Lovely arabs - wonder were the woman rights movent is on this issue - interesting no demonstration in any capital to stop "honor killings"
Yet Khouri’s book is more than a brief against honor killings and certainly far more than the stuff of a TV movie. It is a powerful depiction of a culture frozen in ancient brutality, whose unyielding cruelties now haunt the modern West. And it is a depiction all the more shocking in that its backdrop is the Arab world’s seemingly most modern and progressive state. The inhabitants of Dalia’s Amman own cell phones and computers, run around to classes and jobs, and work out at the gym. But behind closed doors, it’s still 1400, and women remain vassals.
In Muslim homes like Dalia’s, women serve husbands, sons, and brothers their meals, but may not eat with them. They cannot enter certain rooms when men are present. They must ask for permission to leave the house. And when they do leave, a male relative must almost always accompany them. Many are married off to men they do not know or whom they find repulsive. Woe to those who demur. “All Arab men are taught it is their responsibility to discipline the women in their lives,” writes Khouri, “and that the best way to do that is by corporal punishment.” Women receive black eyes or broken bones for taking too long with the laundry or making the wrong dinner. When Dalia’s sister-in-law complained to her husband about not being able even to take the garbage out alone, he broke her nose; she left the house only four times over a nine-month period of their marriage.
What this cruelty finally suggests is that Arab women are murdered not because there are not enough laws against honor killings, though surely such laws would be a good thing, and not because it is in the nature of men to engage in “violence against women,” as feminist groups tend to put it. They are murdered because the culture denies the humanity of all its inhabitants—men and women. To live in a world that expected him to force his daughter into domestic slavery and to kill her for loving, Mahmood had to stifle all feeling for his own child, one of the most elemental of human bonds. He is only the worst of the men described in Honor Lost, all of whom, except for Michael, are the dehumanized instruments of ideology. For all its girlish simplicity and justified rage, Honor Lost manages to show that when a society denies half its people their most basic rights, women might die—and men lose something vital too.
city-journal.org |
