Leila Hussein, Mother of 'Honor' Killing Victim, Is Herself Murdered

I blogged recently about the 'honor' killing in Iraq of 17 yo Rand Abdel-Qader.  Rand was killed by her father, Abdel-Qader Ali, when he learned that she had become infatuated by a British soldier, 'Paul' while she was volunteering to help fellow Iraqis in Basra.  He learned this 4 months after she had last conversed with Paul.  Apparently, she had chatted with Paul briefly a few times over several months.  When Abdel-Qadar began assaulting Rand, her mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand's two brothers for help, as in to stop her husband.  Instead, they joined in.  Rand was stomped upon, suffocated and stabbed to death.  Abdel-Qadar was arrested by Iraqi police, but released within 2 hours.  He has not been charged with any crime.  He claims that police congratulated him on his actions.  From the Guardian UK (also linked in my original post):

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. 'They are men and know what honour is,' he said.

Hussein divorced Abdel-Qadar two weeks after the killing, at which point he broke her arm while beating her.  She went into hiding and was being helped by one of the few womens' rights groups in Iraq.  The group was trying to get Hussein out of Iraq.  Feministe tells us that Leila Hussein has also been murdered.  Again, from the Guardian UK:

Leila Hussein lived her last few weeks in terror. Moving constantly from safe house to safe house, she dared to stay no longer than four days at each. It was the price she was forced to pay after denouncing and divorcing her husband - the man she witnessed suffocate, stamp on, then stab their young daughter Rand in a brutal 'honour' killing for which he has shown no remorse.

Though she feared reprisals for speaking out, she really believed that she would soon be safe. Arrangements were well under way to smuggle her to the Jordanian capital, Amman. In fact, she was on her way to meet the person who would help her escape when a car drew up alongside her and two other women who were walking her to a taxi. Five bullets were fired: three of them hit Leila, 41. She died in hospital after futile attempts to save her.

The two women helping her were hit with one bullet each.  The womens' rights group to which they belonged has since stopped their work, citing the danger:

Since the attack the NGO has stopped its work in Basra. 'We daren't answer the phones because we have received so many threats since we gave our support to Leila's case,' said Mariam [one of the two women with Hussein at the time of the attack]. 'Most of our members are preparing to leave the city and even Iraq if they can raise the money.'

...

Mariam has moved out of her home. But within hours of speaking to The Observer a close friend went to her new address to deliver a message that had been left for her at her front door. It read: 'Death to betrayers of Islam who don't deserve God's forgiveness. Speaking less you will live more.' She believes it was sent by Leila's killers.

This whole business of female 'honor' seems so odd to me, for several reasons (and yes, I realize that several of these points stem from my own cultural background which is itself foreign to cultures in which these murders are condoned):

1. The idea that an individual's honor is connected to/defined by another individual seems so counter-intuitive.
2. These murders are about control, not honor, religious purity, Islam, etc. Yes, the murderers hide behind Islam (like so many murderers have hidden behind so many religions for ages), but one can be Muslim without condoning honor killings. Of course, extremists will say that such people aren't real Muslims.  I wouldn't be surprised if many, many extremist men who think that they're defending Islam ('true' Islam, of course) don't realize that they themselves have been formed by generations of cultural manipulation.  I'm not expressing this well, let me try again: They think they're being good Muslims, i.e., they think they're acting religiously out of their own piety, when really they're acting culturally.
3. It strikes me as odd that, in such a very patriarchal society, the actions of one woman - a society in which women are worthless, female births are occasions for sorrow instead of joy - have such power over the men in her family.
4. Besides being about control, there's something here that suggests fear. Perhaps it's fear that, by not supporting concepts such as female honor, men will lose control over women.  When a woman steps outside the bounds, it ignites this fear and the transgressor must be extinguished a) before she does any damage to male control and/or b) so that others see her fate as a deterrent (similar to how capital punishment is supposed to serve as a deterrent in the U.S.).

The commenters on the Feministe thread about Husseins' murder are mostly anti-honor killing, feminist, etc.  There is one dissenting commenter, 'Syed'.  Now, other commenters wonder if Syed is who he appears to be, i.e., a Muslim man who supports Rand's honor killing, but not necessarily Hussein's murder.  Some suggest that he may be a troll posing as such so as to make Islam come off badly in a public forum.  Here I'll take Syed's comments at face value.  His first comment:

While I understand that the murder of the wife should be prosecuted, the daughter’s killing is justified in Islam which was their religion and while it may appear strange to westerners, they should not worry too much about it just as Muslim countries leave the strange Western practices alone. In Islam, it is forbidden for a woman to be alone with or talk unnecessarily to a man that is not related to her. The punishment prescribed by the Holy Quran can go from imprisonment until she repents upto death. We are not privy to what went between her father, who must have loved her, and her before her death and we should refrain from speculating.

From another comment:

Only that which is given in Quran matters as that is the unaltered will of Allah.

Annnnnd:

It is just the way it is. There are consequences for actions. They may appear harsh but there is a reason they were ordained that way.

These comments, and this view in general, strike me as odd for, again, at least several reasons:

• Allah is (I presume) the source of all creation, including humans, who have powers of reason. The above interpretation of Islam suggests blind adherence to the Quran, i.e., no further thought is required. Perhaps reason can be applied to non-religious matters (if there are any; perhaps everything can be religiousized[?]), but never to religious matters.
• Strict adherence (read: blind obedience) to the Quran is necessary. How was this decided? Perhaps somebodies, somewhere, sometime along the way, reasoned that that was the thing to do. But is that still human reasoning involved in the very fundamentals aspects, in the establishment of Islam?
• Or perhaps the Quran itself mandates strict adherence. But a lot of Muslims interpret Islam and the Quran in a lot of different ways. Even such a mandate could be interpreted with widely divergent results. If determining the meaning of text is an exercise in reason, then even those who say they're following the letter of such a mandate in the Quran (again, I don't know that there is one) are actually reasoning about the meaning of said mandate.
• If there's any reasoning involved in following the Quran, isn't there room then to wonder if one's got it wrong?  I suppose one could argue that one's interpretation is the correct one, but then there's that reasoning again.
• These bullets point are not an argument.  In fact, there are inconsistences among them. There are also other factors that should be considered, e.g., what role does free will play in Islam and in the interpretation of the Quran?  (That particular question is too large to deal with here.)

I don't have any answers to these questions.  More importantly, I don't know what can be done.  Several commenters on the Feministe thread express frustration at the seemingly non-existent assistance one can give to women like Rand and Leila.  I used to volunteer on the help line at a womens' shelter (also at a nursing home and an animal shelter, but it's the womens' shelter volunteering that I miss most; I miss the cats at the shelter, but I do not miss all the cleaning, the scooping, the stinking, the  medicating, the feeding, etc. etc., in short, all the dirty work; with 6 cats, I get enough of that at home nowadays) and my contributions were always visible, measurable, etc.  I knew that I was helping people, that I was getting the right information to the people who needed it, that I was listening to people who needed to talk, etc.  Direct assistance is surely not the only way to help others, but women suffering under oppressive patriarchal societies seem so far away, so unreachable, so untouchable to those outside the society willing to help (and, to a lesser extent, probably to those within as well).  One commenter had several suggestions, most of which I'll call 'administrative', although I do not mean to suggest anything negative about them.  I'll guess that the most effective suggestion would be the economic one: boycott offending countries.  So, unfortunately, I have nothing practical to offer.

I'll leave you with pictures of Leila and Rand, both of whom are now dead, murdered by religious/patriarchal extremists.

Leila Hussein:

Rand Abdel-Qader:

Comments

[Myrl25]

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