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Saudi rape case: What’s honorable about “honor”?

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Nov 20, 2007

The White House isn’t protesting. The Muslim world isn’t protesting. Those polite Christian theologians who wrote a letter of peace to Muslims last weekend — nope, they aren’t protesting.

Thank God CNN is making a federal case out of the absurd treatment of a young Saudi woman who’s been imprisoned and sentenced to 200 lashes. Her crime? Consorting with man not related to her, then being abducted, then getting gang-banged, then speaking to the media.  All neatly packaged as “illegal mingling.”

Her real offense is that, in being raped and speaking up about it, she has tarnished the “honor” of her entire family. Honor trumps justice in much of the Muslim world, and we’d better understand how that works if we’re going advance human rights.

Honor is the Arab tribal tradition that requires a woman to sacrifice her individuality to maintain the reputation of the men in her family.  This, in effect, turns women into communal property. Their lives don’t belong to them. Their lives belong to a wider group of people — their clans, tribes, even nations.

Which means when a Muslim woman is accused of dishonoring — of shaming or breaking moral codes — the punishment against her can be mammoth. Again, that’s because her life doesn’t belong to her, but to a bigger body. So that in “smearing” her personal reputation by being the victim of rape, she winds up tarnishing the reputation of many more people — with the penalty having to be large enough to compensate them all.

Why must Muslim women bear such a heavy burden when the Quran clearly tells us that in the eyes of Allah, actions and not gender define one’s piety (3:195)?

The pre-Islamic tradition of honor is a cultural weapon, pure and simple. For more analysis, and evidence that a few feminists are finally speaking up, read my blog entry of last month. In it, I applaud Sheila Jackson-Lee, Democrat from Texas, who introduced a resolution against honor crimes in the U.S. House of Representatives.

CNN phoned me about the Saudi rape case. I told them everybody knows where I stand; Americans need to hear somebody in political power condemn this travesty. I recommended Rep. Jackson-Lee.

Meanwhile, kudos to CNN’s Carol Costello, who looked into the camera today and stated flat-out: “It’s not a woman’s tale of woe. It’s a human rights issue.”

What part of that point do George W. Bush and moderate Muslims not understand?