The Washington Post takes notice of the practice of stoning women and girls to death for doing things like looking at a boy.
Despite creeping modernity, secular condemnation and the fact there’s no reference to stoning in the Koran, honor killings claim the lives of more than 1,000 Pakistani women every year, according to a Pakistani rights group.
They have widespread appeal. Eighty-three percent of Pakistanis support stonings for adultery according to a Pew survey, and only 8 percent oppose it. Even those who chose modernity over Islamic fundamentalism overwhelmingly favor stonings, according to Pew research.
If that statistic is true it seems very unlikely that the figure is only 1000 women murdered for “honor” every year.
Some Islamic fundamentalists think that only through the murder of an offending family member can honor be restored to the rest of the family. Honor killings predominantly affect women — 943 women were killed under such circumstances in 2011 and another 869 in 2013, though not all of them were stoned. Some were just gunned down in cold blood.
So the first sentence was misleading. Journalists have so much trouble being honest about this subject. It’s not “an offending family member”; it’s a female family member who comes under some kind of enraged suspicion.
One man in Punjab province suspected his teenage nieces of having “inappropriate relations” with two boys. So on Jan. 11, he killed both girls, confessed and said he did it for “honor.”
Another teenage girl, living in Sukkur, was allegedly shot dead by her brother while she was doing homework because her brother thought she was sleeping with a man.
One mom and dad allegedly killed their 15-year-old daughter with acid because they said she looked at a boy and they ”feared dishonor.”
“There was a boy who came by on a motorcycle,” her father told BBC. My daughter “turned to look at him twice. I told her before not to do that; it’s wrong. People talk about us.”
The mother added: “She said ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I won’t look again.’ By then I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way.”
So the mother carried acid with her, ready to throw on her daughter should she look at a boy. What a pretty story.
Those who are stoned in an honor killing are oftentimes accused of committing adultery. Both genders face stonings in Pakistan and across 14 Muslim countries, but women are more frequently the targets.
The reason is rooted in sexual inequality in such countries, where the punishment has survived through some interpretations of sharia, or Islamic law, that say adultery is punishable by stoning. In countries such as Iran, where stonings are legal and widespread, men often have significantly more agency than women. If accused of adultery, they may have the means to either hire lawyers or flee. But those options are frequently closed to women.
One 13-year-old girl named Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow faced such a fate. The Somali child claimed she had been raped by three men and told the authorities what had happened. But her report did not spur an investigation into her allegations. Instead, the girl was accused of adultery, buried up to her neck inside a stadium and stoned to death before 1,000 people.
That’s the story I chose for the last pages of Does God Hate Women? I included more details than are mentioned here; they are horrific.
It makes my blood run cold.
Probably a lot more than anyone will ever know.
One would be better advised to sit beside a block of concrete waiting for it to melt in the noonday sun than to hope that minds polluted by that crock of shit called Islam might start thinking about reform: ie as in reformation.
83% support stonings?!
Pakistan is really a hopeless place. It is so corrupt, in fact, that more and more international aid agencies will no longer operate in the country.
Aid money lines the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats and emergency aid is pilfered and then sold on the black morket for a hefty profit.
“Support for strict punishments is equally widespread among men and women, old and young, and the educated and uneducated.”
“The mother added: ‘… By then I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way.”
The sad fact is that it is mothers, as primary carers, from whom almost all girls and boys first learn about the culture and cultural attitudes into which they have been born. This is not just in Muslim societies. I don’t know figures, but I would be surprised if disapproval rates of, say, SlutWalk was all that much lower amongst heterosexual women than heterosexual men in the West.
It seems to me that this column could usefully expend less energy on attacking old, white, privileged biology professors and more exploring why the victims (if that is what they are) of these ghastly sexist and patriarchal institutions collaborate with it so whole heartedly and how it is transmitted to new generations.
@5 When women are powerless and nearly invisible, the only values they can transmit to their offspring are those of the patriarchy.
In Pakistan there really aren’t a lot of women, just tons of ‘submales’.
yahweh @ 5 – how much time do you consider I do expend “on attacking old, white, privileged biology professors”? Myself, I would say I expend zero.
I take it that’s your way of telling me to stop “attacking” Richard Dawkins? Your version of Dear Muslima, in short?
Well, I’m not going to stop “attacking” Dawkins, because he doesn’t stop attacking feminism. I think he does harm; I think he abuses his fame and influence (and even his credentials as a scientist) in efforts to undermine feminism. I think that’s an asshole move, especially for someone who does in fact have male privilege in abundance.
What I have heard is true. You really can’t avoid seeing social sexism once you install the mental filters for it. While acid attacks are not the weapon of choice in the west, women stepping out of the place that others think they should stay in have categorically similar reactions. Just criticizing a man will get all sorts of social nastiness with no consideration of the merits of the claims.
@ yahweh 5
Or you could criticize what you want, and other people can criticize what they want. If the criticism is warranted it does not matter if someone is doing something worse somewhere else. Everyone has a rational interest in criticizing things that are more closely related to their social world anyway. There is great value in attacking old, white, privileged biology professors when their actions deserve such.
@Brony 8 and Ophelia 7
After I submitted this comment I knew that my final para was a mistake, but it’s worth noting that in responding to it you chose not to engage with the observations of the first three.
They can be read, if you really must, as “stop attacking X because Y is just as bad’, and it seems to me that there is a tendency within both feminism and atheism which cannot get beyond the canards of its enemies.
(Ironically, it is the same, never ending demolition of rival interpretations of evolution which makes Dawkin’s biology books such an entertaining read at first).
I brought it on myself, but still a disappointing response.