Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
January 16, 2008
By Mona Eltahawy
BERLIN — Death came for Hatun Surucu at a cold bus stop here three years ago. The 23-year-old was the sixth Muslim woman murdered by a relative in Berlin in as many months for being “too western.”
Hatun had divorced a cousin she had been forced to marry by her Turkish-Kurdish family when she was 16. She had stopped wearing a headscarf, and was living with her 5-year-old son independent of her family. She was training to become an electrician and dating German men.
That last detail was probably why her (then) 18-year-old brother killed her.
He allegedly bragged to his girlfriend about what he’d done. One can only wonder at the patriarchal irony: bragging to his girlfriend about killing his sister for having a boyfriend. He was sentenced to prison for nine years and three months.
This past December, Aqsa Pervez was a bit younger when she died. The Pakistani-Canadian was just 16-years-old when her father strangled her in their home in Ontario, Canada, and then called the police to confess. Her friends said she had argued frequently with her strict Muslim family — including over wearing the hijab, or headscarf, which she would remove once she was at school.
And for the Said sisters — 17-year-old Sarah and 18-year-old Amina — death found them on New Year’s Day in the back of their taxi-driver father’s cab, where he left them after shooting them. Family members say their Egyptian-born, Muslim father was given to fits of violence, threats, and gun-waving rants about how Western culture was threatening the chastity of his daughters.
In the so-called “clash of civilizations,” Muslim girls and women are the biggest losers.
When Muslims in the West are not in the headlines for the latest terror threat, they are scrutinized for how poorly they are integrating into their respective societies. In Europe they are generally considered dangerously ghettoized, but they are thought to be more a part of things in North American society.
Regardless of geography, the Muslim girls and women above were murdered by their relatives for integrating too well. Others will die until there is a difficult resolution about Muslim girls and women that for too long has been denied and hidden beneath layers of knee-jerk defensiveness — by western Muslims and cultural relativists in the face of rightwing anti-Muslim hate.
To see what I mean, just “Google search” Aqsa Pervez.” Right wing commentators call her death an “honor killing,” suggesting every Muslim father is ready to murder his daughter for taking off a headscarf.
I took off mine after nine years of wearing it and I’m still here.
Some Muslims insist it was “just” a case of “domestic violence,” as though religion and culture had “nothing” to do with Aqsa’s murder. Beyond these interpretations, liberal writers exhort us not to judge the “culture” of others.
The term “Muslim women” is a flashcard that ignites furious arguments that have more to do with political positions and very little to do with the women themselves. Their voices go unheard — until they end up in the headlines as murder victims.
Muslim women will continue to suffer until we confront the toxic cocktail that is equal parts an ugly fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and a patriarchy forced upon too many Muslim women and girls in the West.
Canadian Muslim writers Tarek Fattah and Farzana Hassan provide an example: A Montreal mosque recently posted on its Web site a warning to the effect that if young girls took off their hijab, they could end up getting raped and having “illegitimate children.” Other risks of not wearing hijab are said to include “stresses, insecurity and suspicion in the minds of husbands” and “instigating young people to deviate towards the path of lust.”
When a mosque in Canada offers such hateful messages, the terms “honor killings” and “domestic violence” miss — and hide — the point. This mosque teaches a culture of hate and incitement that must be condemned.
Germany, a country where a painful history has meant at times an absurd reluctance to criticize minorities, provided an example last year of how ludicrous and dangerous culture relativism can be.
Frankfurt judge Christa Datz-Winter refused to grant a fast-track divorce to a German Muslim woman who had complained that her husband beat her. The judge said both partners came from a “Moroccan cultural environment in which it is not uncommon for a man to exert a right of corporal punishment over his wife,” and she cited passages in the Qu’ran that she said sanction physical abuse.
She was removed from the case.
I am waiting for the removal of clerics and imams, who incite hate and violence with their messages about hijab. I am waiting for Muslim families to stop disowning European Muslim women for marrying non-Muslim men. And I am waiting for the end of a sometimes deadly choice Muslim women — victims of violence — have had to make in a post-9/11 United States, when calling the police could mean the deportation of a husband, a brother or a father.
