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Honour-crimes between the agreement of the state
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and the ignorance of the citizen
D. Essam Aboud
These cases are very much connected with the state’s ability to control their culturally determined instruments, in their confrontation with the state in view of the social crises it still experiences. It is possible that some still effective inferior traditional influences in society do exist and leave a bad reputation
The power of the state cannot be divided, but extends to all fields of its society and to all activities therein, which should conform with the existing laws, because law is considered by all standards the clearest significant regulator of the state’s situation in its relations with cultural values in society, since they are the biggest challenges for its institutions to master the problems of our time and to introduce human rights and to foster the beginnings of social justice and human rights.
Mankind has passed through numerous and consecutive phases since its beginnings, until it has reached the phase of positive law, which can be considered as a socially responsible age and as an agreement of honour between the state and its citizens. It can be assumed that that agreement has eliminated long phases of the family- and tribe-conflicts and that it has regulated the relations inside and outside of families (in a family-centered society), and that it has made ultimately and definitively an end to all forms of social division because of the strengthening of unity in society and of unity in the state as an institution. Those times, when the individual was king of the family or the tribe, have ended and he has become a citizen subordinated to the state both with rights and duties. The state has the right to call somebody to account: if he does not fulfill his duties towards the state or if he violates its laws. The citizen has the right towards the state to demand protection for his life and possessions. It is also his right to demand that the state protect his dignity as a human being. The existence of a law, which grants the right to murder to defend ones honour – 548 - is in accordance with all existing standards considered as an infringement of the convention of honour concluded between state and citizen, of the right of the citizen, of any citizen and not only of the one, who has become a victim of that traditional customary law.
Any citizen will feel that an important part of his human dignity is humiliated when he sees or hears that a human has died unjustly and that the state has consented directly or indirectly in the murder. The honour-crime is considered an action of murder with intent, which in such a case the state seems to allow or to conceal under the pretense of accepting feelings, which belong to ancient times (the honour), to customs and traditions, the popular heritage and so on… In those times those customs and traditions had some legal foundation, emerging from a primitive cultural level of society. But nowadays, those principles and the values which could justify any action of murder outside of just judicial legislation concerned with the safety of the society and the integrity of the citizen, have disappeared. What then does honour mean? Is there still somebody who is asking for the limits of honour in a time, when the civilizing process of the world has started to overthrow this concept and when these conventions and values have been changed to support and strengthen the dignity of the individual human being. The individual first became a member of the family or the tribe, until continual and fast progress and development became more pressing to control the norms and to strengthen the values, which could harmonize the high forms, which the limits and values of human dignity had reached.
Honour is an idea belonging to moral consciousness, or it is a moral comment which informs about the situation of a society compared with the general cultural level which that society has reached. Through the history of progress of human societies that concept took on numerous forms which always and constantly indicated the level of progress in the values relevant to the humanity of human beings.
In former times the punishment for disgrace was killing the offender, and in that time the individual was the ruler of his family or his tribe, because society in general did not possess institutions which could care for its citizens inside the frontiers of a society wider than the frontiers of the tribe and from this point law became customary secular law as part of the peculiar features of a society, which is convinced that any moral value outside the frame of the values of their own community and its principles are disgraceful and that the only retaliation to this disgrace can be the punishment of the offender by killing. That act of killing happened in accordance with the norms of the tribe, which were generally acknowledged by all its members. Who ever possessed (something) could dispose of his property as he wanted to. The father had authority over the members of his family, and, consequently he was able to dispose of them as he wanted to. Those customary laws which prevailed during any time of the history of human kind were a logical expression of the limits, in which the narrow tribal society was confined without a wider human horizon.
The different moral customs and different habits differ with the difference of the times. Therefore, every epoch requires the redefinition of social conditions, which determine the suitable moral pattern to a great extent. To the obligation of the state belongs to create suitable conditions for its citizens, so that they may be able to assess the situation and the significance of terms and conceptions and values, which in the end are compatible with the requirements of each phase of its development. If the state itself is the one who helps the citizen in that wrong assessment of the situation of the honour as a term and value, that state will become involved in the moral work with all its implications. When murder under the pretense of honour is committed outside the frontiers of the regulating law which is intended to regulate the situation in the society, and when, if the law is applied it can be called an action of intended and willful malicious murder, and when then the state is the one who undertakes the falsification of this situation - a humane behaviour which does not belong to this time - it will loose its credibility as a state with its citizens, because the relations between the state and its citizens are the first thing which becomes visible when the idea of justice is applied, while justice is realized by the statutes of law. The values of former times are unaccountable, and in this way the state tolerates a deviation of the cultural foundations to an odd world different from our time, far away from the merits which can build a society, which should be based on science in laying its foundations and consolidating its social structures.
