From the editor’s desk

Stain on Islam's honour

International outrage greeted the news from Iran that a woman accused of adultery there had been sentenced to be stoned to death. Sentence was postponed but the woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, could now face execution by hanging. The case illustrates just how wide is the gulf between civilised standards of behaviour accepted in the West and the brutal way the social norms of “honour” are enforced in other cultures, especially those with an ultra-­conservative version of Islam. Although judicial stonings are rare, killings in the name of honour, particularly of women accused of sexual misconduct, are horrifyingly less so.

Honour killings occur regularly in Pakistan, for instance. When they happen in the Pakistani community in Britain, police find such cases difficult to prove because families tend to close ranks and refuse to give evidence. Sometimes such murders are triggered by allegations of infidelity, but a common cause concerns arranged marriages. Police in Pakistan and Birmingham are investigating the killing of a British couple, Gul Wazir and his wife, Niaz Begum, who were shot dead while visiting relatives after they refused to force their two daughters to marry their cousins. The case is by no means unique.

Muslim authorities, including the Muslim Council of Britain, have made clear their detestation of honour killings and of forced marriages, saying they have no sanction whatever in Islam despite the common perception in the West to the contrary. This forms part of a larger judgement by Western public opinion – that Islam itself is unjust and discriminatory towards women. It is also associated in the public mind with such customs as the wearing of the veil, whole or partial. It does seem to be the case that the more deeply a society is steeped in Islam, the worse it treats its womenfolk.

But it would be unfair to assume cause and effect – both phenomena may denote cultural conservatism which extends outside the area of religion as such and is also linked to poverty and lack of education. The testimony of numerous Muslim women in the West is not to be ignored when they say they find Islam, properly understood, liberating rather than oppressive with regard to their gender. Dressing modestly and covering their hair, which is what most Muslim women limit themselves to, does not signify for them subservience to men so much as a repudiation of the almost universal Western convention of young women being made to feel they should put their sexuality on public display. They have a point. And Islamic law recognised certain rights for women – the right of wives to own property, for example – long before the Christian West did. The concept of honour centres upon ownership and control, not so much of women per se as of their fertility. It came to be seen as a necessary element in the power structure and stability of family and village life, and hence of the rural economy as a whole, which needs to be borne in mind when Western commentators talk uncritically of the merits of “family values”. These cultural customs and practices need to be seen not just as having no sanction in Islam, but as being in complete opposition to its core values. Islam itself, in other words, has the capacity to eradicate what is in truth a stain on its own honour. But it will take time.