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Fiel a Verdad
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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...930A1575AC0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
PHENOMENON; A Dishonorable Affair
•
By KATHERINE ZOEPF
Published: September 23, 2007
The struggle, if there was any, would have been very brief.
Fawaz later recalled that his wife, Zahra, was sleeping soundly on her side and curled slightly against the pillow when he rose at dawn and readied himself for work at his construction job on the outskirts of Damascus.
It was a rainy Sunday morning in January and very cold; as he left, Fawaz turned back one last time to tuck the blanket more snugly around his 16-year-old wife. Zahra slept on without stirring, and her husband locked the door of their tiny apartment carefully behind him.
Zahra was most likely still sleeping when her older brother, Fayyez, entered the apartment a short time later, using a stolen key and carrying a dagger. His sister lay on the carpeted floor, on the thin, foam mattress she shared with her husband, so Fayyez must have had to kneel next to Zahra as he raised the dagger and stabbed her five times in the head and back: brutal, tearing thrusts that shattered the base of her skull and nearly severed her spinal column.
Leaving the door open, Fayyez walked downstairs and out to the local police station. There, he reportedly turned himself in, telling the officers on duty that he had killed his sister in order to remove the dishonor she had brought on the family by losing her virginity out of wedlock nearly 10 months earlier.
''Fayyez told the police, 'It is my right to correct this error,' '' Maha Ali, a Syrian lawyer who knew Zahra and now works pro bono for her husband, told me not long ago. ''He said, 'It's true that my sister is married now, but we never washed away the shame.' ''
By now, almost anyone in Syria who follows the news can supply certain basic details about Zahra al-Azzo's life and death: how the girl, then only 15, was kidnapped in the spring of 2006 near her home in northern Syria, taken to Damascus by her abductor and raped; how the police who discovered her feared that her family, as commonly happens in Syria, would blame Zahra for the rape and kill her; how these authorities then placed Zahra in a prison for girls, believing it the only way to protect her from her relatives. And then in December, how a cousin of Zahra's, 27-year-old Fawaz, agreed to marry her in order to secure her release and also, he hoped, restore her reputation in the eyes of her family; how, just a month after her wedding to Fawaz, Zahra's 25-year-old brother, Fayyez, stabbed her as she slept.
Zahra died from her wounds at the hospital the following morning, one of about 300 girls and women who die each year in Syria in so-called honor killings, according to estimates by women's rights advocates there. In Syria and other Arab countries, many men are brought up to believe in an idea of personal honor that regards defending the chastity of their sisters, their daughters and other women in the family as a primary social obligation.
Honor crimes tend to occur, activists say, when men feel pressed by their communities to demonstrate that they are sufficiently protective of their female relatives' virtue. Pairs of lovers are sometimes killed together, but most frequently only the women are singled out for punishment. Sometimes women are killed for the mere suspicion of an affair, or on account of a false accusation, or because they were sexually abused, or because, like Zahra, they were raped.
In speaking with the police, Zahra's brother used a colloquial expression, ghasalat al arr (washing away the shame), which means the killing of a woman or girl whose very life has come to be seen as an unbearable stain on the honor of her male relatives. […] Under Syrian law, an honor killing is not murder, and the man who commits it is not a murderer. As in many other Arab countries, even if the killer is convicted on the lesser charge of a ''crime of honor,'' he is usually set free within months. Mentioning the killing -- or even the name of the victim -- generally becomes taboo.
---
That this has not happened with Zahra's story -- that her case, far from being ignored, has become something of a cause célèbre, a rallying point for lawyers, Islamic scholars and Syrian officials hoping to change the laws that protect the perpetrators of honor crimes -- is a result of a peculiar confluence of circumstances. […]at heart it is because of Zahra's young widower, Fawaz, who had spoken to his bride only once before they became engaged. Now, defying his tribe and their traditions, he has brought a civil lawsuit against Zahra's killer and is refusing to let her case be forgotten.
[…] Zahra first heard the rumors from a friend of her father's [and she met him]. The man threatened Zahra, telling her that he would reveal the scandal if she didn't join him outside her house, itself a grave transgression in her conservative society. That Zahra did so, disobeying her family and going out with a man unaccompanied, even under duress, is so scandalous to many Syrians that advocates working on Zahra's case have tried to obscure this fact, preferring to describe what took place as a simple kidnapping. They also say that at 15 she was naïve in the extreme, so young for her age that she took a teddy bear to bed every night in prison.
