Honour in the light

Came across demi ray's post about honour killing of 4 young girls in Pakistan. With the new year beckoning and with hindsight to our advantage, it won't be a bad idea to look at where we are headed. This sure might be an isolated incident, but an uncivilized one all the same.

These young girls were not simply daughters conceived by men. They were borne and nurtured into existence by a mother. She -- the mother -- could do nothing more than stand by her man as he slit their little throats.

To say there is an unhealthy, unrealistic perception of sex – as ‘sex’ is loosely defined as ‘women’ – is to put it mildly. For centuries, this patriarchal perversion has been festering in the dark like an ignored cancer, adapting to its debilitating pain and unsightly lumps, growing stronger in endurance, but weaker in health, isolated from examination for fear of the major surgery it will require to remedy it and ultimately, justified by the societal function this disease serves – the family unit, with a mother that will never run away from household duties.

That’s not exactly how women are inspired to unconditional love. It’s so easy to activate a woman’s loyalty and devotion, I marvel at the cavemen who think they need to cripple a woman in order to keep her around. And undoubtedly, that works, too. Women are abused to greater and lesser degrees all over the country and all over the world.

The criminal in this case, however, now has two sons to carry on his name with ‘honor’ in tact – and a criminal justice system that defends him. Matters like this are perceived as 'family disputes' and men are inherently the household disciplinarians. What have the sons just learned? The mother, has a private, silent psychological and emotional torment to contend with. Mothers don’t ‘recover’ and bounce-back from things like that. What has been reinforced for her?

We all find ways to justify our behavior – even cold-blooded ‘pre-emptive’ murder can and is justified in the mind of the criminal. He killed young girls who don’t even know what menstruation is in anticipation of the day they ‘will’ have dishonorable sex. For centuries, this deviation has grown and festered in the dark.

When the Qur’an was being revealed to the 7th century Arab pagans, one of their ‘directives’ was to stop burying their live newborn baby girls. That was a common practice back in those days. I don’t know how long it took to stop these live burials, but we don’t hear about this practice in Arab countries, any longer. However, if the root of what motivated this live burial of females is not eradicated, it could simply ‘evolve’ as another gender-based crime, such as burying ‘adulterous’ women in sand up to their necks so that stones could be thrown at the only exposed part of her body. This was a Middle-Eastern practice, described in the Bible as well, that Jews – and their counterpart Christians – have moved past.


Hang your head down in shame. We belong to the same race.
We can only hope such news does'nt make the headlines in 2006.

p.s: Police in Multan said they would complete their investigation into Ahmed's (the girls' father) case in the next two weeks and that he faces the death sentence if he is convicted for the killings and terrorizing his neighborhood.

Would be interesting to see how things turn out, the country taken into consideration