Earlier this month, Aasiyah Hassan was murdered by her husband in Buffalo, New York. The media response has been to toss around phrases like “honor killing” and “Sharia law,” despite the fact that we haven’t heard a thing from the authorities or the murderer that would indicate Hassan was killed to preserve her family’s honor, or that Sharia played into it at all. The thought process seems to be, “They’re Muslim and so this must have been a Sharia-based honor killing.” This bullshit post (complete with an illustrative table!) is a pretty good example. It comes down to this: “Honor killings” are worse than “regular” domestic violence murders. How do you spot an honor killing? Well, it’s done by a Muslim. Why is an honor killing worse? Because it’s done by a Muslim. It’ll make you dizzy if you think too hard about it. And it conveniently makes run-of-the-mill woman-killing not so bad if perpetrated by a nice non-Muslim guy.
Violence against women is of course shaped by culture. The mechanisms of control over women are going to vary across social class, race, religion and geographic location. The most effective way to hurt, shame and exert power over a woman is going to depend quite a bit on the norms in her community — and her ability to escape violence is also going to depend on her own access to power and her community’s views and assumptions. As the women at Muslimah Media Watch point out, communities can be complicit in domestic violence. It’s the same deal when religious Christian leaders tell their congregants not to get divorced even when there’s abuse (hello, Rick Warren). Religion doesn’t cause abuse — abusers cause abuse — but religious communities can enable and even promote abuse. So can non-religious and even liberal communities. At their best, those same communities can also provide resources for abuse survivors and can condemn abusers. That doesn’t seem to be what happened here.
What’s bizarre about this story is the jump to OMG HONOR KILLING when, really, the only evidence we have of an “honor killing” is the Pakistani/Muslim angle. As Fatemeh says, the facts of this case are sadly standard in murders that take place after a long history of violence: Man has a history of abuse, man abuses this woman for a prolonged period, woman tries to leave, man kills woman. Aasiyah Hassan filed for divorce and requested a protective order and her husband killed her — just like a lot of abusive men kill their partners when their partners try to leave. Had this couple been white and Christian, “honor killing,” “Sharia” and “terrorism” wouldn’t have come up. So I find myself confused when feminists write things like, “For many commenters on the web, it is apparently impossible to condemn this nightmare without hastening to add that American culture has plenty of its own home-grown brand of misogyny, and it’s therefore ‘intolerant’ to notice the particular lethalness of the honor-shame paradigm in some non-Western cultures.” Of course it’s true that culture impacts the way crimes are carried out. What confuses me here is the jump to “honor killing” without any sort of evidence to support that conclusion — other than the ethnicity and religion of the victim and murderer.
On top of the unsubstantiated claims of honor killing and sharia law comes the strange shadow-boxing against “multiculturalism.” For example:
To the feminists of the right, this matter is cut and dried. This past week, I was the keynote speaker to a group of politically active women and men called Republican Women Contemporary Federation of Boca Raton. In a question-and-answer session after my speech, the women and men in the room launched into a discussion about Aasiya’s murder. “We have laws here,” one woman exclaimed. “It’s called the US Constitution.” They were downright angry that this type of cultural hit job could take place on our shores. Live here and obey our laws or get the heck out was the general sentiment.
Artemis March, a feminist intellectual and a co-founder of The New Agenda, wants to find the line between respecting cultural and religious diversity and obeying one law. She posits: “We need to draw a line between respect for other cultures and not accepting practices which harm women. We have one set of laws that govern murder. We cannot have a dual legal system. Our laws and the universal standards of human dignity to which we aspire trump cultural diversity when it comes to harming others.”
…which would all be fine and dandy if anyone had suggested anywhere that that Muslims shouldn’t have to obey the law. As far as I can tell, Aasiyah Hassan utilized the American legal system (which ultimately failed her) in filing for divorce and a protective order. Her husband broke American laws when he killed her, and is now being criminally prosecuted in American courts. No one that I’ve read has objected to his prosecution. No one that I’ve read has written that we should have a “dual legal system” or that American Muslims shouldn’t be subject to the Constitution.
As Amy Siskin points out, the real issue is how women and men face intimate partner violence every day, here and everywhere in the world, and how our legal system and our communities too often fail.
Our country needs to start a national dialogue on violence against women. One in four women will be the victim of violence at the hand of an intimate partner in her lifetime. One in three female teenagers in a dating relationship has feared for her safety. Domestic violence costs our country $67 billion a year, including property loss, ambulance services, police response, pain and suffering, and the criminal-justice process. As Aasiya’s case shows, the laws in place simply do not work. It is time that feminists of all stripes come together and work to raise public awareness about violence against women. We need to carefully dissect the causes and figure out solutions. And in due course, some savvy politician needs to make this issue her own and help to champion our way forward together.