Honor

A History

James Bowman

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781594033704
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The importance of honor is present in the earliest records of civilization. Today, while it may still be an essential concept in Islamic cultures, in the West, honor has been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete. In this lively and authoritative book, James Bowman traces the curious and fascinating history of this ideal, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and to the killing fields of World War I and the despair of Vietnam. Bowman reminds us that the fate of honor and the fate of morality and even manners are deeply interrelated. His book is an indispensable document in a time of growing concern about the erosion of values.

PART I

Cultural Honor, East and West

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ONE

“We Are Men”

The Islamic Honor Culture and the West

The ethos of honour is fundamentally opposed to a universal and formal morality which affirms the equality in dignity of all men and consequently the equality of their rights and duties. Not only do the rules imposed upon men differ from those imposed upon women, and the duties towards men differ from those towards women, but also the dictates of honour, directly applied to the individual case and varying according to the situation, are in no way capable of being made universal.

—Pierre Bourdieu ¹

I don’t pretend like we’re the perfect family no more. Desire to live is burning. My stomach is turning. But all they think about is honour. I was like a normal teenage kid.

—Shafilea Ahmed, 17, of Warrington, Cheshire, England ^2e

ON JUNE 22, 2002, IN THE VILLAGE OF MEERWALA near Multan in the Punjab province of Pakistan, a twenty-eight-year-old divorcée named Mukhtaran Bibi—also sometimes known as Mukhtar Mai—of the Gujar tribe was gang-raped on the order of a tribal council dominated by members of the higher-caste Mastoi clan.The Mastoi had accused her twelve-year-old brother, Abdul Shakur, of an impermissible contact with a Mastoi woman, but that story appears to have been made up only in order to discredit the boy as a witness against his own rapists—several Mastoi who, he said, had raped and beaten him. When they subsequently failed to extract from him a promise not to inform on them, the Mastoi men took him to the house of one of them, Abdul Khaliq, where the honor of the woman, Khaliq’s sister Salma Naseen, was said to have been compromised. Miss Mukhtaran then went to the council with her father to plead for her brother, whose punishment was as yet undetermined. Some reports suggest that on this occasion there was talk of a settlement by which her brother would marry Salma Naseen and she would marry one of the Mastoi men.³ “When I appeared before the tribal council,” she later testified, one of the elders said that “since the girl has come here, therefore, we should pardon her…. But suddenly a man stood and said we will rape her.”⁴ The sentence was immediately carried out by Abdul Khaliq and three other men. “When Khaliq dragged me away, I said,‘Khaliq, I am like a sister to you,’” Miss Mukhtaran said.“He did not listen to me. I even said, ‘In the name of the Koran, please forgive me.’ I asked the whole council for forgiveness, to save my honor. But nobody listened…. They took me inside. And they raped me.”⁵ After the men had raped her, she was forced to walk home nearly naked to the jeers of the assembled villagers to complete her humiliation before the Mastoi and “to avenge their tribal honor.”⁶

She was expected not to seek legal redress because in Pakistan, as in many other honor cultures, the shame of rape falls upon the victim rather than the perpetrator. “A girl who has been raped has no honorable place in the village,” another of Miss Mukhtaran’s brothers told Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. “Nobody respects the girl, or her parents.There’s a stigma, and the only way out is suicide.”⁷ Miss Mukhtaran herself must have thought the same, later telling Declan Walsh of The Guardian about a woman from a neighboring village who was raped at almost the same time she was. “She swallowed a bottle of pesticide,” she said. “In this area, there is no law and no justice. A woman is left with one option, and that is to die.”⁸ She herself was saved from a similar fate when the local imam, Abdul Razzaq, publicly condemned the rapists at Friday prayers and, most unexpectedly, her situation attracted worldwide publicity. The governor of Punjab province, Khalid Maqbool, was sufficiently embarrassed by this example of tribal justice to order the arrest of eighteen of the Mastoi rapists and tribal elders, six of whom were subsequently tried and condemned to death by hanging for their part in the rape. Two and a half years later, an appeals court overturned the sentences of five of them, while that of the sixth was commuted from death to life imprisonment. An Islamic court reinstated the sentences, but Pakistan’s (secular) supreme court questioned its jurisdiction. Miss Mukhtaran appealed to Pakistan’s supreme court against the acquittals in June 2005, and the court ordered a reversal of the lower court’s decision, the rearrest of those who had been released and a retrial. By then the case had received such a degree of international attention that the Pakistani government could hardly afford to abandon further efforts to punish the guilty men, but at the same time it attempted to curtail Mukhtaran’s opportunities for publicizing her case in the West. At one point she was arrested, reportedly after a personal reprimand by President Pervez Musharraf, and held incommunicado.⁹ The State Department official responsible for South Asia proclaimed the United States “dismayed” by this action, while the New York Times editorialized that it found it “bizarre” that Musharraf’s government was said to be “worried that Ms. Mukhtaran might malign Pakistan’s image if she is allowed to go abroad—as if it has not taken care of that rather ably by itself.”¹⁰

