Honor Killing Culture, Politics and Theory

8/3/2019 Honor Killing Culture, Politics and Theory

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From Vol.xvii Nos. 1/2 Spring/Summer 2002

Honor Killing:Culture, Politics and Theory

by Shahrzad Mojab

On January 22, 2002, Rahmi Sahindal, a Kurdish immigrant from Turkey, killed his daughterFadime, in Uppsala, Sweden. (For further discussion of this case, see Mojab and Hassanpour(2002a and 2002b.) Fadime, a student in a Swedish university, was visiting her sister when herfather shot her dead. The murderer confessed to the crime, telling police that her daughter hadshamed the family. Fadime had shamed her father and brother by rejecting an arrangedmarriage and choosing her own partner. She had also dishonored the family in 1998 in a highlypublicized court case against her father and brother who had threatened to kill her.

Following the 1998 case, the father received a suspended sentence, while the then 17 year oldbrother was sentenced to a years probation. In spite of court injunctions, Fadime had to hidefrom the male members of the family; however, she did not remain silent. She campaignedagainst this form of patriarchal violence known as honor killing. Killing for reasons of honor isof ancient origins, but has occurred more frequently in recent years in the Middle East and inparts of Kurdistan devastated by war. Violence against women for reasons of honor also

happens among refugee and immigrant communities in Western countries. It is by no means auniquely Kurdish phenomenon; it has been practiced in both the West and the East.

The short and tragic life of Fadime has turned into a site of struggle over patriarchal violence andbeyond it. In Sweden and elsewhere, there was extensive protest against honor killing ingeneral and Fadimes killing in particular. The problem and the debate over it are, however, farfrom resolved. Public policy in Sweden, often lenient on such culturally motivated crimes, hascome under a new round of criticism. In civil society, racists used the occasion to denounceimmigrants and pressure the government to change immigration policy. On the Kurdish side,widespread condemnation of the murder occurred, although it has not obscured the tendencyamong nationalists to downplay such crimes, which are thought to bring shame to the Kurdishnation. The media and academia are also involved, the former in a rather intensive way, and thelatter in a subtle manner.

Honor Killing: Culture, Politics and Theory

This new case of honor killing has brought up old questions such as Is honor killing part ofKurdish culture? Or, Is it a religious, Islamic, phenomenon? There are many political andtheoretical underpinnings to these questions. While I argue that violence against women shouldnot be reduced to a question of culture, I also believe honor killing is definitely part and parcel ofthe culture of Kurdistan, and other societies in which it is practiced. However, reducing this crimeto culture, may readily lead to racist interpretations and appropriations.

Kurdish culture, like other Western and non-Western cultures, is not a homogeneous ormonolithic entity. Kurdish gender culture, like its Western counterparts, consists of at least twoconflictual components. One component is patriarchy and misogynism, readily present in folklore,language, literature, jokes, manners and, in a word, the lived experience of individuals. In its

violent forms, this culture is inscribed in the blood of Fadime and countless women who have losttheir lives in obscurity. The other component of Kurdish culture is generally not known, affirmed,valorized, confirmed, or promoted: this is the culture of struggle for gender equality. This cultureemerged in the Kurdish press of the early 20th century (Klein 2001). It was inspired by the liberalfeminist and womens movements of the late 19th and early 20th century Europe. By the mid-20thcentury, the greatest Kurdish poet of the modern period, Abdullah Goran (1904-1962), stronglycondemned honor killing in one of his poems, Berde-nsk (A Tomb-Stone) (text in Mojab,forthcoming). Since the 1990s, there has been considerable struggle against honor killing in IraqiKurdistan, where the 1988 genocide known as Anfal and two Gulf Wars (1980-1988 and 1991)


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have destroyed the social fabric of society, and unleashed waves of patriarchal violence.

Denying or ignoring the existence of a culture of struggle for gender equality in Kurdistan or inother non-Western societies is a political position. It is patriarchal politics in the sense that itdenies the universality of oppression of women and the struggle against it. It is racist in so far asit denies the ability of non-Western, non-White women to understand the conditions of theirsubordination, and ignores their determination to resist it.

