Farzana Parveen was three months pregnant when she was stoned to death in Pakistan in 2014 by her father, brother, and a family-selected fiancé whom she had declined to marry. Farzana had married against her family’s wishes, the family felt shamed, so they killed her in broad daylight outside a courthouse in the city of Lahore. Even more appalling, she was the second woman to die in this case. Her husband had strangled his first wife so that he could marry Farzana. He paid blood money, it was deemed an honor killing, and so he was free to wed again. When Farzana was killed, her stoning was also deemed an honor killing.
A young mother of two in Punjab province was stoned to death by her uncle and cousins, using stones and bricks, on the order of a Pakistani tribal court simply because she had a cell phone. Even though stoning is supposedly illegal in Afghanistan, 115 men stood and cheered the stoning of a twenty-one-year-old woman accused of “moral crimes.”
Commanding right and forbidding wrong can also justify the murder of homosexuals and Muslim apostates—even Muslims who are insufficiently devout. When the governor of Punjab acted to protect a Christian woman who was charged with blasphemy, it was his own bodyguard who killed him. Afterward, thousands of Pakistanis, including numerous clerics, lauded the killer, showering him with petals and celebrating his steadfastness and courage. Dawood Azami of the BBC’s World Service explains the dangers of apostasy in Afghanistan:
For those who were born Muslim, it might be possible to live in Afghan society if one does not practice Islam or even becomes an “apostate” or a “convert.” They are most probably safe as long as they keep quiet about it. The danger comes when it is made public that a Muslim has stopped believing in the principles of Islam. There is no compassion for Muslims who “betray their faith” by converting to other religions or who simply stop believing in one God and the Prophet Muhammad. Conversion, or apostasy, is also a crime under Afghanistan’s Islamic law and is punishable by death. In some instances, people may even take matters into their own hands and beat an apostate to death without the case going to court.8
Yet while these are striking examples, the practice of commanding right and forbidding wrong is subtler and more pervasive than they imply. In a 2013 profile of King Abdullah of Jordan, the writer Jeffrey Goldberg recounted a visit he made with the king to the Jordanian city of Karak (Abdullah flew his own Black Hawk helicopter), “one of the poorer cities in a distressingly poor country.” The king was going to have lunch with the leaders of Jordan’s largest tribes, which in Goldberg’s words “form the spine of Jordan’s military and political elite.” It is a long-standing symbiotic alliance between the Hashemite kings and their kingdom’s clan chiefs. The tribal leaders expect the king to help safeguard their power and privileges, in part by keeping Jordan’s Palestinian population in check. In return, the tribes help to safeguard the king.
This particular trip was designed in part for Abdullah to make his pitch for developing viable political parties among the tribes before upcoming parliamentary elections. Having watched the chaos engulfing his neighboring nations and having seen the bloody overthrow of established (albeit nonroyal) rulers in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, Abdullah was hoping to mobilize the tribal leaders to stem the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and prevent it from “hijack[ing] the cause of democratic reform in the name of Islam.” Still, his expectations were not high. Goldberg quotes the king as saying: “I’m sitting with the old dinosaurs today.”
The meal was a traditional Bedouin one, eaten with forks (a small concession to modernity) at a long, high communal table, a hallmark of tradition. Then, with the ceremonial lunch complete, it was time for the tea and talk. Goldberg writes:
The king made a short plea for economic reform and for expanding political participation, and then the floor was opened. Leader after leader—many of whom were extremely old, many of whom merely had the appearance of being old—made small-bore requests and complaints. One of the men proposed an idea for the king’s consideration: “In the old days, we had night watchmen in the towns. They would be given sticks. The government should bring this back. It would be for security, and it would create more jobs for the young men.”9
“I was seated directly across the room from the king,” Goldberg adds, “and I caught his attention for a moment; he gave me a brief, wide-eyed look. He was interested in high-tech innovation, and in girls’ education, and in trimming the overstuffed government payroll. A jobs plan focused on men with sticks was not his idea of effective economic reform. As we were leaving Karak a little while later, I asked him about the men-with-sticks idea. ‘There’s a lot of work to do,’ he said, with fatigue in his voice.”10
But here’s the rub: employing men with sticks is not some quaint old idea; it is a central component of Islam. Commanding right and forbidding wrong is in many ways all about men wielding sticks, enforcing correct behavior.
