International

In this article, the author argues that it is mostly societal traditions and customs that drive people to resort to ‘crimes of honour’ – which she describes as “shameful, irreligious acts”. She states that in Islam it is a sin to take people's lives in one's own hands. Crimes of honor are therefore social in the full sense of the word. Perpetrators see it as 'social cleansing of shame', and seeking the community's approval. The author uses the example of Jordan, one of the countries that has the highest rate of such crimes, to argue her point.

The Muslim Women’s League argues that the circumcision of girls, in any form, predated Islam by many centuries. It was practiced in some parts of Arabia at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and was evidently a custom of the time that may have been a practice of some but not all of the local tribes. As a pre-established tradition, therefore, female circumcision was not introduced by the Prophet to the early Muslim community.

This book contains the contributions of participants at a seminar, organised by the Consulate General of Sweden in Istanbul, and titled ‘International Seminar on Violence in the Name of Honour’ (4-6 December 2003). The first section of the book – ‘Theoretical Explorations of Honour Killings’ – methodologically and theoretically examines honour violence, including considering prevention, short and long term intervention, post-colonial contexts and the need for contextualisation.

This paper seeks to distinguish culture as it is lived and practised in its fluid and contradictory forms from cultural identity projects that construct it in homogenous and static terms. Cultural projects hide issues of domination, othering and identities both within and amongst cultural groupings – complexities that must be revealed rather than concealed. By positing culture as hostile to women’s equality, cultural identity projects create a binary that simplifies and conceals complex issues of politics, power and representation.