It would be more accurate, then, to state that the killing of Fadime is in line with the norms ofKurdish patriarchal culture. This culture is similar to, if not the same as, the Western, Christian,patriarchal culture which has allowed men and women to blow up abortion clinics andassassinate doctors who conduct abortion in the United States and Canada. One may argue thatthe culture of honor killing is traditional, tribal, feudal or rural. But what is the significance of thistraditionalism if we consider the fact that in the United States men kill 10 women every day?While these murders are not necessarily motivated by honor, the motivations are hardly morehumane: the decision of a woman to end a relationship prompts the male partner to kill her.Seventy-four percent of these killings occur after the woman has left the relationship, filed fordivorce or sought a restraining order against her partner (Seager 1997: 26). In Sweden,according to 1989 data, 39 women were battered daily and one was killed every 10 days by aman known to her (Elman and Eduards 1991: 411).

The culture of patriarchal violence is, thus, universal. Dividing cultures into violent and violence-free is itself a patriarchal myth. It turns into an ethnocentric or racist myth when this divide isdrawn along the lines of the West and the East. Moreover, while the existence of patriarchy as aculture cannot be denied, a cultural reductionist approach alone does not take us a long way inthe struggle against male violence.

Honor Killing as the Exercise of Gender Power

Two centuries of feminist intellectual and political struggles in the West have imposed on thenation-states a regime of legal equality between the genders. However, legal equality has failedto eliminate violence against women. Patriarchy in both Kurdish and Western societies isreproduced on an hourly and daily basis. It is reproduced by the family, the educational system,the state, the media, religion, music, arts, language, folklore and all other social and cultural

institutions. Thus, male violence against women cannot be reduced to a cultural trait, a culturalnorm, or a dormant cultural value that accidentally pops up with the wrath of a violent man.Neither can it be reduced to the psychology of the individual killer or group killers, although thisdimension may play a role.

Honor killing is a tragedy in which fathers and brothers kill their most beloved, their daughters andsisters. Sometimes mothers and sisters participate in the crime or consent to it. Killing occurs in afamily system where members are closely tied to each other in bonds of affection, compassionand love. Here, affection and brutality coexist in conflict and unity. What does this contradictiontell us about honor killing as a form of the exercise of male power? How can this contradiction beresolved?

Given the universality and ubiquity of male violence ranging from killing, to battering to rape it

would be more appropriate to look at honor killing and other forms of violence as means for theexercise of gender power, in this case male power. The exercise of gender power is intertwinedwith the exercise of class and political powers. A learned Kurdish mullah in the mid-19th centuryhad a good grasp of honor killing as the exercise of gender power. Writing an essay titled KurdishManners and Customs in 1859, Mela Mehmud Bayezidi argued that tribal and rural Kurdishwomen were as free as the women of Europe; they could freely associate with men. He noted,however, that women could never engage in pre-marital or extra-marital relationships with astranger. If they did they would be killed without hesitation and with impunity. No one wouldquestion the killers. It was a shame on the family that could be cleaned only through murder; itwas also a shame on the community, the village, the tribe, the neighbors and the neighborhood.


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The community participated in the killing by expecting it to happen, by endorsing it, and bycasting out the family in case it failed to kill the woman. Mela Mehmud noted that the purpose ofthe killing was to instill fear in women so they would guard their modesty and chastity (see Mojab,forthcoming). Unfamiliar with feminist or any other theory, Mela Mahmuds understanding of theexercise of gender power was more advanced than contemporary feminist reductions of honorkilling to practice. The learned mullah felt free to discuss honor killing, as Kurdish custom andmanner, in all its brutality.

If honor killing is a form of the exercise of gender power, what can be done to eliminate it underthe existing regimes of gendered political power? What are the dynamics of the production andreproduction of honor killing in our times? In Kurdistan and in Europe?

The Production and Reproduction of Honor Killing

The killing of Fadime is not an isolated case or an abnormality. To see the murder as an anomalyis a convenient excuse for non-action. It only relieves us of the responsibility of acting. In terms ofunderstanding, it leaves us only at the surface.

We realize that it is not easy to dislodge, let alone eliminate, honor killing and other forms ofviolence in the short run or in the absence of a radical transformation of the male-centered social

and economic order. I emphasize, however, that (1) all of us are involved in one way or another inallowing this regime of male brutality reproduce itself, and (2) much can be done in order to putan end to honor killing. We will first look at the factors that contribute to the reproduction of thecrime.

