“We have no remorse.”
Police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have filed preliminary charges against two women accused of killing their daughters.
The women, who were neighbours and are both Muslim, were reportedly furious with their daughters for eloping with Hindu men, police told the BBC.
Zahida, 19, and Husna, 26, were strangled last week after they returned home to make peace with their families.
I know it’s nothing new. It’s just so depressing. They went home, to make peace with their families – and their mothers strangled them.
That just……..
it makes me despair. Their mothers strangled them. For marrying Hindu men.
One of the accused is quoted by the Indian Express newspaper as saying after being arrested, “How could they elope with Hindus? They deserved to die. We have no remorse.”
Despair piled on despair.
It’s the worst when it’s the women perpetuating the oppression of women. I wonder if they would strangle their sons for the same offense?
Religion, you can’t live with it and you can’t live…Erm scratch that and lets get rid of it.
This is one reason why I can’t understand people like Ken Miller and Alister McGrath, who go out of their way to try to accommodate science and religion. What they are doing, if they would only pay attention, is giving comfort to people like these remorseless mothers. It’s enough to make one weep. Truly. And yet the supposedly academic support for religion takes no notice of the kind of thing they are propping up. It’s truly depressing.
Of course, if you read parts of the Christian Old Testament or the Jewish Torah, such penalties are prescribed for various offences, and people are told that they must kill their own children if they are guilty. This comes as no surprise at all. Religion is good at this sort of thing. As Hitchens says, religion does poison everything. It does so by putting the mind to sleep, so that it listens only to whispers from the enfolding dark.
We have no remorse.
We also have no compassion. Or empathy. Or doubt and uncertainty. Or anything remotely close to your ideas of justice. And you can forget about curiosity concerning anything beyond our own, narrow horizon. Or any desire to know any way but the way of tradition. Or any concern for the opinions of outsiders.
What we have is a command to submit.
Build a bridge to that.
Someone should start up a list of these reprehensible deeds inspired by religion. A depressing list, certainly, but also a useful collection to rebut those who argue that religion is always a correlate and NEVER a cause of the terrible things done in its name. Anyone like that should just be inundated with examples like these.
Try the book “Holy Horrors” for a partial list. And “Does God Hate Women” of course.
Oh noooo, these aren’t regular everyday peaceful believers, these are extremists. They’re following a bastardised & corrupted version of their Religion of Peace ™! It’s not like there are millions of similarly depraved people strewn across the planet from Mecca to Melbourne to Manchester, abusing and beating and murdering their own children every single fucking day for heinous crimes ranging from being a rape victim to daring to learn to read.</sarcasm>
I feel like rubbing this horrific story in the face of every single fucking gnu-basher and asking them how anyone, believer or not, is meant to accommodate a belief system that advocates – demands – such lunacy. These deranged so-called mothers aren’t some isolated extremists living in a cave away from civilised society; they’re ordinary, everyday, decent muslim women acting according to the dictates of their deeply-held beliefs by strangling their own daughters for daring to love Hindus – and daring to think their mothers would forgive them. India’s a big country – who knows how many other deeply devout crimes such as these go unreported? In a nation with porous borders, extreme racial, religious and class tension, widespread poverty, limited access to and involvement with state infrastructure and possibly large numbers of undocumented residents, I have a feeling stories like these are the tip of the iceberg.
Defenders can protest all they want, in these all-too familiar aftermaths, that the good, decent faith in question has been corrupted by humans and they can rail all they want against the so-called extremists that give decent believers a bad name. However, that only strengthens a significant part of our argument: any system of belief (or “way of knowing”) that can be so easily corrupted (or not, as the case may be) to tolerate and even demand extrajudicial murder for minor infractions has no place in our society whatsoever, let alone informing or shaping ethics, morality and law for society at large. Islam is not the only culprit, either – each Abrahamic carries much blood on its hands.The fact is, these women knew they were carrying out the will of their god as dictated by their scripture. They knew were practising their faith and following their law correctly. For all anyone knows, they did not consider themselves extremists in any sense of the word. That they have expressed no remorse at murdering their children illustrates just how far their everyday faith has influenced their moral & ethical standards. The excuse of “extremism” be damned; this is how this religion is practised every day across much of the world; it must not be accommodated.
anna – Thanks for the tip. “Holy Horrors” certainly sounds like a promising title!