The clash of patriarchal cultures — from the perspective of a Muslim woman in the middle — offers a too-familiar oppression and abuse, covered up by an equally too-familiar system of denial.
It is heartening to hear of shelters opening in the United States with the needs of Muslim women in mind. But unless we confront and resolve these difficult issues, not enough girls and women will make it to those shelters.
Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator, and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues.
Copyright ©2007 Mona Eltahawy / Agence Global
Comments (10)
Dale said:
I guess that my own reaction to so-called “honor killings” is same as most other Westerners; “WHAT is wrong with those crazy Arabs/Muslims?”. Now, while I don’t necessarily agree that it is “simply” domestic violence, I see no real reason to treat such murders as anything but murders. Whether or not they are related to domestic violence is perhaps of interest to sociologists, but not to the bulk of us.
Fortunately, such events are still rare enough that they do actually make the news when they happen. This is, in a way, a sad thing as it distorts reality to the viewing public who do not realize that only unusual events are newsworthy. I’m sure that many Americans think that “honor killings” happen every other day in some places.
Certainly Muslim women should be protected from such insanity when in Western countries… or anywhere else for that matter. Shelters for women and children are a good thing. That said, I have to ask what the “needs of Muslim women” are exactly. Are their needs any different from the needs of Christian women being beaten up by an intimate partner?
True story:
I once helped a police officer push a disabled vehicle down the block and around the corner to get it off a busy street. I didn’t really get a good look at the driver. As it was well below freezing, and there was a child in the car with her, I did take time to give the woman my phone number if her ride failed to show up in a timely manner.
About the time I got home, she was on the phone asking me for a ride. I went back out and drove to her location. My first question when I got a good look at her was “What happened to your face?”, which was badly bruised. Her answer was classic: “I just moved into a new place and I ran into a wall in the dark last night.”
After I took her home, I called the police and got a call back from the officer who’d helped me push her car. He’d been under the impression that the bruise that covered half of her face was a birth mark and apparently didn’t want to offend her by asking about it. I told him that I had been in the car with her and gotten a good look and in my opinion somebody had taken a baseball bat to that woman, or perhaps just gotten on top of her and wailed on her with his fists for a half hour or so until he got tired.
Three days later, I ran into the same woman, again with the same car broke down in the street. She told me that the officer had gone to her house and talked to her a bit, giving her his business card, the number of a shelter, and some advice. She further admitted that a man had beaten her up the night before I met her the first time.
She thanked me for “sending” a police officer to talk to her. Now, I don’t have any authority to send a police officer anywhere. He did that of his own volition for no other reason than that he cared. I wish all police officers were like that one.
Why she was unwilling to tell a police officer or a helpful stranger that she needed help is beyond my ability to fathom. The motivations of women baffle me most of the time.
As I see it, any woman needing sanctuary simply needs… well, sanctuary. That is to say, a secure building with a competent staff and hopefully somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger standing out front with an Ithaca Model 37 12 Ga.
What else might she need or want than that?
January 16th, 2008, 8:47 pm
Z said:
Mona, I used to read your columns on the Asharq al-Awsat (English). I was *extremely* glad to find your blog. Your common-sense writing is such a breath of fresh air.
Groups and leaders can choose whether to maintain “reigns of terror.” Those who have things their way by creating a climate of fear among their followers are a plague and should be treated as such. Muslim groups have had some abysmal leaders, and unfortunately there has been a reluctance to criticize or replace them.
To Dale – the woman you mentioned may have felt trapped, helpless, alone. A woman who doesn’t seek the police when beaten by her husband often comes from a family where such violence was normal. Now, suppose that her husband emotionally abuses her, constantly telling her that she’s “worthless” and that the beatings are “her fault.” Suppose that (even though part of her knows this is not true) this fills her with shame. Suppose that she has no job and nowhere else to go, and the abuser controls the money. This, too, fills her with shame. Suppose that she has kids, and can’t bear the thought of possibly living on the street with them. Suppose that she doesn’t really know what’s possible, and has very little hope of any kind.