(1) Kurdish Nationalism. Kurdish nationalists have promoted the myth of the uniqueness ofKurdish women: like some Western observers of Kurdish society, they claim that Kurdish womenenjoy more freedom compared with their Arab, Persian and Turkish sisters. Whatever the statusof women in Kurdish society, Kurdish nationalism, like other nationalist movements, has beenpatriarchal, although it also has paid lip service to the idea of gender equality. For Kurdishnationalists, nation building requires the unity of genders, classes, regions, dialects, andalphabets. Nationalists consistently relegate the emancipation of women to the future, i.e., afterthe emancipation of the nation. And when Kurdish nationalism achieved state power in Iraq afterthe 1991 Gulf War, its record in matters of gender equality was bleak.

The Kurdish people have lived since the late 1870s in what Mark Levene (1998) hascharacterized as a zone of genocide. In this zone (Eastern Anatolia comprising Kurdistan), theOttoman state conducted a genocide of the Armenian people in 1915 and, together with itssuccessor, the Republic of Turkey, subjected the Assyrian and Kurdish peoples to numerouscampaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Bath regime of Iraq ensured that this zonewould continue to operate in spite of its division between Iraq and Turkey in 1918. No less thanten thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed in Iraqi Kurdistan between 1975 and 1991, and inTurkey between 1984 and 2000.

The zone of genocide continues to be an active zone of war. Wars have destroyed the social,economic and cultural fabric of Kurdish society. They have unleashed waves of male violenceagainst women. This explains, at least in part, why there are more incidents of honor killing

among the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey compared with the Kurds of Iran, whose experience of warhas been less devastating.

In the aftermath of the US-led Gulf War of 1991, when the Iraqi army attacked Kurdistan, millionsof Iraqi Kurds escaped into the mountains in March and April. The US, UK and France created ano-fly zone, a safe haven, for returning refugees. Two major parties, the Kurdistan DemocraticParty of Iraq (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which had been fighting the Iraqigovernment for decades, created the Regional Government of Kurdistan in 1992. This was a defacto Kurdish state, with its parliament and administrative structure. However, the two partiesengaged in an internal war in 1994, which continued intermittently until 1996. Failing to resolve


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their conflict, the two parties formed, by 1999, their own separate administrations. In dealing withthe increasing incidence of honor killing, they upheld Iraqi personal status laws, which do notcriminalize honor killing, and are lenient on the punishment of killers. Faced with opposition fromwomen, the two parties, especially KDP, tried to justify honor killing as a Kurdish and Islamictradition. Faced with continuous resistance, the PUK issued, in 2000, two resolutions aimed atrevoking Iraqi law, and criminalizing honor killing. The resolutions, which have the status of law inthe absence of a legislative organ, have remained on paper in so far as the government hasneither the will nor the power to enforce them. The KDP administration, faced with negativepublicity in Europe, adopted a similar measure (after Pela, another Kurdish girl from Sweden waskilled by her father and uncles in the KDP region of Iraqi Kurdistan, and a local court acquitted themurders).

The KDP and PUK have persistently ignored the demand for gender equality and for thecriminalization of honor killing, both bowing to the demands of a handful of mullahs and theirIranian overlords. Kurdish clerics (mullahs and shaikhs), who never pushed for theocraticgovernance before the introduction of an Islamic regime in Iran, now demand the Islamization ofgender relations, and the subordination of Kurdish women according to their own breed of Islam.Financed and organized by Iran and the Taliban (before their fall), some Kurdish Islamist groupshave aimed at establishing a theocracy. Not surprisingly, Kurdish leaders who were secularbefore 1979, now entertain Islamists and espouse Islamic ideas. The two Kurdish governments

have opened more mosques than womens shelters. In fact, they have not initiated the opening ofany womens shelters. Even worse, the PUK government launched an armed attack on awomens shelter operated by an opposition political party (the shelter operated by theIndependent Womens Organization in Sulemani).

Kurdish nationalism, in or out of power, has generally entertained patriarchy and legitimatized itsviolence; it has little respect for the Kurdish tradition of struggle for gender equality. After tenyears of self-rule in the no-fly zone of Iraqi Kurdistan, the womens press, consisting of only a fewpublications, is dwarfed by the bulky nationalist periodicals produced in the two major cities ofSulemani and Hewlr (Irbil). Not a single work of feminist theory has been translated into Kurdish.The texts of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women(CEDAW, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1979) and the UN resolutionWorking Toward the Elimination of Crimes Against Women Committed in the Name of Honor

have not yet appeared in Kurdish, nor have they been adopted by the two Kurdishadministrations. The priority of Kurdish intellectuals, males and females, is not gender equality.

