A “Cultural” Offense/Defense-But For the Prosecution. Some Thoughts for the Prosecutor of the Buffalo Beheading.

The profile of a classical honor killing is one in which a young girl or young woman in an Islamist household is, from a modern, western, and feminist point of view, kept secluded and subordinate, normatively abused, force-veiled at a young age, and held to a 7th-8th century view of woman’s honor and family honor as practiced in the past and still today among many people in the Muslim Middle East, in the increasingly Arabized Islamic world in Asia, and in Muslim immigrant communities in the West.

For the first time, in the wake of the Buffalo beheading, Muslim-American organizations who routinely claim that honor killings have nothing to do with Islam are now saying that a classical honor killing involves the murder of a young girl or woman by multiple family members. It does. I have shown this to be so in my study, just published in Middle East Quarterly HERE. The Muslim organizations are not necessarily admitting that such a killing is related to Islam, but they are admitting that honor killings do exist, separate and apart from western-style domestic violence/femicide. And, to be fair, many individuals and organization leaders are also condemning such murders in grave and heartbroken voices.

Alas, they are now doing so, loud and clear, in order to make the point that Muzammil Hassan’s “alleged” beheading of his wife, Aasiya Z. Hassan, does not fit the profile of a classical honor killing-and, of course, that Islam has nothing to do with it…Continue reading on Chesler Chronicles >>