Honor killings, in which women are murdered for tarnishing their family’s honor, are prevalent throughout the Middle East. In Jordan they account for one-third of all violent deaths, on the order of twenty-five a year. Although they are illegal, the murders are prosecuted leniently in a country where tribal custom and Islamic teachings often hold sway in the courts.
Lina Nabil was writing glossy features for a Middle Eastern women’s magazine when she found the story that changed her life. In the 1980s, while she was working on an investigative report on the situations of Jordan’s imprisoned women, she was shown a cell in the Central Jail in the capital of Amman. It was packed with women in their early to late teens.
“I asked, what had these girls done?” recalled Lina. “I was told they were being held for their own protection because their families had tried to kill them. Some of them had been there for years. Others were released and later murdered. I knew this was a story I had to tell, whatever the consequences.”
Honor killings, in which women are murdered for tarnishing their family’s honor, are prevalent throughout the Middle East. In Jordan they account for one-third of all violent deaths, on the order of twenty-five a year. Although they are illegal, the murders are prosecuted leniently in a country where tribal custom and Islamic teachings often hold sway in the courts.
It’s a practice that dates back through the ages, but what’s new about honor killings in Jordan is that women like Lina have started talking about them. Her series of articles about the women in prison, published in the late 1980s in a leading Arabic-language newspaper, attracted a storm of controversy, including a number of death threats. “The subject was a taboo when I started writing about it. At first people were in a state of denial; then they accused me of being un-Jordanian, a whore, an enemy of religion,” she said. “But slowly the truth emerged.”
As Lina discovered, the motivations for the killings vary. Most common, in a culture that prizes a woman’s virginity, is an accusation of sex before marriage, although Lina estimates that in 90% of the cases the victims are virgins.
“In the small communities where honor killings often take place, a rumor that a woman was seen talking to another man is enough to ruin the family’s reputation in the eyes of society,” she said.
Other cases involve rape, often by a member of the family. In the story Lina recounts at the start of the video, the 17-year-girl was raped by a cousin from a nearby farm. After her family’s first attempt to kill her failed, she was taken into police custody. That’s where Lina first met her, during a visit from the girl’s father and son.
“I left the room for a moment with the supervisor, and the next thing we heard was a gunshot, and she was lying on the floor in a pool of blood,” said Lina. “The father and son who did this thought they were upholding the family’s honor, that they were doing the right things according to their customs and their religion.”
As Lina has strived to make clear, honor killings have nothing to do with Islam. “Nowhere in the Koran does it tell you kill women like this. In fact it’s just the opposite: it says that men and women should be treated equally,” she said.
Since her first article ran almost 20 years ago, Lina has dedicated herself to changing these perceptions. Along with women like Rana Husseini, another journalist who has publicized honor killings, and the Jordan Women’s Union, an education center and shelter for abused women, they have broken down the silence that has surrounded the issue.
But there has been no real reduction in honor killings. To achieve that, Lina believes, the law courts must start prosecuting as murderers the men who kill their female family members. Currently, under Article 98 of the Jordanian Penal Code, a man can claim “mitigating circumstances”, and receive a light custodial sentence, Lina said.
“In every murder I’ve investigated, the woman was held to be responsible for the crimes committed against her, even though she was actually the victim,” said Lina, “What we want is equality before the law. Then we will see change.”
Jack Fairweather is a contributing filmmaker to Altmuslimah. He is also the Washington Post Global’s Islamic world correspondent and a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones and the Atlantic Monthly.