(2) The Nation-States in the Middle East. The states that rule over the Kurds either do notcriminalize honor killing (Iran, Iraq and Syria), or are lenient on punishing killers (Turkey). (Iran, itshould be noted, also provides for the execution of lesbians and gays, and the stoning to death ofadulterers.) These states deny citizens the right to life in so far as they practice capitalpunishment as a normal, unproblematic, indispensable means of governance. Turkey, whichaspires to become a full member of the European Union, has refused to abolish capitalpunishment for all crimes. Extrajuridical killings continue, and Turkey wants to reserve the right tokill citizens on charges of secessionism. Turkey wants to become an EU member, while reservingwhat Leo Kuper (1981: 161-85) calls the sovereign states right to genocide.

The coming to power of the theocratic Islamic regime in Iran has unleashed waves of state-

sponsored male terrorism against women. Many Muslim states, from Algeria and Morocco in theWest to Pakistan in the East, have Islamized gender relations by introducing more conservativeinterpretations of sharia into their legal system. A century of struggle for the separation of stateand religion has come under attack. The idea of separation of the powers of state and religionwas branded by Iranian theocracy as a Western conspiracy against Islam. Women were the firsttargets of theocratic terrorism in Iran and, later, Afghanistan. Many Kurdish nationalist leaders,like the states in the region, embraced Islam. If conservative theocrats have promoted stoning todeath and honor killing as Islamic institutions, some Kurdish leaders have endorsed maleviolence as a national tradition.


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(3) European/North American States. There are now sizeable Kurdish communities in Europeand North America, especially in Germany, Britain, France, and Sweden. While these states havereadily declared the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to be a terrorist or criminal organization,some have not criminalized male terrorism against women. The policy of respect for culturaldifferences is often paved with good intentions. However, we have learned from two centuries ofdemocratic development that group identity and culture should not be the basis for the exerciseof state power. How can one have any respect for any culture that endorses violence againstwomen? In fact, such respect subverts its goal -- it ends up in racism rather than anti-racism. Thispolicy of respect for male brutality has no respect for the anti-patriarchal culture of the Kurds. Is ita matter of accident that there are always enough financial resources for the army and for war,but there is little investment in promoting feminist knowledge, the culture and politics of genderequality, the provision of shelters and other resources for terrorized women, Kurdish and non-Kurdish? Is it an accident that governments began the new century with $798 billion (annualspending for 2000) on military spending? Why is this machinery of man-made violence so wellfunded? Devoting the costs of a single Chieftain tank or a single Mirage aircraft to womensshelters, support for battered women, and promotion of feminist knowledge could producetangible results.

Public policy in Europe and in North America has responded to some extent to academic debateson culture, identity, and difference. I am referring to academic research and theorization on the

merits of diversity, difference and cultural relativism. While Western governments have takensome steps forward (e.g., considering gender violence as a criterion for refugee status) it is notdifficult to see the steps backward.

(4) The Academic Environment. Our knowledge about violence against women, especially inthe West, has improved visibly in the last two decades. The monthly academic journal ViolenceAgainst Women has made an important contribution to the understanding of the problem. Indealing with honor killing, however, recent Western social theories, including theories of culturalrelativism, politics of identity, post-structuralism, postmodernism and other post- positions, haveplayed a rather negative role.

Since the late 1980s, this brand of thinking, now dominant in academe and fashionable in mediaand popular culture, treats difference as the main constituent of the social world. Human beings,

in this construction of the world, are all different, with their diverse and particular identities. Theirpolitics and everyday lives are shaped by identities which separate them from all other humanbeings. In this world of particularized individuals, cultures, peoples, or nations, there are few, ifany, common bonds. Patriarchy is not universal, and gender oppression is too particular to be thetarget of struggle of women and men even within a single country. The concept differencereplaces the concept of domination. The world, in this view, is not divided into powerless andpowerful blocs. Every individual, every woman, wields power. Power is not hierarchicallyorganized; there may be a center and a margin of power but there are no relationships ofdomination and subordination.

