Jordanian speaker fights Middle Eastern honor killings with history, peace, culture

Every year, 5,000 women—including three in the United States last year—are murdered for dishonoring their families. In response to these atrocities, Ahmad Ghashmari, a Jordanian Ph.D. student at Kent State University, has made it his mission to combat these honor killings across the globe.

Ghashmari was brought to Vassar by Project Nur—a secular, Muslim, intercampus student group created by the American Islamic Congress—and gave a lecture in Rockefeller Hall on Oct. 30. There were six students in attendance.

"In the Middle Eastern part of Africa and the Persian gulf, women are traditionally looked at as property to men," he said, trying to help the audience put themselves in the mindset of traditional Jordanian villagers. "If something bad happened to her, it's all the responsibility of men, and if she does something bad, they feel that the man has the right to fix it."

For the most part, said Ghashmari, these killings have to do with extramarital affairs. "In Islamic culture, women are not supposed to have relationships with men who are not their relatives unless they are married," he explained.

"If a woman is caught having a sexual affair with a man, in most cases, the man stabs the woman to death," Ghashmari continued. "Sometimes it's only suspicion because there isn't this idea of friendship between women and men outside of the family."

At present, Jordanian law requires that men who commit honor killings receive lenient sentences, usually three to six months in prison. All legislation to undo this provision has thus far been defeated by a wide margin, and women who try to seek protective custody are essentially put into prison and can only be released when a male relative comes to take them home, after which they are usually murdered.

Ghashmari, now 24, began his campaign when he was 19 years old after he heard about an honor killing on the news. He went to the victim's village to investigate the incident and found that it had all started when she was raped.

First, "[her family] arranged a marriage with a very old man from another village who didn't know the family, and they covered up the [rape], but it didn't work. The man knew, and he divorced her, and he returned her to the family…so they shot her," he said.

Shocked by these events, he decided to become an activist for women's rights. "It's so terrible—I couldn't understand how they could do this," he said.

At his college, Ghashmari created a student group that began spreading awareness about honor killings. "Student volunteers went to live in villages for several weeks or a month and talked to people who have gone through this experience to learn how they think," he said.

A major issue that Ghashmari continuously stresses is that honor killings are "not a religious thing; it is a traditional thing," meaning that honor killings are not a core tenant of Islam, but just a practice engrained in some Middle Eastern cultures.

In addition, the killings are not localized to Jordan, but occur worldwide, which is why Ghashmari is giving lectures in many countries outside of the Middle East. "[Honor killing] is not an issue of Jordan or of Egypt or of Syria: The issue is all over," he said.

Furthermore, Ghashmari contended that change cannot be imposed upon the culture from the outside, but has to come from within. "Other initiatives [to abolish honor killings] got the idea wrong. They never studied the culture; they never lived with the people and worked with them. They think that what applies to the West can apply to any culture in the Middle East, and this is a fallacy," he explained.

"You have to open your eyes and look within your culture and your history. The answers lie there, within your culture," said Ghashmari. To combat honor killings, Ghashmari educates people about women within Muslim history who have held positions of power. For instance, the Prophet Mohammad worked for his wife, Khadija, who was a successful businesswoman, and there were a number of female caliphs.

"[Muslims] love to be around their culture or their history…when you give them examples from their history or culture they do accept it as it is—they don't even question," he said. Ghashmari's hope is that if he can turn enough people in support of women's rights, the Parliament will pass legislation imposing harsher punishments on people who kill women in the name of honor and put more focus on basic rights.

"We want to see our constitution being separated from tradition because sometimes some traditions cannot be justified—people stick to them and nobody can oppose them, but sometimes you can't justify them—who said that a woman is property of a man?"