I cannot for the life of me comprehend or intuit in any way being under the grip of an ideology so strong it could subvert the innate instinct to protect one’s children, let alone murder them and be so placid about it. I mean, yeah, we all know there are psychopaths, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here (for certain values of psychopath, mind).
My own — adoptive — mother would’ve killed, if she could, anyone who might suggest that my husband wasn’t the optimum spouse for her daughter. She was adamant that my selection was the optimum one, regardless of the fact that she never particularly liked him.
Yes, stuff like that makes me despair too. It really does. In some UK communities their is a lot of this going on under the radar. It difficult to grok how the caring maternal impulses can be overwritten to this extent.
clod – I don’t know about the amount but it clearly does happen. I dislike the cover that the”communities” concept gives to this.
Islam is doomed. It offers absolutely nothing to civilization. Where ever it reigns supreme there is illiteracy, poverty, disease, high infant mortality and shorter life expectancy.
No despair required.
dirigible – There is a lot. I live in the north west with some sizeable immigrant communities within which a lot of abuse takes place. The tendency in the past was to turn a blind eye towards much of it. Now the response is getting more robust and proactive with the setting up of forced marriage units and suchlike.
Yes, the communities concept has held back effective intervention.
I think for most of us atheists, since 9/11, we’ve woken up to the fact of unnecessary man-made suffering across the world, and find ourselves unable to do anything about it. Adam Curtis calls this “oh dearism”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8moePxHpvok
Egbert; There are a lot of people doing a lot of things “about it” all over the world. It is a movement that it is hard to see because it is small efforts, seemingly unrelated, but all moving in the same general direction. I just watched people in my country (America) last night on PBS, beating black people while the police and President Kennedy did nothing. We fixed that and we will fix this.
At least the general trend towards development – increased education, greater spending power, migration for jobs etc, is having the unintended consequence of weakening this sort of tribal behavior all over the world. Exposure of different ideas and lifestyles that are visible compatible with happy living is happening now to a greater extent than any other time in history. Look at the result of a few years of widespread internet connectivity in the Arab world.
No remorse????? Hangem. Hangem high.
Is this not exactly what we’re trying to stop? How is strangling these women by a rope any different to their form of justice? Ugh.
While not endorsing capital punishment, I do see a difference between the retributive urge directed at those that strangle their children, and those that have merely married outside the group.
Killing murderers may serve the utilitarian function of saving the lives of potential future victims; killing those that marry outside the group may simply deter others from marrying outside the group.
Not that I’m advocating capital punishment.
I guess if you’re delusional enough to be willing to strangle your children for an imaginary god, remorse doesn’t really enter into it.
Egbert (re hanging the murdering mothers):
What are you arguing. Are you interepreting the “hang ’em high” comment as a call to vigilante action, or just advocacy of the death penalty for cases like this?
If it’s the latter, would you make the same argument about capturing and confining a kidnapper—is that “exactly what we’re trying to stop,” too?
I’m generally against the death penalty myself, even for murder, but I think there’s a huge difference between murder and a death penalty for murder, which should be obvious.
The social pressures and costs of living in a society where marrying outside your tribe is considered a big no-no is certainly one of the factors. I have seen similar cases where people cut of ties altogether and other violent reactions. It’s much more than the ideology – It’s hard to put in words , I know someone who eloped and married a lower caste guy and her brothers went on the rampage and destroyed his house (fortunately they weren’t at home) – Its a curious combination of factors.
I don’t know Paul W., is stoning a woman to death under Islamic law any different to outright evil murder? Not to me it isn’t. I don’t see a huge difference at all.
When theists claim that, without God, all is permitted, they seem to forget that a lot more is permitted with God, than without. The concern that people who don’t believe in God will try to “get away” with doing wrong is overtaken by the more serious concern that people who believe in God will be able to justify wrong with a clear conscience — and there’s no way to argue them out of it without simultaneously undermining their faith.