This brand of theorization emphasizes respect for cultural difference. Although its advocatesoppose violence, they prefer to remain silent about it, especially when it is perpetrated by otherswhom they cannot judge due to cultural differences. There is, thus, an attempt to isolate honorkilling from the patriarchal culture of the society that generates it. This is done by, among other

things, reducing honor killing to a practice. Labeling the crime as a practice relieves theacademic specialist from the burden of criticizing the culture, its religion and its values. You donot have to critique or indict Islam or Kurdish patriarchal culture. It is the problem of the individualwho commits the crime.

Practice theory claims that individual behavior (e.g., Rahmis decision to kill Fadime) does notderive from rules, norms, culture, rule-bound traditions, systems or structures. Even when theexistence of structures is not denied, they are not seen as constraining the mind or behavior ofthe individual (Barnard 2000: 142-43). While practice theory has not made a major breakthroughin the debate on structure and agency, its application to the case of honor killing undermines


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feminist struggles against this crime.

Racist and (neo-)colonialist biases have plagued studies of the Middle East. Some feministacademics who teach Middle Eastern gender relations try to avoid the neocolonialist or Orientalisttrap of treating Middle Eastern women as backward, ignorant, illiterate, over-oppressed, andpassive. However, in trying to distance themselves from neocolonialist representations of MiddleEastern women, they tend to keep silent about the atrocities committed against women by theirown men, their own religion, and their own culture. As an example, in a workshop onTeaching about Honor Killings and other Sensitive Topics in Middle East Studies: Honor Killing,Female Genital Mutilation or Circumcision, Veiling, and Women and Shariah, held at theUniversity of California at Santa Barbara in March 2000, a number of academic feministsdiscussed their dilemma: how to speak about such sensitive topics without falling into theneocolonialist trap? Nadine Naber, who reviewed the workshop explained how some scholarscoped with Sensitive Topics in Middle East Studies. The strategy of one participant, respondingto questions about [female] circumcision:

had changed over time. First, her policy was silence. She would say, I dont haveanything to say about this issue, or I would rather talk about other issues, like poverty,neocolonialism, and so on... and their impact on women, rather than becoming part of theproblem. But she said she realized that while she was choosing silence, others, who

might not be well informed on the issue of circumcision, were taking over the discourse.She realized then that she had to respond. She added that often she encouragesstudents not to write about circumcision until they know more about it, or until they talk toat least to one woman who has been circumcised. But she expressed concern that thisstrategy might involve silencing her students. (Naber 2000: 20)

In her review of two documentaries about honor killing (Crimes of Honour and Our Honour andHis Glory) Mary Elaine Hegland wrote:

The topic of honor killing, like clitoridectomy, spousal abuse, infanticide, elder neglect,rape, war, capital punishment, and pre-marital sex among other practices condoned bysome groups but condemned by others, presents dilemmas to anthropologists, feministscholars and others. Should anthropologists be apologists or advocates for their researchgroup or social analysts? Should ones role be researcher or activist? (Hegland 2000:15)

One approach to the dilemma was to talk about the sensitive topics, but to contextualize themby informing the students that these problems are not a Middle Eastern phenomenon; they arealso found in the West, now and in the past. This pedagogical strategy, according to some, willdistance the instructor from neocolonialist representations or discourses. This pedagogicalstrategy is not adequate, however, since it does not allow a serious departure fromneocolonialism. It is indeed crucial to relate Middle Eastern male violence to its Western counterparts. This is necessary but not adequate. The participants in the workshop decided to talk aboutsensitive topics as a strategy to handle a dilemma. The goal is to protect the instructor from aperceived threat or a real (ideological and political) fear. What is needed instead is to overcomethe cultural relativist fear of the universality of patriarchal violence. Taking this step, however,demands an appreciation of the dialectics of universals and particulars (Mojab 1998). It requiresthe abandoning of the epistemological and theoretical dictates of agnosticism and cultural

relativism.

