Cultural diversity at the point of a knife;
A traditional Muslim family’s “honor” is based on how strictly it can control its female members. If a daughter, sister, or wife, even one who is living in the West, refuses to “cover,” wears makeup, has non-Muslim friends, insists on going to college, wants to choose her own husband or leave an abusive husband, wants to live on her own, or dares to have an affair — she is seen as having “dishonored” her family. This is a capital crime. She is not merely admonished or shunned as other traditional religions in the West might do. She is killed. The murder is typically carried out by multiple family members, not just by one loner. A grandfather, male cousin, mother, and sister may all collaborate on this.
In my study, I spell out some of the major distinctions between Western-style domestic violence, which of course I deplore, but which does not always or even often end in femicide. Honor murders are femicide; they may involve battering but are also a highly ritual form of religious/cultural murder.
Although most Muslim organizations claim that such honor killings have absolutely nothing to do with Islam, many scholars and critics of Islam strongly disagree. Muslim countries do not often prosecute honor killings. More progressive countries, like Jordan, deal with the intractable problem of honor-related violence against women and honor killing by locking up the potential victims, often for as long as a decade. Sharia law believes in fathers’ and husbands’ physically punishing disobedient women. It does not clearly admonish its followers not to kill women who are viewed as “dishonoring” their families. The Islamic state will not prosecute honor killers, or will do so reluctantly, slowly, inexpertly, etc.
Unlike traditional Western-style non-fatal domestic violence, or Western-style femicide, both of which are considered and prosecuted as crimes, honor killings are traditionally not frowned upon, and the men who restore their family’s honor are valorized.
In at least half the cases I studied, the actual murder itself was very brutal. The female victim was stabbed 8-23 times, set on fire, stoned, beaten to death, decapitated, or suffocated slowly. The beheading in Buffalo is more indicative of a Pakistani and Muslim mind-set which normalizes the tremendously brutal treatment of women and which resembles that of a Western-style serial killer of prostitutes, that of a sexual slaver/pimp, or that of an Islamist terrorist.