Faith, apparently, shouldn’t be too strong. Just strong enough to define your life and elevate you above the world. But don’t go too far and get unreasonable or anything.
Deepak – right – it’s hard to put into words and hard for outsiders to imagine their (our – I’m an outsider) way into.
One can get a glimpse of it by reading Elizabethan drama, actually – but only a glimpse because drama of its nature is external not internal, and also because Shakespeare’s rivals were not very good at……well, what he was good at: giving a sense of characters’ minds. But you can get a glimpse of the simmering hatred and suspicion of women, which takes only a breath of a whisper to turn to murderous violence. If nothing else this shows how recent the escape from that mindset is in Anglophone culture. (There’s more than a trace of it left in Jane Austen – the frantic shame and horror when a woman runs off with a man.) Or there’s Samuel Johnson telling Boswell, “Sir, the woman’s a whore” and there’s an end of it, when Boswell had been pointing out that her husband was an evil swine who beat her up all the time.
This is unspeakable. This is one of those stories that persuades me that our species should not survive.
Egbert, you evaded both my question and its obvious intent.
Would you say that capturing and confining a kidnapper was the same thing as kidnapping such that we wouldn’t do it?
Sure, stoning a woman to death for bad reasons is bad even if it’s sanctioned by a government, e.g. for adultery under Islamic law. But that’s a red herring.
You’re basically implying that two actions are obviously “the same” if they’re the same action, irrespective of context and justification.
That’s silly.
If you’re stoning women to death for adultery, because it’s that’s the penalty specified by Islamic law, you’ve got a much bigger problem than simply having the death penalty for some things, such as, say, aggravated first-degree murder.
The bigger question there is the legitimacy of the government, not whether a legitimate government can legitimately use the death penalty.
You are ignoring some really basic principles of morality by assuming that the moral value of an action is indepenent of context and justification.
That’s about as bad a moral argument as there can be.
I ask you again: would you say that capturing and confining a kidnapper is “exactly what we’re trying to stop”?
If not, then you’re obviously making an invalid argument—there might be a good argument for special-casing the death penalty, but that’s clearly not it. You are making an obviously invalid argument as though you think it was obviously valid.
Well Im sort of an insider and its hard for me too :). Im not sure what it is about the woman and her right to choose her spouse that sets of communities. The case I’m familiar with , the family is fairly liberal (in the sense they would mingle with lower castes and muslims , eat at their places , have their children play together), the girl was educated through to some college, there weren’t any restrictions out of the ordinary imposed on her – and yet when it came to her marriage to a lower caste member , all hell broke loose. So much so that her cousin sister was immediately married off at 21(!) to avoid any chance of this repeating.
“Shakespeare’s rivals were not very good at……well, what he was good at: giving a sense of characters’ minds.”
I would respectfully disagree. The Duchess of Malfi will better illuminate readers on the sad subject of a woman punished for marrying outside the bounds set by patriarchy than any play by Shakespeare. Webster’s grasp of mental pathology is on par with the Bard’s, and Thomas Middleton (Women Beware Women, The Revenger’s Tragedy) is not far behind.
IA – I would respectfully disagree back. The D of M is very good at showing the externals of a woman punished for marrying outside the bounds set by patriarchy, but it is external. Gorgeous language much of the time, but that’s a different matter. Middleton is all mindless surface – I had him chiefly in mind. Plus, he’s revolting. Total contempt for women.
I’m not a woo-meister, but I’m almost on the edge of a “Gaia” feeling that this is the Earth’s way of telling us there are too damned many humans on the planet.
We’ve been infected with mass hysteria. Any day now, I expect Pakistan and India to start throwing their atom bombs at each other for this or some-such other affront to one-another’s religion. It’ll give new meaning to the term “suicide bomber”.
I agree that this does teach a lesson about the futility and the wrong-headedness of accommodationism. Without religion, such things are much less likely to happen. Although I can certainly recall the days when a black man dating a white woman in the US could be positively dangerous, even deadly in certain parts of the country.