In the (neo)colonialist world view, the women of the Middle East constitute an anomaly, anexception, or abnormality: unlike Western women, they are devoted to Islamic patriarchy. Theyare women without history; they do not make their own history by struggling for equality orliberation. Academic feminists of the cultural relativist persuasion, too, fail to appreciate a centuryof womens struggle against patriarchy. And when they talk about this struggle, they have moreconcerns. Womens struggle against patriarchy, too, is a sensitive topic. It is sensitive notbecause Middle Eastern women have a century of womens press; a century of advocacy ofwomens rights; a century of writing; a century of poetry; and a century of organizing. Talking


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about this history is sensitive because cultural relativists, like Islamic fundamentalists, believethat it is inspired by Western womens struggles. Appreciating this history is difficult for theseacademic feminists because, in their opposition to neocolonialist discourses, they often sidewith nationalists, Islamists and nativists. They privilege the nativist position, which rejectsfeminism as a derivative discourse. They treat it as a Western discourse that is not compatiblewith Islam and the native culture. They do not want to contaminate Middle Eastern womensmovements with the struggles of the women of the West, with modernity, with Enlightenment.Some secular academic feminists have indeed contributed to the creation of a Muslim womanidentity.

It is understandable, then, that the cultural relativist position prefers silence about sensitivetopics, and when it has to talk about honor killing, it reduces the institutionalized crime to apractice that has little to do with culture, Islam or the exercise of male power. This position doesnot start from the reality of male brutality against women. It appreciates the violent gender politicsof a tiny minority of the population, the self-appointed clergy. It imposes the politics of this tinygroup on the politics of the entire nation; it authenticates this violent gender politics butdelegitimizes a century of secular feminist movements in the Middle East. As a result it fails tocondemn, without any reservation or condition, honor killing or stoning to death. The starting pointis, rather, ones own interest the fear of being labeled racist, Orientalist, or neocolonialist.

Alternatives, Prospects and Hope

I have tried to look at some of the systemic elements that allow for the production andreproduction of male violence, especially honor killing among the Kurds. We have argued thathonor killing cannot be reduced to the psychological problems of individual killers. Honor-basedviolence is a social, patriarchal institution, which reproduces the supremacy of the male gender.In our times, a host of factors, ranging from religion to public policy to media to academictheories, play a role in the perpetuation of honor killing.

Modernity has failed to stop the killing of women. I believe, however, that education, andconscious, organized intervention will in the long run constrain the perpetration of honor killing. Iemphasize feminist intervention and organizing. However, feminist consciousness, feministknowledge, and feminist culture themselves are under attack. In part because feminist knowledgehas effectively challenged all previous knowledge systems as androcentric undertakings, it hasbeen subjected to vilifications in the Western media and popular culture and even within its ownrealm in academia (Hammer 2002). If non-Western nativists, Islamists and nationalists rejectfeminism as a derivative discourse, conservatives in the West also refuse to include feminism intheir canon of Western civilization and culture. This is where the Western colonialist, new andold, and the non-Western nationalist, nativist, Islamist, and cultural relativist inadvertently joinforces. That also explains why the Holy See, Saudi Arabia and Iran joined forces in the BeijingConference of 1995. Indeed, anti-feminism is probably stronger in the West than in the East.There is a hunger for feminist consciousness in non-Western societies. This is the case in spite ofthe fact that a host of theories ranging from post-modernism to identity politics to culturalrelativism encourages the women of the world to go under the banner of their tribes, ethnicgroups, nations, religions, and communities.

Kurdish women are a potentially powerful force in international womens movements. They

constitute the hub of all contradictions in this globalizing world. Subjected to the brutal violence ofthe nation-states of the Middle East and their genocides and ethnic cleansing projects, sufferingfrom the violence of their own national patriarchy, and dispersed throughout the world, Kurdishwomen are in a unique position to distance themselves from male-centered ethnic, nationalist,and religious politics, and to join forces with feminist movements which do not compromise withpatriarchy. Women and feminist movements are international in character; they are present allover the world and resist a world-wide regime of patriarchal oppression. However, they are notorganized as an international movement. Kurdish women and Kurdish womens studies are at themargins of this international movement (Mojab 2001; Mojab and Hassanpour, forthcoming). Thereis considerable solidarity, although it is not readily available due to the organizational


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fragmentation of the movement.

