Prof. Sondra M. Rubenstein
Adjunct Distinguished Professor
Department of Communication
University of Haifa, Israel

Book Review - On Honor Killings

Burned Alive, written by "Souad" in collaboration with Marie-Thérèse Cuny (Bantam Press, 2004), is more than the recounting of shocking and tragic events that took place some 25 years ago in a West Bank village. The book addresses the prevailing taboo of honor killings, the punishment for the perceived misuse of female sexuality, and issues a heart-rending plea to expose and end such executions, which are still considered a "private" affair.

Souad, then 17 and several months pregnant, was set afire by her brother-in-law for having had sex before marriage. She writes:

Suddenly I felt a cold liquid running over my head and instantly I was on fire.... I started to run in the garden.... My terror led me instinctively away from the courtyard.... I knew I was running and I was on fire and screaming.... How did I get away? Did he run after me? Was he waiting for me to fall so that he could watch me go up in flames?

Somehow Souad climbed onto the garden wall and into the neighbor's garden or the street, where some women tried to beat out the fire and drag her to the village fountain.

...the water hit me suddenly and I screamed in fear....I felt the cold water running on me and I cried out with pain because it burnt me too.... I hear women wailing over me.... I was lying in a car.... And then nothing, and then again the noise of the car. I felt the jolts of the road. I heard myself moan. In my mind I was still running with fire all over me.

Thus, initially rescued by some women of her village, she was taken to a local hospital, where she was essentially left to die, as she explains:

I knew they were letting me die because it was forbidden to intervene in a case like mine. I was guilty in everyone's eyes. I would endure the fate of all women who sully the honour of men.

On learning their daughter was near death, Souad's father and then her mother came separately to the hospital. He was "furious" and demanded to know who had made her pregnant. Souad slipped in and out of consciousness, unable to speak. "Look at me, my daughter," her mother said. "I could never bring you home like that, you can't live in the house any more," and she continued:

...The shame is on the whole family.... The police came to see the family at the house.... the whole family, your father and your brother, and your mother, and your brother-in-law.... If you don't die, your brother will have trouble with the police.

Souad was again saved by providence, when a young doctor suddenly entered the room, grabbed the glass in her mother's hand, and made her leave. "I was still looking at that glass, and I would have drunk it...lapped up the liquid like a dog." When the doctor returned to the room, he said:

You're lucky I came in when I did. Your father, and now your mother! No one from your family will be allowed in here.

In the midst of one her nightmares, reliving being set afire, Souad, unattended, gave birth prematurely to her son. She writes that she does not remember, but says that she "must have cried out" and the "doctor leant over and took the baby away, without showing it to me."

Ultimately, Souad's salvation and that of her son came through the careful intervention of a European aid worker, identified as "Jacqueline." She convinced the young doctor to accompany her to the village where Souad's family lived. Together, after several visits, they convinced Souad's parents to sign papers permitting Jacqueline to take Souad out of the country to die, thereby saving the family the humiliation of having to retrieve her body from the hospital for burial in the village.

Burned Alive submerges the reader into Souad's cruel family life, where her sisters and her mother were commonly beaten and where "being born a girl is a curse."

I think we were beaten everyday with the belt or with the cane. A day without a beating was unusual. Once he [her father] tied us up, Kainat [one of her sisters] and me, our hands behind our backs, our legs bound, and a scarf over our mouths to stop us screaming. We stayed like that all night, tied to a gate in the stable. We were with the animals, but worse off than they were.

Suoad, saying "There was no other way of living," explains how it was in her village:

It was the law of men. The girls and women were beaten every day in the other houses, too. You could hear the crying. It was not unusual to be beaten, or to have your hair shaved and be tied to a stable gate....

Our mother was often beaten, just as we were. Sometimes she tried to intervene when my father hit us especially viciously, and then he'd turn on her, knocking her down and pulling her hair. We lived everyday with the possibility of death. It could come for no reason....simply because Father had decided you should die. Just as my mother had decided to smother the baby girls. She would be pregnant, then she wasn't, and nobody asked any questions. I never knew what became of the baby girls after my mother smothered them. Did they bury them somewhere? Did they become food for the dogs?

Working on the book proved to be painful and exhausting for Souad, as she forced herself to remember pieces of her life that she had long ago subconsciously buried. She explains that "it is my duty to bear witness and to do that, I must relive the nightmares." And, she does, indeed, "bear witness" to the day-to-day violence by often repeating a sentence similar to "Violence towards women in my family and in our village occurred daily." At another point in the book Souad speaks of inherited violence, the legacy of violence that a father hands down to a son. Thus, when her brother Assad beats his wife, Souad states that:

Between the father's violence and the son's, there was nothing for the rest of us to do but hide to avoid being beaten ourselves. Did my brother love his wife? For me love was a mystery. In our culture, we talk of marriage, not love, of obedience and submission, of the obligatory sexual relations with a virgin who has been bought for her husband, not a loving relationship between a man and a woman.

