In London, a Muslim Kurd has just been sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering his daughter. It was a so-called honor killing. Abdullah Yones, who with his family fled Saddam Hussein’s regime 10 years ago, stabbed his 16-year-old daughter to death because she had become too Westernized in her personal morals, to the extent of taking up with a Christian boyfriend and planning to run away with him.
Inevitably, the story has made the headlines in the UK press, which like others in the West is fascinated by Islam but hostile and ill-informed about it at the same time. This tragedy has thus been presented in the newspapers and in court as a clash of cultures. The judge spoke of “irreconcilable differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of Western society”.
It is sadly true that honor killings are far from unknown in the Middle East and Muslim countries — although Saudi Arabia is the last place that one would associate with them. But such killings have nothing to do with Islam. They are based on backward cultural and tribal customs. Anyone who has studied the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sunnah knows that. Killing is sanctioned only after due and rigorous legal process. No one has the right to take the law into his own hands. No one has the right to kill his daughter — not for any reason.
In fact, this is not a Muslim problem at all; it is a human problem. In society after society, people with strong moral views worry about the corrosive effects of a permissive culture. But few would go as far as murder to maintain honor and integrity. Family bust-ups are the more usual consequence. Even when it does end in violence, it is not a purely Muslim issue. In Jordan and Egypt for example, Christians have been as much involved in such killings. In the UK, according to the police, there have been 12 known honor killings in the past year, involving not just Muslim families, but Sikhs and Christians as well. That does not mean that there are not difficulties for Muslims fitting into Western secular cultures. In Europe, in North America, secular influences on young Muslims born there are strong. Muslim families worry whether their children will grow up to be good Muslims. As the Muslim Council of Britain has explained, many British Muslims will have understood the circumstances of this particular case, will have understood the father’s despair and horror at his daughter’s apparent rejection of her faith and its values; nonetheless the majority of them are sickened at what he did.
Ignorance is what this sad story is all about — ignorance of Islam by Muslims who falsely claim a religious sanction for such killings, and ignorance by those who rush to use such tragedies to heap calumny on Islam.
