Is There Honour In Killing?

Canada is horror-struck that three young sisters and their step-mother were discovered to have been deliberately murdered by their father, Mohammad Shafia, their mother Tooha Mohammad Yahya, and their son, sibling of 19-year-old Zainab Shafia, 17-year-old Sahari, and 13-year-old Geeti, along with 50-year-old Rona Amir Mohammad. The three - father, mother and brother of the murdered girls were arrested and charged with murder in the first degree and conspiracy to commit murder.

How it is possible for people to become so humanely degraded, so incapable of recognizing the enormity of the aberration they represent as people taking deliberately intentional steps to murder their kith and kin is beyond most peoples' imaginings. The primary consciousness of empathy, the connection between children and parents so irretrievably corrupted. This is the face of evil. It is beyond comprehension that a mother would be complicit in planning the murder of her three daughters.

It begs belief that a young man would agree to assist his parents to kill his sisters and the step-mother who had been the major female influence in his life. Cultures that practise a version of religious observance that claims through its primitive kind of heritage that women are inferior to men, and must be violently subjugated in recognition that they are a source of troubles and afflictions of temptation have infiltrated their presence around the world.

Fundamentalist religionists from Sikh to Muslim to Buddhist, Christian or Judaic practise a misogynistic heritage of patriarchy which insists on controlling every facet of a woman's life. From infibulation to duennas, from binding feet to the wearing of burkas and the niqab. Women are sequestered within the confines of the family home, taught no skills other than those she will require as a wife - which is basically to please her husband - and must accept arranged marriages.

Not all religious traditions wreak the horrible dead-end discipline on women that "honour killings" represent. Daughters who disgrace Christian households were traditionally disowned and thrown out of their families to fend for themselves. Orthodox Jewish households said a prayer for the dead, and cut off all contacts with their young women who were felt to have offended orthodoxy and cultural normatives. As uncongenial as these practices were they were emotionally abusive, not physically murderous.

Islamic fundamentalists may not be the only groups in the world that practise this kind of theocratic fanaticism in condemning young girls and women to stoning, public shame and humiliation, lashings, being outcast, and above all, murdered to cleanse the family's honour of the shame they have brought upon it, but they are the most visible in the prevalence of these honour killings. Young girls can be said to have brought dishonour to their families through their unacceptable mode of dress and manner.

More egregious disobedience to family values were represented by girls defying tradition by appearing in public with a male outside of the family group. Expressing affection for a male or even interest in one was considered an unacceptable offence. Actually having a physical affair with a man outside of marriage was anathema and deserving of death. A young girl or woman being the victim of rape would be viewed as deserving punishment by somehow provoking that incident of rape.

Muslim groups within Canada are angry that the media and the general public have reacted with aghast outrage at the dreadful deaths of these four women at the hands of their family members. Claiming that as soon as an event is labelled an 'honour killing', it is seen as condemnation of Muslims. As long as such a dreadful tradition resonates within the Muslim community, even within a minority of the ummah, it becomes incumbent on the greater community to condemn it and root it out, not insist it is a fabrication of a febrile Western mind, celebrated by the international media.

In the instance of this family, Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their children having emigrated to Canada to begin a new life, that new life should have meant abandoning the primitive and hateful practises left behind in their native Afghanistan. That it did not occur in this manner, that the head of this family remained an unreconstructed monster that insisted on controlling the women in the family is a tragedy.

But it should surprise no one. Long ingrained customs and traditions are not easily shed. They are lightly abandoned when one is an impressionable young girl emerging into early adulthood, witnessing the manner in which all other young women live out their lives in a new and open environment, but this is no reflection of what their domineering father demanded of his female charges. Zainab's attraction to a young man of whom her father disapproved was her death sentence.

It is abundantly clear that the 18-year-old son, Hamed Shafia, was successfully inducted into the traditions of his heritage and culture, given the influence of his father. That love for his sisters and his step-mother could not transcend the influence of such a debased culture may not be surprising given the needful attachments of young people, but it is disappointing. Hamed Shafia was emotionally and culturally coerced to abandon his humanity.

Perhaps the worst place in this affair was that played out by Tooha Mohammad Yahya, the biological, though perhaps not emotionally-bound mother of the three young girls. Even if she represented the persona of an abused woman, she was complicit with her husband in planning the murder of her children. We are all the beneficiaries of free will; when put to the test we are capable of choosing another path than that down which we are led.

Tooba Mohammad Yahya ensured her place in infamy by having surrendered her sensibilities and sensitivities to a culture of blame, vengeance and death. She helped murder her three daughters and she helped to stifle the emerging maturity and humanity of her oldest son. Where is the honour to be had in lending oneself to the most horrendous of human acts of betrayal?