Mick Hartley

Asra Q. Nomani, in the WSJ, reviews Katherine Zoepf’s book “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of the Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World”:

Ms. Zoepf has been reporting on the region since 2004, as a stringer for the New York Times and contributor to the New Yorker, and her book is like a “Lonely Planet” guide to the dark underbelly of the purity culture of Muslim societies. From Damascus to Jeddah—and, yes, now to the capitals of Western Europe—women who transgress their perceived “social responsibilities” in this matrix of honor and shame are fair targets for humiliation and violence.

In one particularly poignant chapter, Ms. Zoepf steps through the doors of a girls’ prison in Syria, where 16-year-old Zahra al-Azzo was jailed for being raped. (That’s right, they jailed her.) The prison is a sort of holding facility for girls like Zahra who are at risk of being murdered by their families in a so-called honor killing. Yet there is little to protect the young women once they leave. “One of the girls came to me, crying, the other day,” the head social worker tells Ms. Zoepf. “She wanted to go home and it’s an honor crime situation. I told her, ‘Try to relax here for a while because they’re going to kill you anyway when you’re released.’ It sounds cruel, but I needed to calm her down, to get her to behave sensibly.’”

Zahra was eventually freed from the prison in order to marry a cousin. Shortly thereafter, she was hacked to death in her apartment by her own brother—with the blessing of their parents. Zahra’s crime: “losing her virginity out of wedlock.” Her brother believed he was “washing away the shame” to the family. The day of her murder, Ms. Zoepf chronicles, the girl’s family threw a party….

Ms. Zoepf gingerly traces the roots of twisted practices, such as honor killings, to Islamic concepts such as fitna, or the “chaos” that is often connected to “temptation of a sexual nature.” Quoting a prominent male Syrian women’s-rights advocate, Bassam al-Kadi,she notes that the current state of Arab politics has only made matters worse. “Arab society’s attachment to the idea of personal honor as something bound inextricably to the virtue of female relatives was becoming even deeper than it had been historically. Partly this was a result of the wave of Islamization that had been sweeping the Arab world since the 1980s,” she writes, summarizing Mr. al-Kadi’s argument. The “obsession with the control of female sexuality” is, she notes, a “symptom of political despair.” As Mr. al-Kadi puts it: “No one talks about loyalty to country, about professional honor. Now it’s just the family, the tribe, the woman. That’s the only kind of honor we have left.”