Religious Policemen in India

The Indian Express via Dhimmi Watch:

They murdered her when she was returning from a local beedi company after collecting leaves and tobacco. They accosted her on the road, warned her against a affair she was allegedly having with a married man and the local manager of a beedi company.

She just told them to mind their own business.

They first threw stones at her. Then, some of them came closer and stabbed her. Mumtaz died on the spot.

Later:

Her sister Nabeena said: “People in the town are saying she deserved it. We don’t know what to think.”

The "town chief" presents his take on the whole matter:

The Melapalayam town chief, Khaludeen, felt the youths should have brought the case before the local Jamaat. “Only a year back we threw a woman out of the town with her seven-month-old baby boy whom she begot through an illicit relationship,” he said.

According to him, the married man accused of getting her pregnant, had “sworn” on Allah that he was not responsible. “Once a man swears on Allah, we believe him,” said Khaludeen. But the woman had to leave the town.

But, of course.

Two days after Mumtaz’s murder, the police arrested S Rasool Moideen (22), Shahul Hameed (21), his brother K Noushad Ali (19), K Imran (19), Mohamed Hussain alias Allappa (23) and Mohamed Moideen, all from Melapalayam. Two of them are college students. The police are searching for Shahul Hameed (27), who is said to be the mastermind.

Buddhists?

Comments

[Josh Scholar]

I know this is slightly off topic, but last night, quite against my will, I found myself thinking about honor killing.

Frankly that's the one aspect of middle eastern culture that still shocks me. I can understand that people are taught to hate outsiders, I can understand (if not approve of) hostile, triumphalist religion.

But men do have an instinct to love their children, their mothers, to want to protect women and family. So it's a bit of a mystery to me how men can be raised to lack heart. It seems inhuman...

And despite how cruel, heartless or hostile Islam seems, the practice of honor killing is older than Islam. So this problem can't really be blamed on Islam, except to the extent that Islam does not hinder it. The heartlessness of these aspects of culture are of a piece, but one does not cause the other.

And then it occurred to me, that just as Muslims have been teaching their children to dispise Jews and other outsiders, the only explanation I can see for the treatment of women is that the culture must teach people to dispise the female. To see female as dirty and corrupt. Love can turn into hatred, and so perhaps one can be taught to hate in the first instance instead of love.

[Isaac Schrödinger]

Josh Scholar: After reading this, I started writing a lengthy post -- I'll publish it in April.

[Josh Scholar]

Some more thoughts I have on this:

The word "honor" in "honor killings" or even just the way Arabs use that word doesn't really translate the modern English meaning of the word honor. I think that there is an older meaning that corresponds. This is honor meaning merely "social status" or some other kind of status that we find hard to fathom now.

But I think the English concepts of honor and chivalry was deliberately modified by the Christian church from being mere fuedal status to include Christian concepts of virtue and (perhaps) eventually even included some romantic notions that aren't strictly pure or and eventually some not entirely religious notions of compassion.

Basically what is not honorable is shameful and as you can clearly see, the actions that Arabs do in the name of "honor" are considered so absolutely shameful in our society, now. So our idea of "honor" has mutated from its original form, though it may never have been as brutal as Arab honor.

As a young man (I was about 18), I remember one of my friends talking about under what conditions he would consider killing someone for the sake of the community, I think he expected the rest of us to agree with him, so this would be American honor killings, essencially. Anyway his idea was basically the opposite of the Arab idea - his was that rapists should be gotten rid of, killed even when the police couldn't prove their guilt.

Perhaps girls were slightly less feminist in the 80's so it seems a bit dated to feel, as he did, that women and girls should be protected from harm. But that is, I think, male instinct. Anyway I imagine that if he had even heard of honor killings, he would have felt that any girl who was killed by her family would have to be avenged.

No doubt Americans would still feel that way, intinctually, but I think the current generation is different in that, I imagine that the same conversation would take place, these days, with young women as well as men. I can imagine teenage girls avenging the death or rape of another girl, not just boys like ourselves.

So I think it's wrong to think that Americans have no idea of honor; some do. But it would be opposite of Arab honor.

............

Another point. Honor killing imply that there must be an entirely abusive process where a family loses all status when there is a rumor about any female member.

I don't think we can understand Arab honor killings until we see examples of the abuse of the family, and of the results, of the loss of status of the family.

[Josh Scholar]

Or maybe the current generation has seen enough CSI episodes that they think that it's impossible to get away with anything like that anymore... American revenge might be a bit less than killing.

[Josh Scholar]

What I wrote above was very poorly written. And fantasies of macho friends from my teen years probably didn't deserve much consideration, except to point out something I didn't even make clear above, that my American friends would rather avenge abuse because it hurts people than avenge some abstract notion of virtue...

Main points:

1. the word "honor" has multiple meanings. Don't get them confused. The opposite of honor is really "shame" and our cultures completely incompatable notions of what's shameful.

2. I get the feeling that my first post was lacking in that it only considered the values leading to shame rather than the process of shaming families. I think both need to be studied