Honour Killing Debate Without Honour
Hanne Kjöller
Swedish original: "Hedersmordsdebatt utan heder"
(Hanne Kjöller, Dagens Nyheter, 2004/03/04)I did not know Fadime Sahindal [a 26-year-old Kurdish woman who was killed by her father because she fell in love with a Swedish man.*]. I am therefore as far from being Fadime with her as I am from being Göran with Prime Minister Göran Persson. Whether Idris Ahmedi, Cecilia Englund, Masoud Kamali, Stieg Larsson, Diana Mulinari, Bernardita Nunez and Tara Twana knew her I don't know. What I do know is that they persistently have chosen to stub out half her name in Expos book “The Debate on Honour Killings - Feminism or Racism” (Svartvitts förlag). For them she is Fadime.
This gets all the stranger when Stieg Larsson, one of the editors of the anthology, criticizes the first name phenomenon in his own chapter. And he proudly points out that it was his friend, Kurdo Baksi, who “discovered” that Fadime Sahindal lacked her last name. The publicist Kurdo Baksi, who had no problem to reduce Fadime Sahindal to Fadime himself during the inflamed debate (DN Kultur 6/11-02).
But this is only one of many queer things about this queer book. It seems stranger to even publish a debate book where nine out of nine writers in principle agree with each other completely. In the foreword Stieg Larsson and the second editor, Cecilia Englund, write that it is “striking that the writers today arrive at very similar conclusions”. Wouldn’t it be an obvious point to give voice to someone among all of them who actually have arrived at different conclusions? As, for example, Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, Sara Mohammad or Elisabeth Fritz.
For certain, the Kurdish writer Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, the Iranian human right activist and feminist debater Sara Mohammad and the well-known lawyer and debater Elisabeth Fritz are present in the book, but then in a company which hardly can be considered flattering. Cecilia Englund does some kind of interpretation of what they have said and done, which she then connects with what has been said and done by Sverigedemokraterna [the Swedish Democrats, a nationalistic fringe party]. It’s a connection which is far beyond my comprehension.
Several of the other writers make similar connections. We who are of the opinion that there actually is a connection between which 15-year-old girls who risk to get a bullet in the head when they go to the cinema with a boy and where their parents come from, we who are of the opinion that it actually not is a typical Scandinavian phenomenon to throw 5-year-old girls on the kitchen table to cut off her clitoris and labia, we who are of the opinion that it actually not is in Denmark that unfaithful women are stoned to death — we are happily bundled together with racial biologists and assorted movements on the extreme right.
Our stand — that there is a honour related violence which doesn't look the same all over the world — is dismissed as an expression of racism, nationalism, islamophobia, ignorance and even stupidity. Without naming anyone or particularizing, editor Larsson maintains that the culture critics at Expressen argue “exactly as if they have gone through the party’s [Sverigedemokraternas] cadre schooling”.
Javeria Rizvi, head of projects at the women’s centre Terrafem, writes on the connection between honour killings and Islam, “that it is extremely ignorant to presume that a billion of the world's population is a homogenous unit”. Indeed. But who has done that? Who has said that all Muslim/Kurdish/Syrian/Christian men are prepared to kill their daughters? That there exists a concept of honour in certain cultures doesn’t mean that everyone kills, as little as our brännvinskultur [vodka culture] means that everone is boozing.
But if there is such thing as a culture, it should include everyone, according to to Masoud Kamali, who incomprehensible enough has been appointed as the director of the government's report on discrimination. He writes that the “cultural model” presumes “that everybody (or in any case a large majority of those) who come from a certain cultural area are products of a certain culture and consequently must exhibit identical or similar patterns of behaviour.” Ah. So Argentinian tango is only a part of the Argentinian culture if everybody is dancing it. With such a narrow definition of culture it’s hard to see anything remaining of a common culture anywhere in the world.
Consider that a women’s centre left, which never has had any problem with proclaiming one half of the world’s population as potential rapists, is so exorbitantly outraged when the concept of honour is applied geographically or culturally. “It is difficult to agree with the view that honour related violence is different in any way from that which Swedish women are subjected to,” writes Cecilia Englund who apparently has missed that it’s not native girls from Säffle [a Swedish small town] who are given away in forced marriages in their early teens. Of course it’s wrong, as Javeria Rizvi writes, to let a billion Muslims stand in the dock. But whenever did it become right to put all the men in the world there?
When Cecila Englund has finished daubing the “immigration debaters” she doesn’t like with extreme right smear, she quickly jumps over to an interview she has done with islamologist Jan Hjärpe. She writes that he “chuckled knowingly” when she mentioned “the media beat around Kurdish men and the honour killing debate”. “he understood exactly what I meant,” Cecilia Englund concludes.
When I made a call to Jan Hjärpe it turns out that that is exactly what he does not. He did not know about the book, nor about Cecilia Englund, nor about any interview with Cecilia Englund and absolutely not what this Cecilia Englund means when she uses his name, maintaining that he chuckled knowingly and exactly understood what she meant.
“Is the level of debate low enough?” wonders Stieg Larsson in the concluding chapter. Yes. After having read this confusing and offensive anthology it makes you wonder if that isn’t the case.
* For more on Fadime Sahindal, see for example: "Fadime was executed by her father. Her crime? She fell in love with a Swedish man" (Johanne Hildebrandt, The Observer, 2002/01/27)
[Posted 2004/03/04]
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