What is the Color of “Honor”?
March 15, 2011
by Emine Dilek
|Emine Dilek is the Co-Editor of WVoN. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
Medine Mehmi was a 16-year-old girl who was buried alive under a chicken coop in Adiyaman* because she was
“befriending” boys. Her father and grandfather decided that their family’s “honor” was stained by her behavior. Her life was the price she had to pay.
As in most countries where honor killings go on, there are laws in place in Turkey to protect women, but they are not enforced and even if they were, families know how to get round them. Many of these murders are kept secret, underreported and underestimated. A woman is murdered without a name and a gravestone, every minute of every day. A girl is poisoned, stabbed, hanged, beheaded, burned, stoned or buried alive, every minute of every day, somewhere. “Honor” is worth more than her little life.
I could give you endless statistics and describe in detail here how girls and women murdered in the name of “honor” are abused under a banner of “dignity” and “tradition.”
But one is too many. One is enough to cry out and scream – stop! Medine Mehmi is another one too many!
I grew up in Turkey, dark tea, warm bread, mountains and the Aegean Sea. And with the women, like secrets, sins, bitter sweet, with big black eyes, small chins, quiet and doleful. They are also smart, frugal, modest, and beautiful. Great mothers, better wives, best friends; but always belonged to others, other then themselves. Owned and purchased, sold like commodities, like cattle. They were also carriers of “honor,” custodian of the family’s dignity.
But the concept of “honor” in my country is lost in translation. Honor is an active verb in Turkish, something you do, achieve, hold. One does not live with “honor,” one carries it, works for it and shares it. It is a systemic disease mix of custom and confusion. Being born a girl, and surviving it, is nothing short of a miracle if you are born in Asia, the Middle East or Africa, and especially if you were born into a Muslim family.
But it’s not just about religion.
“Honor” killings go on in Christian and Hindu communities too; but Iraqi Kurds, Palestinians in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey are the worst offenders. Yes, I can sugar-coat it and say, “Oh, it only happens in the rural areas, and Turkish women are mostly modern and educated and advanced,” but this would do nothing to heal the bleeding wound. An artery is cut, blood is all over, and I can’t bring myself to think my arms and legs are working so forget the injury. I can’t ignore it.
I really would like to see this precious “honor” once. What color is it? How does it smell? Sound?
Obviously it must sound better than a girl’s giggle, or the milky smell of a baby girl. It must be stronger than the bond between a father and his daughter,and more powerful than love. Sounds awfully similar to the other “h” word, doesn’t it? Hate.
So what needs to change?
What needs to change are wrong, outdated patriarchal tendencies, the definition of “girl”, “honor” and “love.”
What needs to change is the idea that a girl is less valuable than an ox or a goat or a horse. Having a vagina and a couple of breasts does not automatically make us less than human. Men’s consciences, entire societies, beliefs, traditions, dogmas, tenets, these are what need to change.
It’s a tall order, I know, but when fathers start to smile at the first sight of their baby daughters, when the men start to think may be, just may be, this human being deserves to have a life and to keep her life regardless of her gender, we will proceed to a better world.
Like the old French proverb said “Hope is the dream of a soul awake.”
Adiyaman* is a city in the Eastern Anatolian region of Turkey
When are Americans going to get angry enough?
Jen,
Sadly, when sharia law is unleased in America under the guise of “culture, custom, religion” and American women are subjected to this insane male need to control and kill women in the name of their “honor.”
The older I get, the more I witness time after time after time, that it is men, and not women, who are too weak to rise above “human nature” by not giving in to the greed, narcism, the inexplicable need for them to control the other half of the human race in order to appease what can only be defined as a “messiah complex”, which men of all religions seem to share.
Those good men who believe women to be equals need to get off the sidelines and stand with women and use their power for something other than themselves. Otherwise, I don’t hold them with any higher esteem than those men who believe it is their God given right to kill a girl/woman in the name of honor.
Men’s ability to engage in cognitive dissonance is beyond comprehension when it comes to women.
Thank you, Emine. I usually do not think of Turkey as a country weighed down by an antiquated version of Islam. All of our media coverage of Turkey focuses on it’s modernity. And yet I traveled around Turkey for 3 weeks when I was a young woman and in my brief stay there, saw both sides – Modern Turkey as well as outdated misogynistic traditions. I did not know that honor killings were anything but rare in Turkey before reading this.
And I like what you wrote here:
“I really would like to see this precious “honor” once. What color is it? How does it smell? Sound?
Obviously it must sound better than a girl’s giggle, or the milky smell of a baby girl. It must be stronger than the bond between a father and his daughter,and more powerful than love. Sounds awfully similar to the other “h” word, doesn’t it? Hate.”
Beautiful and sad words. Makes me contemplate what the world could look like if we valued women equally.
Dear Kathleen,
I want to clarify one thing, as it mentions in the article Honor Killings do not just happen in Islamic countries so it is not connected to sharia law as it happens in Christian and Hindu societies as well. And Turkey is not governed by sharia law. It is a Parliamentary Republic.
Emine,
I agree with you. I only mentioned sharia law because of the recent honor killings here in the U.S., which the media actually took time to report and although a jury did convict the father but only with “2nd degree” murder for running over his daughter and killing her for dating a westerner.
Patriarchy exists in all religions to varying degrees. Sharia law and its advocacy for “honor killings” hopefully will awaken American women to just how much our rights are slowly but surely being whittled away by political correctness and a complacency that has shrouded the women’s movement and turned it into a tool for the very patriarchy it is supposed to be fighting against.
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