Zahra was frightened by the man but apparently believed that if she came out with him, briefly, she could ensure her family's reputation and safety. Instead, says Yumin Abu al-Hosn, a social worker at the prison, she was taken to Damascus, held in an apartment and raped. Terrified, in a strange and crowded city she had never visited, Zahra didn't try to run away. […]The man was taken to jail, where he now awaits trial for kidnapping and rape. Zahra, meanwhile, was taken to a police station for a so-called virginity exam, the hymen examination that, however unreliable at establishing virginity, is standard procedure in Syria in rape cases and common when women are taken into police custody.
[…]
---
For girls like Zahra, prison is only a temporary solution. Even the most murderously inclined families often issue emotional court appeals to have their daughters returned to them. Judges usually try to extract sworn statements from male guardians, promises that the girls, if released, will not be harmed. But those promises are often broken.
Among Syria's so-called tribal families -- settled Bedouin clans like the one that Zahra belonged to -- first-cousin marriage is common. So it wasn't a shock when her family, looking for someone who could marry her while she was in prison and help secure her release, turned to one of her cousins, Fawaz. But Fawaz hadn't intended to marry a cousin, he told me recently, and was startled when Zahra's brother Fayyez showed up one day at his home.
''Fayyez started telling us that his sister, Zahra, had been kidnapped,'' said Fawaz's mother, who is usually addressed by the honorific Umm Fawaz, meaning ''mother of Fawaz.'' […]
The mere fact that Zahra had been taken from her home for a few days signaled dishonor for the family. '' 'Oh, Auntie, I don't know what to say,' '' Umm Fawaz recalled Fayyez saying as she adjusted her hijab with one hand and dabbed her eyes with a tissue in the other. ''I said: 'Don't be ashamed for your sister. Even in the best families, something like this can happen.' '' Fayyez claimed that despite having been kidnapped, his sister was still a virgin. Slowly, he broached the subject he had come to discuss. Would Fawaz consider marrying Zahra in order to secure her release?
At first, Fawaz, a shy, wiry man, politely demurred. He felt sorry for Fayyez, he told me, but he couldn't help recoiling a little at the story, which in his community constitutes an ugly sexual scandal. Besides, he was already engaged to another girl. […]
''I liked the girl,'' said Fawaz, who seemed embarrassed to have admitted such a personal thing in public, and he quickly corrected himself. ''I mean, here we fall in love with a girl after we marry her. But I decided to leave my fiancée for Zahra. I felt that a normal girl like my fiancée would have other chances. With Zahra I thought, my God, she's such a child to be stuck in this prison.''
Fawaz's father disapproved, suspecting from the outset that Zahra's family would kill her once she left prison[…] Zahra and Fawaz were married in a civil ceremony at the prison on Dec. 11, 2006, and then a week later in a formal celebration for the neighborhood, held in the bride's new home. […]
The marriage, by all accounts, was happy. ''Zahra used to call me even after her wedding,'' Ali, the lawyer, recalled. '' 'How is Fawaz?' I'd ask her. And she'd say, 'Oh, Auntie Maha, we're spending all night up together, talking and having fun.' […]
---
Fawaz told me that, according to his interpretation of Islam, he was ''honoring Zahra again'' -- restoring her lost virtue -- by marrying her. In this decision he was supported by his sheik, or religious teacher, who according to Fawaz subscribes to a progressive school of Koranic interpretation. Fawaz and his immediate family, though not well educated, are proud of their open-mindedness, and he boasts about Zahra's intelligence and literacy. […]
According to Fawaz, Zahra had been married just five weeks when her brother, Fayyez, arrived on an unannounced visit, saying he planned to look for work in Damascus. Zahra was happy to see her brother, but Fawaz described feeling painfully torn between his duties to hospitality, a cardinal virtue in Bedouin culture, and his feeling that Fayyez -- sleeping just upstairs in Fawaz's parents' apartment -- was a danger to his wife. On the morning Zahra was attacked, Fawaz recalls going upstairs before leaving for work to find Fayyez awake and tapping nervously at his cellphone.
''He couldn't afford to have a mobile,'' Fawaz said. ''I'd been wondering about that. It turned out that his uncle had given him the phone so that he could call and tell the family that he'd killed his sister. We learned later that they had a party that night to celebrate the cleansing of their honor. The whole village was invited.''
======
Most honor killings receive only brief mention in Syrian newspapers, but Zahra al-Azzo's death has been unlike any other. Dozens of articles and television programs have discussed her story at length, fueling an unprecedented public conversation about the roots and morality of honor crimes.