Does she go to the police?
Now on top of that, suppose that the brutality of the man/men in her life is given religious sanction by the local imam, preacher, etc. Suppose that going to the police or getting divorced could get her shunned, attacked or even killed by her own family.
Regarding the needs of conservative Muslim women, shelters would need to provide halal food, or else it is possible that conservative Muslim women might not feel that they could go there. Shelters might need to have all-female staff, etc. Counseling would need to counteract the imams who defend abuse; the staff would need to understand the women’s social context in order to help them. For immigrants, language and culture might be challenging. In some cases, the women may be afraid to seek jobs lest they be shunned or harmed by their communities. They may even be convinced to return to the abuser by community/religious leaders who view their flight as shameful, immoral, etc.
January 17th, 2008, 7:56 am
Dale said:
To Z:
Thanks for the explanation as to a Muslim woman’s potential needs in a shelter. As a former civil affairs soldier deployed to the Persian Gulf, the things you pointed out really should have occurred to me. I must be getting old, or maybe its the nerve gas exposure catching up with me.
All female staff is probably a good idea for any culture in a woman’s shelter. There are very practical reasons for that which I never considered before. Also, I don’t think I could be paid enough to work in such a facility as a man. Not all abused women are especially pleasant to be around.
The food issue is one I could argue about, but you make a valid point. Whether or not the requirement is valid in the eyes of God, if a woman believes it to be important, it certainly would influence her decision making.
Still, in the end, the old story is that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. If things are really that bad for the woman and her children, she really needs to take the first step herself and if she won’t, no amount of “help” will be of any use.
Another true story:
I used to sell guns. It was a fairly common occurrence to have a woman come into the store looking for a handgun for defense against an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. More often than not, the woman had little if any experience with weapons.
“I don’t want to shoot him, just scare him away,” or “I don’t want to kill him, just wound him.”… these were common statements in such cases. My advice was always the same: “If you are not willing to kill somebody, don’t point a gun at him, and perhaps its not a good idea to even have one in that case. It will just be used against you.”
On more than one occasion, my suggestion was for the woman to quit her job and move away. They never took this advice, and more than one ended up either dead or beaten up pretty badly.
After a while I concluded that women seldom take advice from men and stopped giving advice without being asked for it. At some point, I quit that job, for various reasons.
There is no “magic bullet” in complex cases like this, but the shelters are certainly needed to introduce other options than death or worse.
January 17th, 2008, 12:28 pm
Lc said:
Dear Mona,
I have read many of your articles and I find them stereotypical and disturbing.Your articles confirm to non Muslim people that Muslim men are savages to the point where they would kill their daughters if they disobeyed them.
Coming from a large Muslim family, I never saw or heard of such cruelty and savegery.
Instead, like my father , I am related to women who had supportive, loving, educated level headed fathers.
Like myself, the women in my family are well rounded, highly educated and married to great men.
I ,married outside my Muslim faith and my family loves and respects my adoring husband.
Perhaps you write about cases that reflect your own background.
Dysfunctional people come from all social and economical classes.
Here in the U.S. your articles regarding Muslim women being killed, stoned, etc because they disobeyed only feeds the stereotype that many Americans have of Muslims.
January 24th, 2008, 6:26 pm
Mona Eltahawy said:
Lc
You obviously haven’t read my essay properly. I spread my criticism far and wide, and directed much of it against anti-Muslim groups which try to portray all Muslim fathers as potential murderers of their daughters.
I even shared my own experience with hijab, saying I took it off after wearing it for nine years and didn’t suffer negative consequences from my father.
But just because I’ve led a privileged and blessed life doesn’t mean I close my eyes, or heart, to the suffering of others.
Your denial of the suffering of others is the worst kind of knee-jerk defensiveness. It is because of denial like yours that girls and women like Hatun, Aqsa, Sarah and Amina are killed with very little fuss or outrage from fellow Muslims.
Tell Hatun and Aqsa that their murders are “stereotypical and distrubing”.
And finally, if you don’t like what I write then stop reading me.