The institution of the state in the countries that rule over the Kurds in the Middle East is neithercivil nor civilized. One cannot expect an end to honor killing in a state which has no respect forthe citizens right to life, and freely exercises the right to genocide. The struggle against honorkilling is inseparable from the struggle for democratic rule. It is also a struggle for separation ofstate and religion; a struggle to deny the two Kurdish governments the right to impose atheocratic regime on the people in Kurdistan. It is a struggle to push the two Kurdish governmentsto adopt and implement the resolution Working Toward the Elimination of Crimes AgainstWomen Committed in the Name of Honor (revised in 2002) and the Convention on theElimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, without any reservations. CEDAW isan important document that Kurdish feminists can use to promote a democratic gender culture.Are these demands rooted in European Enlightenment? Our answer is, without hesitation, in theaffirmative. Are these demands Western in origin? Definitely, yes. Peoples in the East havestruggled for these demands for no less than a century. They are, thus, universal demands. Weemphasize again that in the West, too, there was extensive opposition to these demands. Today,too, the extreme right and Christian fundamentalists, like Islamic fundamentalists, continue tooppose feminism and the separation of state and religion. The lines are, thus, not drawn on ethnicgrounds but rather on political principles.

Western feminism has been critiqued for its ethnocentrism and racism. However, contrary to theclaims of nationalists, there is a rich tradition of anti-racism in the West, especially in its feministmovements. Indeed, nowhere in the non-Western world can one find a tradition of anti-racism thatis as rich as that of the West. Kurdish women in the West are in an ideal position to draw on andcontribute to these traditions of anti-racism and internationalism. In Kurdistan, women aresubjected to the harshest forms of national and gender oppression. In its brutality, nationaloppression overshadows gender violence. However, Kurdish women have already made theirown history by resisting their national patriarchy.

On the anniversary of Fadimes loss, I regret to report the loss of more lives in both Kurdistan andEurope. The Kurdish media, especially the growing womens press, have begun to report,analyze, and protest the continuing wave of suicide, mostly through self-immolation, and killing. Anumber of new womens organizations have emerged during the last year in various parts of

Kurdistan. They are mostly self-help groups with the agenda of resisting poverty, illiteracy andviolence.

Shahrzad Mojab is an associate professor in the department of Adult Education, CommunityDevelopment and Counselling Psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Works Cited:

Bayezidi, Mela Mahmud,1963. Adat Rismatnamey Ekradye/Nravy I Obychani Kurdov(Kurdish Customs and Manners), Kurdish text and Russian translation by M. B. Rudenko,Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Izdatelstvo Vostochnoi Literatury.

Elman, R. Amy and Maud L. Eduards, 1991. Unprotected by the Swedish welfare state: A surveyof battered women and the assistance they received, Womens Studies International Forum,14(5):413-21.

Hammer, Rhonda, 2002. Antifeminism and Family Terrorism: A Critical Feminist Perspective.Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Hegland, Mary Elaine, 2000. Review of Crimes of Honor and Our Honor and His Glory in MiddleEast Womens Study Review, Spr./Sum. 15(1/2): 15-19.


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Klein, Janet, 2001. En-gendering nationalism: The woman question in the Kurdish nationalistdiscourse of the late Ottoman period, in Shahrzad Mojab, (ed.), Women of a Non-State Nation:The Kurds. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, pp. 25-51.

Kuper, Leo, 1981. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press.

Levene, Mark, 1998. Creating a modern zone of genocide: The impact of nation- and state-formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 12(3):393-433.

Mojab, Shahrzad, 1998. Muslim women and Western feminists: The debate on particulars anduniversals, Monthly Review, 50(7):19-30.

----, 2001. The solitude of the stateless: Kurdish women at the margins of feminist knowledge, inShahrzad Mojab (ed.), Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Pub.,pp.1-21.

---- and Amir Hassanpour, 2002a. The politics and culture of honour killing: The murder ofFadime ahindal, Pakistan Journal of Womens Studies: Alam-e-Niswan, 9(1):57-77.

---- and Amir Hassanpour, 2002b. Thoughts on the struggle against honour killing, TheInternational Journal of Kurdish Studies, (16) 1 & 2: 83-97.

----, Forthcoming. No safe haven for women: Violence against women in Iraqi Kurdistan, inGiles, Wenona and Jennifer Hyndman, (eds.), Sites of Violence Gender and Identity in ConflictZones, Berkeley: U. of California Press.

---- and Amir Hassanpour, Forthcoming. In Search of Kurdish Women: A MultilingualBibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Naber, Nadine, 2000. Teaching about Honor Killings and other Sensitive Topics in Middle EastStudies, Middle East Womens Study Review, Spr./Sum., 15(1/2):20-21.

Seager, Joni, 1997. The State of Women in the World Atlas. New Edition. London: Penguin

Books Ltd.

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