[…]
Yet the notion that Islam condones honor killing is a misconception, according to some lawyers and a few prominent Islamic scholars. Daad Mousa, a Syrian women's rights advocate and lawyer, told me that though beliefs about cleansing a man's honor derive from Bedouin tradition, the three Syrian laws used to pardon men who commit honor crimes can be traced back not to Islamic law but to the law codes, based on the Napoleonic code, that were imposed in the Levant during the French mandate. ''Article 192 states that if a man commits a crime with an 'honorable motive,' he will go free,'' Mousa said[…]
''Article 242 refers to crimes of passion,'' Mousa continued. ''But it's Article 548 that we're really up against. Article 548 states precisely that if a man witnesses a female relative in an immoral act and kills her, he will go free.'' Judges frequently interpret these laws so loosely that a premeditated killing -- like the one Fayyez is accused of -- is often judged a ''crime of passion''; ''witnessing'' a female relative's behavior is sometimes defined as hearing neighborhood gossip about it; and for a woman, merely speaking to a man may be ruled an ''immoral act.'' […]
Syria, which has been governed since 1963 by a secular Baathist regime, has a strong reputation in the region for sex equality; women graduate from high schools and universities in numbers roughly equal to men, and they frequently hold influential positions as doctors, professors and even government ministers. But in the family, a different standard applies. ''Honor here means only one thing: women, and especially the sexual life of women,'' Mousa said. The decision to carry out an honor killing is usually made by the family as a group, and an under-age boy is often nominated to carry out the task, to eliminate even the smallest risk of a prison sentence.
---
[…] The United Nations Population Fund says that about 5,000 honor killings take place each year around the world, but since they often occur in rural areas where births and deaths go unreported, it is very difficult to count them by country[…] it is widely agreed that honor killings are found disproportionately in Muslim communities, from Bangladesh to Egypt to Great Britain.
The Grand Mufti Ahmad Badr Eddin Hassoun, Syria's highest-ranking Islamic teacher, has condemned honor killing and Article 548 in unequivocal terms. […]The commonly held view that Article 548 is derived from Islamic law, he said, is false.
[…] In downtown Damascus, one man I interviewed on the street declared that the grand mufti was not a ''real Muslim'' if he believed in canceling Article 548. ''It's an Islamic law to kill your relative if she errs,'' said the man, who gave his name as Ahmed […]
PHENOMENON; A Dishonorable Affair
•
By KATHERINE ZOEPF
Published: September 23, 2007
The struggle, if there was any, would have been very brief.
Fawaz later recalled that his wife, Zahra, was sleeping soundly on her side and curled slightly against the pillow when he rose at dawn and readied himself for work at his construction job on the outskirts of Damascus.
It was a rainy Sunday morning in January and very cold; as he left, Fawaz turned back one last time to tuck the blanket more snugly around his 16-year-old wife. Zahra slept on without stirring, and her husband locked the door of their tiny apartment carefully behind him.
Zahra was most likely still sleeping when her older brother, Fayyez, entered the apartment a short time later, using a stolen key and carrying a dagger. His sister lay on the carpeted floor, on the thin, foam mattress she shared with her husband, so Fayyez must have had to kneel next to Zahra as he raised the dagger and stabbed her five times in the head and back: brutal, tearing thrusts that shattered the base of her skull and nearly severed her spinal column.
Leaving the door open, Fayyez walked downstairs and out to the local police station. There, he reportedly turned himself in, telling the officers on duty that he had killed his sister in order to remove the dishonor she had brought on the family by losing her virginity out of wedlock nearly 10 months earlier.
''Fayyez told the police, 'It is my right to correct this error,' '' Maha Ali, a Syrian lawyer who knew Zahra and now works pro bono for her husband, told me not long ago. ''He said, 'It's true that my sister is married now, but we never washed away the shame.' ''
By now, almost anyone in Syria who follows the news can supply certain basic details about Zahra al-Azzo's life and death: how the girl, then only 15, was kidnapped in the spring of 2006 near her home in northern Syria, taken to Damascus by her abductor and raped; how the police who discovered her feared that her family, as commonly happens in Syria, would blame Zahra for the rape and kill her; how these authorities then placed Zahra in a prison for girls, believing it the only way to protect her from her relatives. And then in December, how a cousin of Zahra's, 27-year-old Fawaz, agreed to marry her in order to secure her release and also, he hoped, restore her reputation in the eyes of her family; how, just a month after her wedding to Fawaz, Zahra's 25-year-old brother, Fayyez, stabbed her as she slept.