January 25th, 2008, 8:14 am
Abu Kareem said:
Mona,
Contrary to Lc, I found your post very balanced. I understand, somewhat, her point of view but it has more to with a relunctance to air our “dirty laundry” to a Western public that is already predisposed to have negative views of Muslims. We should resist such a temptation to bury our heads in the sand.
The best antidote to the stereotype is women, like yourself, speaking frankly and forcefully.
January 27th, 2008, 7:37 am
deb said:
Hi, I found this post while searching on abuse of Muslim girls by their brothers. I am a non-Muslim, non-religious medical student doing a rotation in child psychiatry at a psychiatric hospital, where recently (last week) a 16 year old Palestinian-American Muslim girl was admitted, due to overdosing on sleeping pills in an attempt to commit suicide, after her older brothers beat her because they found out that she had replied to a message she received from one of their best male friends on Facebook. I was present when the psychiatrist on call interviewed her initially, but then her case was assigned to a different psychiatrist and two different medical students, and since then I have seen her around the hospital but have not spoken to her. The reason I am writing to you is this: I feel extremely bothered by her situation. Her current psychiatrist at this hospital is Muslim and simply states that “it would be hard to get her family to work on anything” and her nurses just say “it’s a cultural issue, she thinks she deserved to be beaten, the poor thing.” They are taking the path of cultural relativism, and though the admitting psychiatrist filed a child abuse case with the department of social services, she was not very vociferous and DSS does not seem to be taking it seriously (they have neither visited the child nor the parents). In the past, the girl sustained a head injury leading to loss of consciousness (this was last year) and in the current episode, the beating from her older brothers led to a concussion and visible marks on the side of her head.
Her mother is a stay at home mom and occasionally slaps her; she herself has been a target of domestic violence from her husband in the past. The girl reports a good relationship with her father, who is unfortunately out of town right now (and was out of town when this incident occurred).
The girl had a sister who ran away from home at age 15 due to similar abuse.
The girl can apparently graduate this year if she wants to. This week, maybe even tomorrow, she will be discharged from the hospital to go back to her home. She has been minimizing the abuse and lately has been saying that maybe she deserved it, and the fighting was equal between her and her brothers. But this is not what she said in the ER when she was initially admitted. It seems she is afraid of getting her family in trouble/getting her family pissed off at her since she anticipates having to go back home after discharge. Her brothers will most likely (since DSS is not paying this much heed) face no consequences of their actions. They live at home and could potentially hurt her again. This is weighing on my conscience. I feel like I should do something but I’m not sure what…suggest to the girl that she apply to college, and then leave home when she gets accepted and get loans to support herself during college so she doesn’t have to live with her family? Suggest that she report any violence she is targeted with in the future by calling the police or DSS herself? Her career aspirations are to be a dentist. Sorry for the long post, it’s just that she might be discharged soon, and I am sick to the stomach knowing that the idiots around me might be returning her to an abusive situation. Please email me if you can, or I will just check back here to see if you have said anything.
January 25th, 2010, 5:14 pm
Deb said:
Wow, um, thanks for that (lack of) advice….you muslims really care about each other! Anyways the girl has been discharged today from the hospital, so even if you decide belatedly now to reply, it would be useless. Hope you show more concern for members of your religious community in the future.
January 26th, 2010, 5:20 pm
Mona Eltahawy said:
Deb
Your desire to help the young woman was honourble and admirable but your sarcasm is silly and your “hope you show more concern for members of your religious community in the future” just ridiculously immature.
I was traveling and just saw both your messages today. My blog is moderated because I’ve received threats in the past, including one from someone who said he wanted to see me gang-raped. So messages sometimes wait in a queue until I get to them.
Next time, try to resist the temptation to make it seem like you’re the only who cares. As I said, you sound very silly and immature.
January 27th, 2010, 8:37 pm
Ayesha said:
People, we should be thinking about helping people and not letting them go the wayside.
As a practicing Islamic counsellor I have come across issues which are not part of Islam but the clients have been bought up culturally and this effects the way they think and loose there identiy.
Visit Sakoon Islamic Counselling
April 9th, 2011, 9:00 am
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