is believed to reinforce patriarchal values that legitimise the murder of women in the name of honour. El-Morr suggested that applying the Shari'a would guarantee justice in the treatment of women suspected of infidelity. "Islamic jurisprudence prohibits killing a woman simply on account of rumours, and makes no distinction between men and women when it comes to the punishment of adultery," he asserted. According to the Shari'a, adultery is punishable by death, although from El-Morr's account, Islamic jurisprudence is not unanimous regarding who has the right to apply such punishment.
Khaled Montasser, a physician and writer at Sawt Al-Umma newspaper, was uneasy about recourse to religion in judging crimes of honour. A distinction must be made, he argued, between the Shari'a and Islamic jurisprudence, "and unfortunately, most of the writings by scholars of Islamic jurisprudence have been anti-women," he said. Worse, he noted, is the dominant religious discourse, which he suggested is in many ways misogynist and has played a role in enforcing the double standards that society and the law apply to women's and men's honour. "A man without honour is one who steals or deceives people, but he remains an honourable man even if he has sexual relations with three-quarters of the earth's women. As for a woman, she may kill or steal, but she will be considered honourable so long as she preserves her hymen, without which she loses all honour," he concluded.
The sexualisation of women's honour in the public psyche is at the heart of the problem, suggested Montasser. A study conducted by researcher Mohamed Awad revealed that 99.2 per cent of women interviewed believed that a woman's honour lies in her virginity, and only 0.8 per cent mentioned that it is based on her principles and values.
Most participants agreed that the press has played a pivotal role in propagating distorted and inaccurate images of victims of honour crimes, often by exonerating the perpetrator implicitly. The reasons, suggested Karima Kamal, a journalist at Sabah Al-Kheir newspaper, are related to crime reporting on the one hand, and the social values of the reporters on the other. "Crime reports rely on police reports for their stories, and the reporters have to use their imagination to add colour and sensationalism," she said, adding that such artistic licence includes descriptions of the victim's physical features, mannerisms or actions. "In the end, the reporter often turns the victim into the accused," she noted. To avoid mentioning such taboos as incest, reporters may also distort the truth, suggested Kamal. For example, "there was one case where a father had raped his daughter, and the reporter wrote that he had killed her to wash away the shame, when in reality, he killed her in order to avoid a scandal."
El-Morr also attacked the unethical practice of publishing the victims' names. "In this, there is sheer discrimination: the names of wealthy women are never mentioned, while if the victim is poor, her name and the district in which she lives are spelt out, leading to the stigmatisation of her entire family," he emphasised, adding that lawsuits should be filed against newspapers which publish victims' names.
The stigmatisation of her family is no doubt linked to the general perception that a woman is the guardian of her family's honour. As Kamal suggests, nobody questions whether her honour may be hers, and only hers, or whether it is everybody else's as well. "Of course her honour is not only hers. If a woman is harassed in the street, her neighbours or other members of the community may rise up to defend her, because they feel that anyone who touches her honour touches theirs," said one participant. Another objected, insisting that "a woman's body is hers alone. Her honour is independent from that of her father or her brother or any other member of her family or society." How much support society lends to this view is questionable, of course. At the conference, all participants condemned the killing of a woman merely on the basis of rumour; some, however, suggested that the death penalty should apply to adulterers, as stipulated by the Shari'a. Things are not so straightforward, for, as Tahani El- Gebali, a prominent women's rights activist and lawyer, pointed out, the Shari'a requires four eye witnesses to prove adultery, "and realistically speaking it is impossible to meet such a requirement," she added.
No course of action to address this social issue was determined at the conference, given the division over the terms of reference appropriate to dealing with honour crimes. Some felt that Shari'a was the answer, while others were against what they described as "the Islamisation of the law." Azza Soliman suggested addressing the issue as one of human rights, given that honour crimes constitute violence against women, while El-Morr rejected the application of human rights discourse to personal matters, describing human rights as a Western product that advocates gay rights, which are incommensurate with local religious and cultural beliefs.
Ironically, the conference demonstrated that a woman's honour is anything but personal, since it does not just belong to her family and community. And judging from the leniency of sentences that are passed against perpetrators of honour crimes, it is certainly political. It is one thing, as Hoda Badran suggested, when discrimination exists in society; "it is another altogether when it is institutionalised and legalised."
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