In the Name of Allah, the Most Merciful

Every year many women are killed in the name of honor. Honor is such a primitive concept that one hopes that with urbanization, like the depleting food stocks, this concept will also go away. But it doesn't. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in 2007, 1205 women were reported to have been killed in the name of honor. In 2006, 565 women were killed and in 2005 the number was 287. Each year the number is doubling and while most women are killed for having illicit relations, some are also killed for marrying a man of their choice.

Honor functions as an opiate in backward societies like that of Pakistan. But before we go any further, we must clarify what is honor because it remains a widely misunderstood concept. Some believe honor to be self-respect originating from years of discipline, value and status. So automatically people with no status are freed from the shackles of honor - finally some relief for the poor! The dictionary definition of honor is a concept of direct relation between one's virtues and their status within society. In many societies honor by and large remains an external concept of the worth and stature assigned to an individual by the society. So in a way it is evaluation by the society of a person's "character" and actions. Just as character, a woman's honor is also tied closely to her sexuality. Combined with religion and tribalism, honor seeks to subjugate women, and a woman is killed justifiably in the name of honor by her own family for having defiled the family's honor.

Many believe honor killing to be a problem plaguing only the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA where according to the 1973 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, High Courts and Supreme Court of Pakistan have no jurisdiction. A Tribal Court or Jirga is the only path known to justice in the rocky region that comprises over 2% of Pakistan's population. These Jirgas are notorious for child marriages, and marriage to the Koran to settle personal feuds. Over the past many years, jirgas have also publicly executed adults if found guilty of committing an honor crime. But taking into the consideration the proximity to the Taliban and the remoteness of basic necessities of life such as health care, education and employment one may be willing, albeit hesitatingly, to look away. But in parts of Pakistan, urban and rural, where the courts do have jurisdiction we see a definite clash between the law of honor and the rule of law. In the southern province of Sindh, the tradition in the rural areas used to be that a man would kill his enemy and then go home and kill his wife and allege that his wife was having an affair with the other man, which would legitimize the double murder and he would be pardoned by the court.

In 2004, the government of Pakistan passed a bill making honor killing punishable under the same penal provisions as murder. However, the government did not alter the provisions whereby the accused could negotiate pardon with the victim's family under the Islamic legislation enacted by General Zia-ul-Haq. So, in most cases of honor killing this is how the story goes: Girl meets the guy, girl falls in love with the guy, the family opposes their union, one member of the girl's family kills the girl, and the rest of the family pardons the murderer because they are legally allowed to do so. While one may admire the close familial bond that the East is famous for, one cannot help but question the law and the meagre price of a girl's life in Pakistan.

I recently met a young girl whose name is unimportant because she is not unique, nor is her story. At the age of twenty this nameless girl fell in love with a boy, Bollywood style. She wanted to marry him because in the movies love always seems so accomplishable. Her family chose a strange and violent way of showing their dissent. To deter the girl from this childish notion of love, her family killed the boy and chopped his body into several pieces and promised her the same destiny. And they were successful! As a result, the girl is now afraid for her life and running away from her family. The nameless heroine of this not-so-bollywood story knows that these are not empty threats, not only because the family has shown her what they are capable of doing by killing her lover but also because she sees murders being committed to safeguard a family's honor with total impunity in Pakistan. Not too long ago, a woman from the same shelter where our nameless heroine is hiding a girl was killed by her mother and uncle at her lawyer's office and nobody got punished by the law except for the murdered girl. Our heroine now knows the ground realities of love and life in Pakistan. She also knows that the grim reality of death is that there is nothing remotely Bollywood about it.

We have seen in Pakistan that laws are not easy to change, especially when they are enacted by the US-supported dictators who imported Islam to Pakistan and prescribed the "chaadar aur chaar-divari" pill for women. The weight of chaadar on a woman's head has transformed sexuality into a burden and the walls of chaar-divari have sought to imprison women behind the closed doors in a manner that one step towards overtly expressing sexuality becomes a crime of the highest degree, the one with moral stamp on it.

As hard as this chaadar aur chaar-divari pill might be to swallow, I wonder if this is the only viable solution for the women of Pakistan. Love is a natural instinct and as a teenager and in my early twenties, I used to believe that love is the saviour of all. But now knowing what I know and seeing how love is curbed at the cost of human life, I question the role and necessity of love, after all we do get just one life to live and if we are dead, that is the end of our story. I don't believe in fate, I don't believe in lies and I don't believe in Allah, but I question if a life of lie and deceit, beginning with the name of Allah and narrowing down and eventually ending in an artificially created and suffocating grave is the fate for the women of Pakistan.