The Zone of Privacy Is Now a Dead Zone
Part of what makes commanding right and forbidding wrong such a menace is that, unlike the term “jihad,” it sounds so virtuous. What could be wrong with living a moral life? Isn’t that the primary aspiration of all major religious teachings? And what could be more reasonable than a devolved discipline, with norms of behavior enforced by family rather than some external power?
The problem is that these questions expose some fundamental differences between Islam and Western liberal thought. A core part of the Western tradition is that individuals should, within certain limits, decide for themselves what to believe and how to live. Islam envisages the exact opposite: it has very clear and restrictive rules about how one should live and it expects all Muslims to enforce these rules. In its modern conception, commanding right has become (in the words of Michael Cook) “the organized propagation of Islamic values.”11 As Dawood Azami puts it, if you depart from the basic (and time-consuming) requirements of the faith, you had best “keep quiet about it” if you hope to survive unscathed even by your own family.
It was not always this way. In the medieval period, there were disagreements about how far commanding and forbidding should extend. Behind closed doors, in private lives, without witnesses, there was more latitude. As Patricia Crone notes, “Freethinkers could discuss their views with like-minded individuals in private salons, in learned gatherings at the court, and to some extent in books and even more so in poetry, where things could be put ambivalently.” There was even an entire Islamic literary style, the mujun, which allowed its practitioners to push the boundaries of what was acceptable in society, allowing them to teeter on the edge of the blasphemous, the pornographic, the scurrilous. “In short,” Crone concludes, “freedom lay essentially in privacy. The public sphere was where public norms had to be maintained, where there might be censors or private persons fulfilling the duty of ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ who would break musical instruments, pour out wine, and separate couples who were neither married nor closely related. But their right to intrude into private homes was strictly limited.”12 There was even a way to say, to those who sought to enforce the Qur’an’s dictates, “Mind your own business.”
The idea of a zone of privacy and the concept of “mind your own business” have eroded in our time. As modern Islamic communities have become radicalized, there is a kind of arms race of commanding right and forbidding wrong. This means that a closet atheist is quickly outed because he is soon caught not praying five times a day, not fasting in the month of Ramadan, not praising Allah constantly, not saying “Inshallah” every time he refers to the future. While we in the West have surrendered our privacy to our credit card companies, website cookies, social media networks, and search engines, in the Muslim world the zone of privacy has been eroded by other means.
How Does This Doctrine Take Root?
Universal human rights also play no part in the conception of commanding right and forbidding wrong; there are only the rules of Islam. This phenomenon is at its most extreme wi
th the so-called Islamic State, which demands that anyone living within its “caliphate” convert to its extreme practice of Islam and follow its rules. When IS fighters rolled into the city of Mosul, hanging out of car windows or off the backs of trucks, video footage captured one fighter aggressively wagging his finger at a woman on the street. He was signaling to her to cover up. Next would come the order for women not simply to cover, but to stay in their homes. Clothing stores in captured cities and towns could no longer sell anything but Islamic dress and all mannequins were to be veiled and covered.
How can formerly progressive cities and regions, or at least fairly modern ones, allow the clock to be turned back to such an extreme degree? The answer is that the central elements of this type of fundamentalism are already present in Islamic politics, albeit in diluted form. The IS agenda is in some respects not so different from that of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Saudi Wahhabist teachings; it is just that their methods are more exposed.
