This
book, "Honor Lost: Love and Honor in Modern-day Jordan," by Norma
Khouri, is a story of love and divinely sanctioned murder told under the strain
and tension of an alien, shameful, slave culture: And that alien shameful slave
culture is called 21st Century Islam. It is one that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had
already warned us in the West about in her book "Infidel."
Islam is a 1500-year old Bedouin tribal desert religious culture where enslaving and murdering women "on a whim" was, and still is, legal. However, the excuse used as pretext to justify "religiously sanctioned" murder is called "a man's family honor." Even in modern and liberal Jordan, dishonor murders, to "protect a man's (so-called) family honor" is considered a normal and accepted way of life.
The love story told here is about two girlfriends, one Christian and the other Moslem, who had to go through the elaborate ruse of opening up a Beauty Salon simply to arrange for one of them, Dalia, the Moslem woman, in love with a Catholic man, to be able to meet him for several non-sexual trysts. As we later learn in the story, the lovers were eventually caught. Her father and brothers in a "so-called" "honor murder" stabbed Norma's girlfriend, Dalia, twelve times in her chest, and waited until she was dead before calling the ambulance. This was a crime committed according to the normal rules and practices sanctioned by Islamic law. Dalia was then discarded like a piece of trash in an unmarked mass grave without even the dignity of a normal burial.
The tableau of this vignette has been played out and repeated so often in the Moslem religion, that even today's in our supposed post-modern times, we in the West are becoming numb to them and have begun to turn our eyes away. But we should not turn our heads or eyes away, because "so called" honor killings, not only condone the crime of murder, but by doing so, they also defile and diminish civilized human behavior and our collective humanity. Plus, they violate even the most basic tenets of normal religious moral rules, codes and sensibilities -- such as the fifth Christian Commandment of "thou shall not kill."
But more than this, honor killings also beg an important question about the health of our collective humanity. One that it is high time all civilized nations should begin to ask themselves: From where does such barbaric, shameful, criminal cultural traditions spring, and why in the name of 21st Century civilization, do we still tolerate it by continuing to turn our heads away and allowing it to happen?
The answer is obvious: all "cultures of gender slavery," spring from only one place: directly from religion -- that primal tribal societal mechanism invented 2000 years ago in some Middle Eastern desert camp as a response to men's fragile sexual egos and fears about the chances of some other man being able to somehow conspire to "screw" their own women?
This fear is a primal one just short of being a part of our male DNA, one that is endemic even to enlightened post-modern men. And thus it has a long sordid pedigree of destructiveness across both the animal and the human landscapes. It is as deeply encoded in masculine run societies (which is to say all of them) and their respective religious books, as it is in the male brain.
So, let us make one thing crystal clear: faced honestly, the codes in "the religious books" all point in the same direction; they all boil down to one thing: How can I protect my male right to "screw" as many women as I can, while at the same time precluding or preventing other men the right to do the same, especially with my woman?
No wonder when it is said out loudly in this way, in plain English, it sounds exactly as "base" and as "vulgar," and exactly as ridiculous, as it is in reality.
Notice that in order for a man to think like this, women must first be "diminished" to a level of abject inferiority and then "objectified" as a man's possession. Hence gender slavery (i.e. female submission) is a prerequisite -- a first step down the rat hole of fear-based masculine sexual insanity.
And then, as a second step, women's sexually related behavior must be carefully circumscribed, segregated, regulated and monitored. This includes their dress, make-up, movement, medical exams, reproductive rights, access to places beyond the home, profession, education, etc., " ad infinitum.
In short, the basis of a large part of Western religion of the Abrahamic strain -- arguably, as much as any other basis -- grew out of a Bedouin tribe's primal sexual fears that resulted in the invention of a religious culture designed to enslave the vagina and to backup the enslavement of this particular body part, with a rulebook full of codes that make it impossible for a woman to even think about, let alone have access to, "another man's penis."
These were codes which, at the same time they were being enforced to further restrict the sexual freedoms of women (with even the thought of violations punishable by death), were also the same codes and religious laws that allowed men clever ways to get around them, so much so that men always retained the maximum scope for their sexual freedoms.
If this sounds like a crude, hypocritical and tortuous double standard, then you too now have gained enough knowledge to fully understand a large part of the underlying meaning of the books of the three Abrahamic religions: Bible, the Torah, and the Koran.
Whenever this shameful but elaborate jerry-rigged Rube Goldberg culturally designed mechanism fails, as it invariably does, by definition, a "man's sacred family honor," has then been assaulted. Presumably this is true because, after all, man was the idiot who designed this fear-based sexual contraption in the first place. Therefore, to save himself from the embarrassment of his own invention, the Bedouin tribe's 2000-year old practice of stupidity based on sexual fear and insecurity, all Islamic women are forced to pay the ultimate price.
These psychologically diminished, objectified and enslaved women must live out their entire lives in fear of being murdered by their own male family members on suspicion of rebellion or sexual infidelity. That is to say, they must pay throughout their lives for crimes that may never be committed, and must pay with the whole of their psychological existence, and often with their lives.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
