By Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young

Canadians have been debating the topic of “honour killings” ever since the arrest last month by Kingston police of an Afghan man, his wife and son, charged with murdering four female family members. Two explanations for the phenomenon have predominated from the beginning.

One explanation is defensive. It originates in the need of local Muslims to distance their community from honour killings, because most Canadians, including most immigrants from Islamic countries, classify these killings as murders — and with good reason. In a recent op-ed piece for the Montreal Gazette, Dolores Chew and Farha Najah Hussain of the South Asian Women’s Community Centre worry that this event will trigger a Canadian backlash against immigrants from some parts of the world. “If a white man kills his partner and/or children, he is seen as a murderer and a ‘bad apple.’ But when non-whites and non-Christians kill, the crime is often called an ‘honour killing,’ and entire communities and cultures are labelled as ‘backward.’ ”

That happens sometimes, to be sure, but not always. Apart from anything else, many Canadians would be embarrassed to expose their own prejudices — and even that is better than trying to legitimate their prejudices.

Muslims point out, moreover, that the Koran itself says nothing about honour killings. What they are usually reluctant to point out, however, is some of the societies that adopted Islam were (and still are) tribal societies with long martial traditions — societies, in other words, that have always relied heavily on the closely related notions of honour and shame, which apply in different ways to both women and men. Not all tribal societies (or societies with tribal remnants) are Islamic, at any rate, and not all Islamic societies are tribal. This controversy is not about Islam, therefore, but about tribalism. And if that implies a critique of Afghan or other tribal societies, then so be it. Immigrants come here from around the world precisely to avoid tribalism, and Canadians should respect them for doing so.

Finally, this defensive explanation raises some additional questions. Are women the only victims of tribal societies? Although most experts admit that a few families in these societies kill sons or brothers who get out of line, the consensus is that almost all of the victims are daughters and sisters. That is probably true. But it raises additional questions. Do these families care about no kind of honour except sexual honour? Actually, they care just as intensely about another kind of honour: the courage of men in battle (which remains common in many parts of the world). What happens to sons and or brothers who show signs of cowardice or weakness of any kind?

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Tags: Canada, Honour, Honour killings, Men, Muslims, Tribal, Violence, Women

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