Publicity about this case has made it more generally known in the West that less-publicized rapes and “honor killings” of women by husbands, brothers or fathers who believe them to have been dishonored are widespread in Islamic countries. Mr. Kristof of the New York Times tells us, without giving any source for the information, that “on average, a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan, and two women a day die in honor killings.”¹¹ A frequently quoted estimate by the United Nations Population Fund puts the number of such killings at approximately five thousand worldwide every year,¹² but it is impossible to know anything for sure except that the punishment of Mukhtaran Bibi took place in a cultural context where it made sense, at least to some people—just as it made sense to others to keep the matter quiet—and that it makes no sense at all to us in the West. Its sheer strangeness from our point of view ought to alert us to the difficulty of understanding cultural honor in those parts of the world where it still survives—as it does not in Europe or America. That’s why the New York Times has a long history of regarding such behavior as simply “bizarre,” as if there could be no explanation for it. In another editorial about honor killings some years ago, the author attempted to explain the murder of rape victims by their relatives on the grounds that rape is “a crime that many people still believe could not happen without the victim’s consent.”¹³ Some people may believe that, but in the cultures where honor killings are common, the point is not that the killers think the victim consented, but that the idea of “consent” or lack of it is to them an irrelevance. The taint upon the woman’s honor remains the same either way. Our individualistic, post-honor sensibility reaches out to the notion of “consent” in order to explain what otherwise seems incomprehensible. But in honor cultures, a woman’s honor normally belongs to her husband or father, and the dishonor of any sexual contact outside marriage, whether consensual or otherwise, falls upon him exactly alike, since it shows him up before the world as a man incapable of either controlling or protecting her. Dishonor is more like a fatal disease than a moral failing. It requires constant vigilance and even then can strike anyone at any time. And its only end can be death.

Likewise, a New York Times reporter, describing the trial of an Egyptian dentist who was charged with sexually assaulting some female patients, writes that “In this conservative society, sex is so scandalous that even rape victims and their families are considered dishonored.”¹⁴ But there is nothing scandalous about “sex” as such in Egypt or elsewhere in the lands where honor remains potent. The Egyptians are not a species of prudish Victorian ladies. Indeed, the idea of “sex” as something divorced from its social context is a Western concept that hardly makes sense in an honor culture. There, sex is like “violence”¹⁵ in having no meaning apart from the central question of who is doing what to whom—which is why from the point of view of the Mastoi men there is no contradiction between what to us looks like the extreme puritanism of considering Salma Naseen dishonored merely by being alone with a male who was not a family member, on the one hand, and on the other, raping Mukhtaran as a punishment for it. The Kantian categorical imperative—the maxim that no one should act on a principle that he would not wish to be universal—which is so central to Western moral thinking since the Enlightenment is simply incomprehensible in the moral world of the honor cultures that survive outside the penumbra of Western thought.

It is partly just because Kant’s principle arose out of the Enlightenment, which is in turn widely regarded as the triumph of reason over religious belief, that we so readily believe the Islamic honor culture to have been produced by religion. But this is not the case. The honor culture of the Islamic world predates its conversion to Islam in the seventh century. Throughout the Islamic world, the local honor cultures tend to resemble those of non-Islamic and non-Christian cultures nearby, as the Pakistani one does that of its subcontinental neighbors in India—where honor killings are also frequent, if not common. In Meerwala, the local imam, Abdul Razzaq, who saved Mukhtaran from the usual fate of rape victims, did so by condemning her rape as being “against the spirit of Islam,” as any Islamic scholar would surely agree.The fact that Mukhtaran Bibi called out to one of her attackers for mercy in the name both of the Koran and of her honor suggests that she expected at least as much as her attackers that honor and Islam went together. Nor did she suppose, as it is tempting to think in our own anti-honor culture, that honor was merely a cover, a pretext for criminals and rapists. She was as concerned about her honor as the tribesmen who passed the sentence on her were concerned about theirs. Honor is the cultural currency in which the ordinary people of Pakistan, like those in other honor cultures, trade, and often one person’s honorable gain is another’s loss. Like the tribal authority that had ordered the rape—a familiar institution in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it is known as a panchayat or jirga—honor is traditional. Although religion has been tied up with it since the seventh century, it is not religious in origin.

