Why Honor Killings Are A Religious Issue

Burqas are the chains of modern female slavery - a portable concentration camp for women.

From the Apostate (with thanks to Natasha of WAMI):

It’s always nice to have white people speak for you and over your experience.

Authoritatively.

Much to my disappointment, this white American who has recently moved to the Middle East, is using her platform on a “big feminist blog” to tell people that honor killings really have nothing to do with religion.

I point out that she’s a white American because white people have an elevated status in the Middle East and in other majority-brown countries. In case readers need reminding, I spent 20 of my 25 years — 20 years of my life — in Saudi Arabia, as a third (or fourth, or fifth) class non-citizen expatriate. The hierarchy was Saudis first, white people second and everyone else after. I was paid less, as a matter of policy, than white people and was ultimately fired so a white person could replace me.

So it’s not “reverse racism” that makes me call out the race of the person writing this post defending Islam; it just stings that people who are privileged because of their skin color even in countries that are supposed to be more hospitable to brown people, turn around and defend those brown people because their experience is positive.

OF COURSE your experience is positive. You’re white.


(Pastorius note: We see this in the Sudan, where the Arab Muslim government has actively been carrying out a genocide against blacks for almost 25 years now. Apporimately, 2.5 million black Africans have been systematically slaughtered by the Arab Muslim government of the Sudan.)

Why should what I say matters? After all, I’m only a brown woman who spent most of her life trapped against her will in a Middle Eastern theocratic dictatorship who left Islam and her family seeking freedom and never will be sure if it’s safe to meet her parents because they might kill her.

Let me repeat that just so we’re clear. No matter how many times my parents tell me they love me and accept my new life — and they have started to do that recently — I can’t let myself forget that many before me have been fooled by this display of affection and have agreed to see their parents, and then gotten murdered in cold blood.

Let me repeat that one more time just so everyone gets it. I am afraid my parents will kill me to cleanse their honor.

I know they love me. I know they care about me. And I know that that doesn’t matter one bit. The only thing that matters is that I shamed them by growing legs and acting like I was an autonomous human person.

What does honor killing have to do with a patriarchal religion like Islam?

Well, let me put this in simple terms because it’s very difficult for liberals to grasp basic facts sometimes when brown people are involved. Islam is a patriarchal religion. Fact. Islam is misogynistic. Fact. Islam pathologizes sex. Fact. Islam subordinates women to men.

Fact.

“Islam” and “culture” are not two separate things. They are interconnected and arise out of and in relation to each other. Islam IS Arab culture, to a very great degree. Arab culture IS Islam to a very great degree. The one supports and reinforces the other. Religion codifies culture. Such is the case with all religions and cultures. Most cultures have been or are misogynistic and religion is one of the biggest tools used to keep misogynistic practices in place. In other words, if a society is misogynistic, the religion of that society enforces the misogyny.

Muslim societies are largely misogynistic, in large part because of Islam. Islam prevents pro-woman progress, just as other patriarchal religions in their time have prevented pro-woman progress. Islam also institutionalizes and entrenches misogynistic beliefs and practices. Islam’s hold on people’s behavior and consciences is strong enough that all of this may as well be codified and put on the books as written law. The fact that it sometimes isn’t is meaningless. Unless you have lived a thousand daily details of Islamic regulation of your life and body as a woman, you have no idea how deeply embedded Islamic misogyny is in our lives.


Go read the whole thing.