A particularly unfortunate legacy of the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein was the rise of sectarian political parties and militias in the wake of the collapse of the single-party Ba’athist authoritarian state. What is clear in hindsight is that the Ba’ath party had not eradicated these beliefs; it had merely driven them underground. Once freed and unleashed, these groups and their clerics proclaimed honor killings to be a legitimate religious means of “policing” women’s behavior. Islamists in Basra scrawled graffiti that read, “Your makeup and your decision to forgo the headscarf will bring you death.” Years before 2014, in other words, the fundamentalist seeds were already there.
Syria, too, was widely regarded in the West as relatively secular. But the secularization has melted in the heat of civil war. In Raqqa, the Syrian city that became IS’s capital, the insurgents have tested a sort of “Taliban 2.0” style of female repression. As in other fundamentalist states, women who go out without a male chaperone, or who are not fully veiled, are arrested and beaten; but in Raqqa, these arrests and beatings are frequently committed by other women. IS has invented something new in the history of commanding right and forbidding wrong: an all-female moral police, the Al-Khansaa Brigade. The philosophy behind the brigade is simple, according to Abu Ahmad, an IS official in Raqqa, who said in an interview, “We have established the brigade to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law. Jihad,” he added, “is not a man-only duty. Women must do their part as well.”13
For the modern-day jihadists, embracing the doctrine of commanding right and forbidding wrong also provides an opportunity to expand their ranks and incorporate more individuals outside of a purely combatant role. The practice creates many more soldiers for Allah and, in the case of Al-Khansaa, creates new ways to manage women who cannot go off to traditional war. (At least not yet—the Norwegian Islamic terror expert Thomas Hegghammer foresees a gradual shift to give women “more operative” roles in the jihad fight, explaining: “There is a process of female emancipation taking place in the jihadist movement, albeit a very limited (and morbid) one.”)
A teenage girl in Raqqa described to the publication Syria Deeply how the female IS brigades function in practice. She was simply grabbed from the street by a group of armed women. “Nobody talked to me or told me the reason for my detention,” she told the reporter. “One of the women in the brigade came over, pointing her firearm at me. She then tested my knowledge of prayer, fasting, and hijab.” This girl’s “crime” was walking without an escort and with an improperly worn headscarf.
When life is dominated by the fear of small infractions, how little thought can be given to the bigger questions? For want of a properly tied headscarf, a woman is beaten. It is the theological counterpart of the American policing theory of fixing broken windows and getting panhandlers off the streets as a way to prevent petty crimes from leading to larger, more serious violent transgressions. In the theory of commanding right and forbidding wrong, every small act, every minor infraction has the potential to become a major religious crime. Who can think about rights or education or economics when a trivial sartorial lapse can have such monumental consequences?
In Iraq, too, the current political tumult has created opportunities for vigilantism dressed up as religious policing. The dangers for gay Iraqi men are far greater today than they were under Saddam Hussein’s regime. As The Economist notes, “Men even suspected of being gay face kidnappings, rape, torture and extrajudicial killing” by self-appointed sharia judges and squads that deem themselves to be the enforcers of commanding right and forbidding wrong. One gay man who was kidnapped hoped that his kidnappers would not reveal his sexual orientation to his family, the shame of which would force him never to see them again. But hundreds of others have suffered a far worse fate at the hands of religious death squads that patrol the streets of Iraq’s major cities looking for “effeminate men.”
As reported by Der Spiegel, “In Baghdad a new series of murders began early this year, perpetrated against men suspected of being gay. Often they are raped, their genitals cut off, and their anuses sealed with glue. Their bodies are left at landfills or dumped in the streets.” In the words of the head of Iraq’s leading lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender organization, Iraq “is the most dangerous place in the world for sexual minorities.” Even Turkey, where homosexuality is legal and where many Iraqis and Iranians ultimately flee, has seen a gay honor killing, which was carried out by one unfortunate young man’s father. (There is of course a rampant hypocrisy at work here because there are significant gay and lesbian populations in all Islamic nations. Because affairs with women are so logistically difficult, for example, Arab men have long turned to other men to satisfy their sexual needs. In Afghanistan, too, wealthy tribesmen are known to purchase young boys for their personal pleasure.)