Zahra died from her wounds at the hospital the following morning, one of about 300 girls and women who die each year in Syria in so-called honor killings, according to estimates by women's rights advocates there. In Syria and other Arab countries, many men are brought up to believe in an idea of personal honor that regards defending the chastity of their sisters, their daughters and other women in the family as a primary social obligation.
Honor crimes tend to occur, activists say, when men feel pressed by their communities to demonstrate that they are sufficiently protective of their female relatives' virtue. Pairs of lovers are sometimes killed together, but most frequently only the women are singled out for punishment. Sometimes women are killed for the mere suspicion of an affair, or on account of a false accusation, or because they were sexually abused, or because, like Zahra, they were raped.
In speaking with the police, Zahra's brother used a colloquial expression, ghasalat al arr (washing away the shame), which means the killing of a woman or girl whose very life has come to be seen as an unbearable stain on the honor of her male relatives. […] Under Syrian law, an honor killing is not murder, and the man who commits it is not a murderer. As in many other Arab countries, even if the killer is convicted on the lesser charge of a ''crime of honor,'' he is usually set free within months. Mentioning the killing -- or even the name of the victim -- generally becomes taboo.
---
That this has not happened with Zahra's story -- that her case, far from being ignored, has become something of a cause célèbre, a rallying point for lawyers, Islamic scholars and Syrian officials hoping to change the laws that protect the perpetrators of honor crimes -- is a result of a peculiar confluence of circumstances. […]at heart it is because of Zahra's young widower, Fawaz, who had spoken to his bride only once before they became engaged. Now, defying his tribe and their traditions, he has brought a civil lawsuit against Zahra's killer and is refusing to let her case be forgotten.
[…] Zahra first heard the rumors from a friend of her father's [and she met him]. The man threatened Zahra, telling her that he would reveal the scandal if she didn't join him outside her house, itself a grave transgression in her conservative society. That Zahra did so, disobeying her family and going out with a man unaccompanied, even under duress, is so scandalous to many Syrians that advocates working on Zahra's case have tried to obscure this fact, preferring to describe what took place as a simple kidnapping. They also say that at 15 she was naïve in the extreme, so young for her age that she took a teddy bear to bed every night in prison.
Zahra was frightened by the man but apparently believed that if she came out with him, briefly, she could ensure her family's reputation and safety. Instead, says Yumin Abu al-Hosn, a social worker at the prison, she was taken to Damascus, held in an apartment and raped. Terrified, in a strange and crowded city she had never visited, Zahra didn't try to run away. […]The man was taken to jail, where he now awaits trial for kidnapping and rape. Zahra, meanwhile, was taken to a police station for a so-called virginity exam, the hymen examination that, however unreliable at establishing virginity, is standard procedure in Syria in rape cases and common when women are taken into police custody.
[…]
---
For girls like Zahra, prison is only a temporary solution. Even the most murderously inclined families often issue emotional court appeals to have their daughters returned to them. Judges usually try to extract sworn statements from male guardians, promises that the girls, if released, will not be harmed. But those promises are often broken.
Among Syria's so-called tribal families -- settled Bedouin clans like the one that Zahra belonged to -- first-cousin marriage is common. So it wasn't a shock when her family, looking for someone who could marry her while she was in prison and help secure her release, turned to one of her cousins, Fawaz. But Fawaz hadn't intended to marry a cousin, he told me recently, and was startled when Zahra's brother Fayyez showed up one day at his home.
''Fayyez started telling us that his sister, Zahra, had been kidnapped,'' said Fawaz's mother, who is usually addressed by the honorific Umm Fawaz, meaning ''mother of Fawaz.'' […]
The mere fact that Zahra had been taken from her home for a few days signaled dishonor for the family. '' 'Oh, Auntie, I don't know what to say,' '' Umm Fawaz recalled Fayyez saying as she adjusted her hijab with one hand and dabbed her eyes with a tissue in the other. ''I said: 'Don't be ashamed for your sister. Even in the best families, something like this can happen.' '' Fayyez claimed that despite having been kidnapped, his sister was still a virgin. Slowly, he broached the subject he had come to discuss. Would Fawaz consider marrying Zahra in order to secure her release?
At first, Fawaz, a shy, wiry man, politely demurred. He felt sorry for Fayyez, he told me, but he couldn't help recoiling a little at the story, which in his community constitutes an ugly sexual scandal. Besides, he was already engaged to another girl. […]
''I liked the girl,'' said Fawaz, who seemed embarrassed to have admitted such a personal thing in public, and he quickly corrected himself. ''I mean, here we fall in love with a girl after we marry her. But I decided to leave my fiancée for Zahra. I felt that a normal girl like my fiancée would have other chances. With Zahra I thought, my God, she's such a child to be stuck in this prison.''