The doctrine of contempt for the body was followed by the elimination of the initial forms of the human societies and for long ages the Arabic society in general has boasted with slogans that are connected with the freedom of women and the equality between women and men and the realization of social justice. This is simply part of the hypocrisy which the Arabic society practices in front of the world. In reality they make a faked or artificial appearance of civilization, while the society still lives with the obsession of testicles and the length of the penis as a symbol of power and the vulva and the female cavity as a symbol of weakness. This is not the fault of the legislator who creates laws under the pressure of the power resulting from the patronage of the length of the penis of the man and under the pressure of the indulgence of the weakness resulting from the shadows of the vulva of the woman and the problem of her cavity. The faults extend to embrace all educational institutions in the society, because the reality, in which we live and in which the freedom of women can be realized takes concrete forms, is a more modest kind of continued slavery. Although there are political and economic interests and influences which want to stop progress at a certain level, and keep it under the rule of the penis against femininity, either under the cover of religion or under that of popular traditions, this requires one real step at once. And this step will be to increase the free will inside the human being itself, and this human being is the only one who possesses the right to decide how the future will.
The education of the human being from the inside is the only way with which it is possible to oppose all crises which are involved with this moral issue of foremost cultural importance in society.
If we could set free the slogan of equality and social justice of its theoretical form so that it could come out to us from the darkness of the hidden caves under the ashes, dozens of preachers and poets and people who argue like the pseudo-intelligentsia would preach and compose poems and they would give attention to the equality of men and women. But if we move forward in the direction of this equality only step by step, these appeals will come back to us with daggers and knifes and axes by announcing they defend the honour of the society and its traditions and popular heritage.
Is this man who trusts in the qualities of his masculinity, freed from the weight of his testicles and the length of his penis, able to accept justice and equality for him and between him and women? Is he able to accept a similar punishment in case he should commit the same action? Surely not, and we, we do not demand that, but only that if the man was able to step out of his coat of pseudo-masculinity, he should put on his real coat which becomes like his humanity. Looking at this problem from this point of view, these crises would have disappeared since long, because man in this situation will accept the idea as a foregone conclusion. The idea is that the concept of honour has changed, and that this primary form has changed in the way we look at the body. With regard to the human being, its freedom and the equality and the social justice, this has become relic of the past.
The honour crimes are nothing but one model of dozens of models which reflect the existence of obstacles in the way of the emergence of a real human society which belongs to this time.
Do we not have in the end a good reason and the right to ask: From where do those enthusiastic speeches come which increase and spread visions here and there, a vision about democracy, another about civil society, and a third about freedom for human beings, equality and social justice, and so on. From where does it come to us and how are we able to make one step in the direction of the realization of these notions in our land and for the dignity of the fatherland. We will not be pessimistic if we say that we will not be able to undertake one step if the same established things, the same values the same principles linger on. We are not even able to define a concrete truth in accordance with these perspectives. As a society we are moving towards an abyss, if we do not do a first step now in this difficult period through which the Arabic society as a whole is just passing. Because the first thing this society needs, is to belong to the current culture with its cognitive instruments and its positive concepts and its level of civilization. And from now for any generation, we hope that it will the next generation or the following one at the latest, because time will not grant us a respite more than that to pave the way and to lay down the foundations for building that society which is able to realize those concepts and values. For sure, this is an action which does not only need theorizing, but needs to reestablish the institutions, especially the educational ones, and to reestablish the drafting of laws. With that we will be able to dream of a bright future in which the prevailing social consciousness changes and it will leave its primitive and tribal stages in order to belong to human culture and participate in its construction.
Assistant professor
University of Damascus – Faculty of arts – Philosophy section |
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