"Jacqueline," Souad's savior, speaks to us through her own voice in two chapters. We learn that Jacqueline was "in the Middle East working with a humanitarian organization, Terre des Hommes" and that the International Red Cross collaborated with her work, involving touring hospitals "looking for children who had been abandoned." Edmond Kaiser, mentioned by Jacqueline as the director of Terre des Hommes, is identified with the SURGIR (which means "arise") organization, www.surgir.ch, whose motto is "Lives Lost Lives Found." Donations are solicited on the book's last page to continue the remarkable work of SURGIR, a Swiss foundation dedicated to the rescue of women, "anywhere in the world, who are subjected to criminal traditions.... SURGIR fights vigorously against the injustice of the customs that victimize them."

Jacqueline also tells us, "It has been reported that more than six thousand honor crimes are committed every year, and behind this figure there are countless suicides and 'accidents.'"

One can visit the Muslim Women's League website, www.mwlusa.org or simply type in "Honor Killings" to learn more about this cultural phenomenon. The MWL is " working to implement the values of Islam and thereby reclaim the status of women as free, equal and vital contributors to society" (April 1999). One article includes the following:

Clearly, the prevailing view that devalues and belittles women is derived from sociocultural factors that are justified by a distorted and erroneous interpretation of religion, especially of Islam.

The problem of “honor killings” is not a problem of morality or of ensuring that women maintain their own personal virtue; rather, it is a problem of domination, power and hatred of women who, in these instances, are viewed as nothing more than servants to the family, both physically and symbolically.

Islam is clear on its prohibition of sexual relationships outside of marriage. This prohibition does not distinguish between men and women, even though, in some countries, women are uniformly singled out for punishment of sexual crimes while the men, even rapists, may be treated with impunity. In order for a case to even be brought before a Muslim court, several strict criteria must be met. The most important is that any accusation of illicit sexual behavior must have been seen by four witnesses; and they must have been witness to the act of sexual intercourse itself. Other forms of intimacy do not constitute zina [engaging in illicit sexual activity], and therefore are not subject to any legal consequences even though they are not appropriate and are considered sinful.

Susanne Ruggi has reported that according to Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, the honor killing emerged in the pre-Islamic era. He believes it is, "a complicated issue that cuts deep into the history of Arab society," and he argues that

...the honor killing stemmed from the patriarchal and patrilineal society's interest in maintaining strict control over designated familial power structures. 'What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power. Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. The honor killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What's behind it is the issue of fertility, or reproductive power.'

According to Ruggi, because honor killings are considered a private family affair, "no official statistics are available on the practice or its frequency." In November 1997 a report of the Woman's Empowerment Project was published in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. A representative of WEP commented that although 20 honor killings were reported in Gaza and the West Bank in 1996, "We know there are more but no one publicizes it." Ruggi also noted that:

An unofficial report given to the Palestinian Women's Working Society stated that 'recently' 40 women have been killed for honor in Gaza. The report defined neither the period in which these murders took place nor the exact circumstances. During the summer of 1997, Khaled Al-Qudra, then Attorney General in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), told Sout Al-Nissa' (Women's Voices), a supplement published by the Women's Affairs Technical Committee (WATC), that he suspects that 70 percent of all murders in Gaza and the West Bank are honor killings.

Penny Johnson, in a publication on law and the status of women (Women's Studies Program, Bir Zeit University), wrote that the Egyptian and Jordanian legal systems of Gaza and the West Bank (regarding personal status), are "based on a well-developed legal theory with a clearly defined model of family and gender relations that is patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal."

The single mother, as Souad explained in Burned Alive, is an outcast of her community and has no role in the patriarchal legal system. An unmarried mother, "ostracized and without a husband or access to a social welfare system," has no economic support. Johnson notes that the honor killing, as "an inherited mechanism, deters and eliminates deviation from the honor code, in order to perpetuate the traditional clusters of patriarchal familial power."

As a result of the work of NGOs such as SURGIR, the international media have helped set the agenda and raise social consciousness on the issue of honor killings. In the spring of 2003, the Palestinian press reported on a four-year-old girl who was raped by a 25-year-old man and left to bleed to death by her family because she had "dishonored" family members. While the child survived, her "honor" is marred for life.

Within the framework of events in the Middle East, several recent incidents appear to be developing into a phenomenon that purports to offer women a way to restore the family honor. The woman accused of dishonoring her family is told she may redeem herself and cleanse the family’s honor by becoming a homicide bomber. Unfortunately for these women, this “method of escape” simply exploits these women for an agenda representing ideas beneficial only to others and not to the women themselves.

Souad's Burned Alive, is a must-read book. It is important, as Jacqueline states, that everyone know there "are others, already dead or dying, in every country where the law of men condones honour crimes...." We must also understand that "the rare ones who escape must spend the rest of their lives in hiding because their assassins may still be looking for them."