Many religions have difficulties with accepting homosexuality, needless to say. Some mainly Christian countries in Africa have become appallingly homophobic in recent years. But even they do not prescribe the death sentence for gay people.
Honor Crimes in America
The practice of commanding right and forbidding wrong is not simply a problem for Muslim majority countries. It is increasingly a problem inside Muslim immigrant communities in the West.
I never cease to be amazed at how reluctant ordinary Americans are to believe that honor killings happen in the United States, too. In October 2009, for example, twenty-year-old Noor al-Maleki was killed by her father in suburban Phoenix, Arizona. He ran over her with his Jeep in a parking lot, crushing her body beneath its wheels. She did not die instantly, but lay gasping for breath as blood flowed from her mouth. What had she done in her father’s eyes to merit such a death? The answer is that she liked makeup, boys, and Western music, and hoped to be able to support herself. She also refused to submit to the marriage her father had arranged for her to an Iraqi man who was in need of a green card. Noor wanted to choose her own fate. Instead, her father chose it for her. Others in the local Iraqi community defended Noor’s father’s actions. A thirty-something mother praying at a local mosque told Time magazine, as her daughter translated, “I think what he did was right. It’s his daughter, and our religion doesn’t allow us to do what she did.”14 (An Arizona jury found him guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced him to thirty-four years in prison.)
Or consider the case of the Egyptian-born taxi driver in Dallas, Texas, who shot his seventeen- and eighteen-year-old daughters, Sarah and Amina, a total of eleven times for dating non-Muslim boys. At a vigil commemorating the two girls, their brother took the microphone and said: “They pulled the trigger, not my dad.”15 Or Fauzia Mohammed, who was stabbed eleven times by her brother in upstate New York because she wore “immodest clothing” and was “a bad Muslim girl.” Or Aiya Altameemi, whose Iraqi-born father held a knife to her throat and whose mother and younger sister tied her to a bed and beat her because she was seen talking to a boy near their hom
e in Arizona. Several months before, Aiya’s mother had burned her face with a hot spoon because she refused to be married off to a man twice her age. Fauzia and Aiya survived, but they are scarred for life.
Similar crimes are being committed in Canada, too. The multimillionaire Afghan immigrant Muhammad Shafia killed his first wife and three daughters by locking them in a car and pushing it into a canal (the women may already have been drowned elsewhere) because the girls were becoming “too Westernized.” Aqsa Parvez was a sixteen-year-old Toronto girl who wanted to be a fashion designer. Her father and brother strangled her to death for not wearing the hijab.
There can be no excuse for such foul acts. There can be no acceptable cultural defense. It should never be any woman’s or girl’s destiny to die at the hands of her own family—very often, in the documented American cases, her own father’s—for the sake of some antiquated notion of family honor. Nor can any community be permitted to hush up the crime in the name of faith or cultural tradition.
In the West, honor violence is all too often conflated with domestic violence. Indeed, that is often how law enforcers and local media report cases of honor violence, sometimes out of a kind of self-censoring impulse. Underreporting of such cases encourages people to believe that honor violence “doesn’t happen here” or, if it does, is no different from a drunkard punching his wife in the eye or menacing his son with a firearm.
But unlike domestic violence or abuse, where women and children (and sometimes also men) are nearly always brutalized in private, honor violence does not have to happen behind closed doors. Instead, the perpetrators often have the open support of family and community. There is no stigma because of the belief that the perpetrator is in the right. There is no need to leave bruises only where they will not show. Indeed, there can be social vindication and even redemption in a mutilated body, in a trail of blood. To escape a grisly death, a potential victim of honor violence must leave not only her abuser, but often her entire family and cultural community.