Fawaz's father disapproved, suspecting from the outset that Zahra's family would kill her once she left prison[…] Zahra and Fawaz were married in a civil ceremony at the prison on Dec. 11, 2006, and then a week later in a formal celebration for the neighborhood, held in the bride's new home. […]
The marriage, by all accounts, was happy. ''Zahra used to call me even after her wedding,'' Ali, the lawyer, recalled. '' 'How is Fawaz?' I'd ask her. And she'd say, 'Oh, Auntie Maha, we're spending all night up together, talking and having fun.' […]
---
Fawaz told me that, according to his interpretation of Islam, he was ''honoring Zahra again'' -- restoring her lost virtue -- by marrying her. In this decision he was supported by his sheik, or religious teacher, who according to Fawaz subscribes to a progressive school of Koranic interpretation. Fawaz and his immediate family, though not well educated, are proud of their open-mindedness, and he boasts about Zahra's intelligence and literacy. […]
According to Fawaz, Zahra had been married just five weeks when her brother, Fayyez, arrived on an unannounced visit, saying he planned to look for work in Damascus. Zahra was happy to see her brother, but Fawaz described feeling painfully torn between his duties to hospitality, a cardinal virtue in Bedouin culture, and his feeling that Fayyez -- sleeping just upstairs in Fawaz's parents' apartment -- was a danger to his wife. On the morning Zahra was attacked, Fawaz recalls going upstairs before leaving for work to find Fayyez awake and tapping nervously at his cellphone.
''He couldn't afford to have a mobile,'' Fawaz said. ''I'd been wondering about that. It turned out that his uncle had given him the phone so that he could call and tell the family that he'd killed his sister. We learned later that they had a party that night to celebrate the cleansing of their honor. The whole village was invited.''
======
Most honor killings receive only brief mention in Syrian newspapers, but Zahra al-Azzo's death has been unlike any other. Dozens of articles and television programs have discussed her story at length, fueling an unprecedented public conversation about the roots and morality of honor crimes.
[…]
Yet the notion that Islam condones honor killing is a misconception, according to some lawyers and a few prominent Islamic scholars. Daad Mousa, a Syrian women's rights advocate and lawyer, told me that though beliefs about cleansing a man's honor derive from Bedouin tradition, the three Syrian laws used to pardon men who commit honor crimes can be traced back not to Islamic law but to the law codes, based on the Napoleonic code, that were imposed in the Levant during the French mandate. ''Article 192 states that if a man commits a crime with an 'honorable motive,' he will go free,'' Mousa said[…]
''Article 242 refers to crimes of passion,'' Mousa continued. ''But it's Article 548 that we're really up against. Article 548 states precisely that if a man witnesses a female relative in an immoral act and kills her, he will go free.'' Judges frequently interpret these laws so loosely that a premeditated killing -- like the one Fayyez is accused of -- is often judged a ''crime of passion''; ''witnessing'' a female relative's behavior is sometimes defined as hearing neighborhood gossip about it; and for a woman, merely speaking to a man may be ruled an ''immoral act.'' […]
Syria, which has been governed since 1963 by a secular Baathist regime, has a strong reputation in the region for sex equality; women graduate from high schools and universities in numbers roughly equal to men, and they frequently hold influential positions as doctors, professors and even government ministers. But in the family, a different standard applies. ''Honor here means only one thing: women, and especially the sexual life of women,'' Mousa said. The decision to carry out an honor killing is usually made by the family as a group, and an under-age boy is often nominated to carry out the task, to eliminate even the smallest risk of a prison sentence.
---
[…] The United Nations Population Fund says that about 5,000 honor killings take place each year around the world, but since they often occur in rural areas where births and deaths go unreported, it is very difficult to count them by country[…] it is widely agreed that honor killings are found disproportionately in Muslim communities, from Bangladesh to Egypt to Great Britain.
The Grand Mufti Ahmad Badr Eddin Hassoun, Syria's highest-ranking Islamic teacher, has condemned honor killing and Article 548 in unequivocal terms. […]The commonly held view that Article 548 is derived from Islamic law, he said, is false.
[…] In downtown Damascus, one man I interviewed on the street declared that the grand mufti was not a ''real Muslim'' if he believed in canceling Article 548. ''It's an Islamic law to kill your relative if she errs,'' said the man, who gave his name as Ahmed […]
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