Author: Ophelia Benson

Is there no limit?

A senior judge has called for an end to the use of the phrase “honour killings” to describe what is “in reality sordid, criminal behaviour”…The judge had heard that a mother had set fire to one of her three children and tried to burn down the house where they lived in an attempt to incriminate her sister-in-law. The sister-in-law “presented a problem to the family” and had fled the home after she had been beaten and her first child murdered by her husband, the mother’s brother.

So let me get this straight – a guy beats his wife and murders their child so she runs away – so the guy’s sister sets fire to her own child in order to get back at the woman who fled the man who beat her and killed their child? And they considered this a matter of ‘honour’? So what would fit their definition of violence and squalor then?

The mother of the children – a girl aged 11 and boys of 9 and 5 – is serving a five-year jail sentence for arson. One of her brothers had contracted a second marriage to a woman in Pakistan who came to England in 2003 pregnant with her first child. That child died after being taken to hospital aged 27 months suffering from multiple injuries. The motivation for the killing was not known, but among the injuries on the child were signs of chronic sexual abuse. The brother and his wife were arrested. He was convicted of murder and she was cleared of neglect. The grandfather in the family is on record as saying that the death was an accident and the will of God. He has made it clear that the son will return to live at the family home when he is released. His daughter-in-law returned to live at the family home and gave birth to her second child, a son…In May 2005, she fled with the help of the police and social services after complaining of severe ill-treatment. She was moved to a secret location after saying that the family would track her down and kill her because they would not allow her to disgrace them. She is still in fear of her life. Later that year, the mother of the three children alleged her sister-in-law and another had entered her home in burkhas, cut the mother’s hands and neck with a knife and poured white spirit on to one of the children’s clothing before setting fire to clothing at the bottom of the stairs…“Her flight and the disclosure of her treatment at their hands was seen by the family as being an insult to them. They saw it – and continue to see it – as a disgrace.”

Her flight is the disgrace, not the way she was treated. Their revolting cruelty and violence is just fine, her escape from it is a disgrace.

Words fail me.

Bernard Williams says some things relevant to this idea of ‘betraying your community’ in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, which I was re-reading a couple of days ago.

“The dispositions and reactions that are exercised within one culture are not merely diverted or shown to be inappropriate by the fact that its members are presented with the behavior of another culture. In any case, it is artificial to treat these matters as if they always involved two clearly self-contained cultures. A fully individuable culture is at best a rare thing. Cultures, subcultures, fragments of cultures, constantly meet one another and exchange and modify practices and attitudes. Social practices could never come forward with a certificate saying that they belonged to a genuinely different culture, so that they were guaranteed immunity to alien judgements and reactions.” [p 158]

“Never” is putting it a little too strongly – which is why I said that tropical islands are a somewhat special case, and isolated groups are a somewhat special case, and that it depends, in a recent discussion of moral relativism. That’s because I think groups that really have been entirely isolated from competing ways of thinking may be a somewhat special case – and also because I think it depends for instance on what people within the groups think about their lives. If some people in the groups are being, say, beaten or raped or mutilated or forcibly married to people they dislike, and they are unhappy and know they are unhappy and say they are unhappy – then I think outsiders can make moral judgments. In the absence of those conditions, it’s trickier, though that doesn’t rule out further inquiry and investigation. But that seems to end up at the same place Williams ends up at: whether or not social practices could ever come forward with a certificate saying that they belonged to a genuinely different culture, we both think they could not be guaranteed immunity to alien judgements and reactions.

Williams goes on, a few pages later:

“There is no route back from reflectiveness…This phenomenon of self-consciousness, together with the institutions and processes that support it, constitute one reason why past forms of life are not a real option for the present, and why attempts to go back often produce results that are ludicrous on a small scale and hideous on a larger one. This can be seen, above all, with reactionary projects to recreate supposedly contented hierarchical societies of the past. These projects in any case face the criticism that their pictures of the past are fantasies; but even if there have been contented hierarchies, any charm they have for us is going to rest on their having been innocent and not having understood their own nature. This cannot be recreated, since measures would have to be taken to stop people raising questions that are, by now, there to be raised.

But if the questions are there to be raised, should we not – or, at any rate, may we not – raise them about those societies as they existed in the past? In particular, may we not ask whether those societies, however unaware they may have been, were unjust? Can a relativism of distance put them beyond this question?”[p 164]

He adds: “They may not have been wrong in thinking that their social order was necessary for them. It is rather the way in which they saw it as necessary – as religiously or metaphysically necessary – that we cannot now accept. Where we see them as wrong was in the myths that legitimated their hierarchies. We see our view of our society and ourselves as more naturalistic than their view of themselves. This naturalistic conception of society, expressed by Hobbes and Spinoza at the beginning of the modern world, represents one of the ways in which the world has become entzaubert, in Max Weber’s famous phrase: the magic has gone from it. (The current attempts by Islamic forces in particular to reverse that process – if that is what those attempts really are – do not show that the process is local or reversible only that it can generate despair.)” [p 165]

That was in 1985. He was paying attention.

Another pretty story.

“Hannah Shah” is…the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father…rap[ed] his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan…[S]he then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.

Islam is a religion of peace; Allah is merciful.

Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!” Does she still believe they would have killed her? “Yes, without a doubt. They had hammers and knives and axes.”

Then the social services helped out.

When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn’t bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.”

From ‘her own community’ – but which one? The one that was raping her? The one that was beating her? The one that wasn’t protecting her? The one that thinks girls and women should be beaten? The men of ‘the community’ but not the women? Notice the ‘he said’ – the social worker was not just ‘from her own community,’ he was also a man from that community. In what sense was that ‘community’ her ‘own’ community? In what sense was it not a hostile alien force that was oppressing and subordinating her through physical violence and intimidation? And why, above all, were such questions apparently not available to ‘the social services’? Why did such questions not occur to them before sending out a man from this particular ‘community’ to investigate a reported pattern of beatings? In short, why did they not know what they were doing?

‘It’s not right to betray your community’ – so that means it is right to accept beatings and furthermore that it is not right to refuse to accept them. But if that’s the case – then it’s not ‘your’ community. It’s your enemy, your boss, your tyrant, your owner, your oppressor; it’s not your ‘community.’ If you’re not permitted any recourse against violence and brutality – then there is no affiliation, there is only force. Community me no community under those circumstances. Don’t pretty things up. Don’t tell me ‘It’s not right to betray your community’; tell the truth; say ‘You’re not allowed to tell outsiders you’re being beaten, and if you do you’ll get beaten even harder.’

This is the sort of cultural sensitivity displayed by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year when he suggested that problems within the British Muslim community such as financial or marital disputes could be dealt with under sharia…What did Hannah, now an Anglican, think on hearing these remarks? “I was horrified.” If you could speak to him now, what would you say to the archbishop? “I would say: have you actually spoken to any ordinary Muslim women about the situation that they live in, in their communities? By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman’s witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more.” She believes the British government is making exactly the same mistake as Rowan Williams: “It says it talks to the Muslim community, but it’s not speaking to the women. I mean, you are always hearing Muslim men speaking out, the representatives of the big federations, but the government is not listening to Muslim women. With the sharia law situation and the Muslim arbitration tribunals, have they thought about what effect these tribunals have on Muslim women? I don’t think so.”

Because they’re still labouring under the same confusion – that a ‘community’ is homogeneous and united and dissent-free and any member of the ‘community’ is as worth talking to as any other, except in fact if the ‘community’ in question believes in subordinating and silencing women, why, it is only respectful to talk to the men and ignore the women. They have started learning better (they have talked to Maryam Namazie and Gina Khan) – but slowly, slowly.