“A representative, consultative body, though it is informal and illegal, sanctioned a gang rape,” said Naeem Mirza of the Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights group, to Ian Fisher of the New York Times. “It has shocked the entire conscience of a society.”¹⁶ If that is a bit of an overstatement, the extent to which Pakistanis really were shocked is one measure of the growing ambivalence that the honor culture elicits, not only in Pakistan but in much of the rest of the Muslim world. The local panchayats are allowed considerable latitude in the regulation of “private” behavior partly because influential Islamic jihadists see them as a bulwark against the liberalizing tendencies that are making inroads in traditional Islamic cultures in all kinds of ways.That is why honor killings like that of Shafilea Ahmed, the British seventeen-year-old murdered by her relatives for wanting to be “a normal teenage kid”—that is, to have a boyfriend and wear make-up—are familiar events in immigrant communities in the West, where the liberalizing pressures of the popular culture are more acutely felt. A British doctor writes that “My young Muslim patients…all know of girls who have been killed by their own fathers and brothers when they refused to accede to a forced marriage to their first cousin back home, or to a man four times their age.”¹⁷ Even in more traditionally minded Pakistan, the reaction against the panchayat’s sentence shows that those pressures, which have their origin within the liberal, anti-or post-honor culture of the West, are being strongly felt while the honor culture has been correspondingly weakened. President Musharraf’s anxiety about Pakistan’s image abroad is at least a pale reflection of that Western influence and the success it has had in undermining the local honor culture.

Since her ordeal, Mukhtaran has become a quasi celebrity in the urban and partly Westernized parts of Pakistan as well as the beneficiary of Western fundraising efforts, which have made her, by rural Pakistani standards, a wealthy woman. As a result, she has received several offers of marriage, including one from the imam, Abdul Razzaq, who saved her by making her case public and denouncing her rapists.¹⁸ There is a long way from Mukhtaran’s brother’s observation that “a girl who has been raped has no honorable place in the village,” to multiple offers of marriage. Her new desirability even within what we think of as the strict Islamic society of Pakistan suggests that, at the least, the traditional links between religion and the pre-Islamic honor culture are coming under strain. And this is largely because the beliefs and assumptions associated with the honor culture are coming into competition with a Westernized and largely anti-honor ethos that threatens to sweep them away. No one feels this more strongly than the Islamic jihadists whose murderous rage against the West, in my view, owes less to religion itself than to the fear that the liberalizing tendencies introduced by Western popular culture will result in the destruction of the honor culture that has always been connected with their religion and is in their view inseparable from it.

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In the historically Christian West, the detachment of honor from religion happened much more easily, as the two things had always been in a state of tension with each other, if not openly in conflict. Honor as understood by the most primitive societies—that is, as bravery, indomitability and the readiness to avenge insults or injuries for men, and as chastity for women—had never quite sat easily with Christianity, the religion of humility and turning the other cheek.The contrary pressures of the value system of the dominant religion forced the Western honor culture, when it still existed, into something that would have been almost unrecognizable to other, more basic honor cultures, and ultimately all but out of existence. By contrast, as Bernard Lewis points out, in Islamic lands¹⁹ this experience of conflict between religious and secular standards so familiar in the West never happened. As a result, the primitive honor culture there remained substantially intact.

Jihad As Culture War

When American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:45 A.M. on September 11, 2001, Americans were suddenly confronted not only with what was already the familiar phenomenon of “Islamic terrorism,” but also, and for the first time with any urgency, the question of its origins. A common formulation was that of the Newsweek headline:“Why do they hate us?” But it seems to me to be a mistake to frame the question in terms of hatred or, as was also common, “anger.” It is natural enough in a culture like ours, informed by the psychotherapeutic revolution, to think even of geopolitics in terms of psychology and emotions, but these are irrelevant in an honor culture. Not that the terrorists don’t feel hatred or anger. Some of them probably do. With or without emotion, however, the aggressive acts of the terrorists arise from the demands of a traditional honor culture to strike at those whom they see, often for reasons invisible to those outside that culture, as having humiliated them.The disappearance of the Western honor culture for reasons that I shall explain in subsequent chapters has left us ill prepared to understand those different “value systems” we tend to attribute to poverty, ignorance, colonia...