Honour Killing and Much Ado About Nothing

Every so often yet another picture of a young woman appears with the caption: “victim of an honour killing”, and often these pictures are encountered as an easy way to fuel Islamophobic sentiments, playing on the Muslim woman as victim trope.

This aspect of the represenation of “justified murder” raises the question of whether there can be a balance between the very real need to do more to stop honour killings on the one hand, and on the other hand, the need to deal with the context in which honour killing is often represented.

 Perhaps one indication of the second problem is the proliferation of “memoirs” like the infamous Norma Khoury’s Forbidden Love or Souad’s Burned Alive, supposed biographies appealing to readers appetites for stories of oppressed Arab women.

But, while there may be hoaxes in the honour-killing survivor genre, honour killing is anything but Much Ado About Nothing. So, insensitivity aside, the link between honour killing and Much Ado About Nothing is this: apparently honour killing can be used as an educational aid to teach, of all things, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Juxtaposing Shakespeare’s comedy with an article informing the reader that one in ten British Asians back honour killing, beginning with this question:
Leonato wishes his daughter dead when he thinks she had brought dishonour on the family name. Is this idea of ‘honour’ old-fashioned?

A question which begs the question: is the main issue here how ‘old-fashioned’ honour killing is? And is this really the best way to introduce a debate around a complex issue to a group of Key Stage 3 students? Personally, I would have thought a topic like this would warrant a little more depth and attention than student-hooking teaching prop and aid to updating Shakespeare.

What really struck me upon seeing this, though, was my experience of being taught GCSE-level Romeo and Juliet, something which involved an earnest cross-questioning of all the Muslim girls in the class on arranged marriages: do you expect to have an arranged marriage, how many girls do you know who would have to have an arranged marriage, can you empathise with Juliet’s reaction to Paris, can you describe in your own words what that would feel like…and on and on and on. Not exactly a pleasant experience.

You’d think that there would be a little Shakespearean context involved in teaching Shakespeare. The Renaissance concept of honour in relation to women would be relevant. Or how about reading Browning’s My Last Duchess as a portrayal of an ‘honour killing’?

It sound odd, because the phrase ‘honour killing’ itself is so linked with Islam and Muslims that it seems incongruous in any other context. For obvious reasons: many honour killings occur in so-called “Islamic” countries. But this crime is neither exclusive to or invented by Muslims. Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, put it this way: “In countries where Islam is practiced, they’re called honor killings” but as she points out: “dowry deaths and so-called crimes of passion have a similar dynamic in that the women are killed by male family members and the crimes are perceived as excusable or understandable… it goes across cultures and across religions.”

This article does point out that the Asians questioned came from various religious backgrounds. But then the native informant appears rather suddenly to explain that honour is “engrained” into Asian society, while a lecturer in criminology argues that violence against women will not be tolerated. The whole article exudes this “they must understand” rhetoric, reconfiguring honour killings into signs which posit modernity as singularly western. I don’t see that this is necessary to condemning violence against women. Instead, it distracts from the more pressing issue, the fact that this is about murder, not an anthropological debate on the old-fashioned concept of honour.

As in this article it seems attention is more often paid to fascinating “tribal” concepts than to the fact that honour killing actually involves killing. Murder. Something which is not restricted to the Asian or Middle Eastern community, not even predominantly. Something which should be condemned in all its forms, by whatever name.

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