From Berlin
Now that the nonsense is out of the way – on to a very interesting article in the NY Times that starts from the murder (the ‘honour killing’) of Hatun Surucu and the trial of her brothers which began in September, and moves on to the large and familiar subject of women in Muslim immigrant enclaves in Germany.
Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu’s capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German…It’s still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women on this topic, explained, “The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering.” By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother’s life – her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage.
That makes a horrible kind of sense. If their daughters don’t want to do what they did, what does that say about what they did? That’s a familiar situation with parents and children in general. The intrinsic sadness of what is known as upward mobility is that parents often see their children educated out of their reach, or at least out of easy communication.
When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to practicing law is the author of “The Great Journey Into the Fire”; Necla Kelek (“The Foreign Bride”); and Serap Cileli (“We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor”)…Taking off from their own experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model Western democracy known as Germany.
There were signs, but the author (a German man himself) didn’t worry about them much.
For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale district of Charlottenburg. But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like me didn’t care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for which there is only one word: slavery.
Tolerance of what, is always the question. One we’re finally remembering to ask.
Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There have been 49 known “honor crimes,” most involving female victims, during the past nine years – 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the “miscellaneous” column along with other family tragedies and given a five-line treatment. Indeed, it’s possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was “not in keeping with the religious regulations.” Volker Steffens, the school’s director, decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and teachers. More than anything else, it was the students’ open praise of the murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and soon of all Germany.
Well, a good thing something did. (Well done Herr Steffens.)
For more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City officials aren’t in a position to control Islamic religious instruction…Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming and sports as well as class outings…Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques in Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they continue to address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities are gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose home page – until a recent revision – praised the attacks of Sept. 11, designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals. “And that kind of thing,” she says, fuming, “is still defended by the left in the name of religious freedom.”
Just so. And not just in Germany, as we know.
This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a frontal assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are fighting on two fronts – against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. “Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these mountains of German guilt,” Seyran Ates complains. It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.
Which is exactly what Maryam Namazie and Azam Kamguian and Homa Arjomand and Ayaan Hirsi Ali – in the UK, Canada, the Netherlands – also say. Multiculturalism, religious freedom, diversity, tolerance, guilt – they leave Muslim women in the lurch.
The fact is that disregard for women’s rights – especially the right to sexual self-determination – is an integral component of almost all Islamic societies, including those in the West. Unless this issue is solved, with a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the West, there will never be a successful acculturation. Islam needs something like an Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their own Enlightenment, with its separation of religion and state, can the Western democracies persuade their Muslim residents that human rights are universally valid. Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary for integration to succeed. “We Western Muslim women,” Seyran Ates says, “will set off the reform of traditional Islam, because we are its victims.”
And they’re doing it now. Best of luck, all.
Just to backtrack on that a little, as a way, perhaps, of illustrating some prevalent attitudes, midway between the murder and the beginning of the trial, the May edition of Berlin’s English-language monthly ran a story on it. The lead-in to the piece read: “Three German women are killed every four days by men with whom they used to live and one woman in three reports physical violence. But it has taken just one murder in a Muslim family and sloppy reporting in the media to stir up all-too-stereotypical anti-Muslim sentiments.” Later on,in the same article, an anthropologist who is frequently called on as an expert witness in these cases was quoted: “I believe that if the brothers killed [her], it was a means to empowerment and not to regain some lost honor.”
I find it highly ironic that many of the liberal multiculturists in the West are adamantly opposed to making value judgments about other cultures and disparage the idea of universal human rights – yet it is perfectly valid for some of these cultures to make value judgments involving the oppression, mutilation, and sometimes death of the women within them. What, these judgments are valid only because they apply within their society and they aren’t making value judgments about Western women?
The hell they’re not making value judgements about Western women! The approving comments the schoolchildren made about the murder that made it a real news story were to the effect that she deserved to die because she lived like a German woman. That’s not a value judgement?
I wasn’t clear. I absolutely agree that they are making value judgments about Western women.
I meant to say – do some in the liberal West think that as long as certain value judgments are made only within other cultures they are immmune from criticism?
Unfortunately, the answer to that question does seem to be “yes.”
Oh, gawd. Just for one thing – “anti-Muslim sentiments” – well that’s a joke! Don’t the women count as Muslims? Is it only men – and only a certain kind of men – who are Muslims? And then what the anthropologist said – ! “Empowerment.” Sure – hey if you feel alienated and have a grievance, empower yourself, kill your sister.
Thanks for that, Stewart.
How about looking at it this way: is either empowerment or regaining lost honour a better or worse reason than the other to kill one’s sister? Is either a more mitigating circumstance in the eyes of the law? Or is the main difference between them that people have an idea that honour killings happen too often in societies where Islam holds sway, that it is, in fact, a term that doesn’t really apply to discussions of non-Islamic societies? And is that then an incentive to find something else to call it? An attempt to find a way to remove what was done from the context of applied Sharia family law? Funny how a need for empowerment so great that it enabled someone to shoot his sister in the face three times happened to coincide with her near-attainment of independence…
An excellent point, Stewart. It hints at what I was trying to get at with the question in my previous post.A cultural relativist makes no judgments about values within another culture, and this is done often at a distance – the culture is geographically distant and homogenous. But now we have the intersection of two cultures, in which value judgments are made in reference to both. Was the woman a devout German Muslim, a secular Muslim living in Germany, was she subject to German law, was she subject to Sharia law? Thus the incentive for some to change an honor killing to empowerment.
I did get your point when you first made it, but you’d phrased it in such a way that left this giant loophole, to which I reacted. Yes, I can quite easily conceive that the perceived distance between cultures lets people get away with what are really double standards. And in the first of the two quotes I brought, about 3 German women killed every 4 days “by men with whom they used to live,” the implied comparison is with domestic violence tending towards crimes of passion. It doesn’t appear to relate to those killed by siblings, let alone three brothers acting in concert. So why bring the unrelated figure, if not to lead, as if with the second quote (including the words “I believe”) away from the particulars that emphasis that the woman was killed by a brother or brothers (I don’t think the details as given in NYT were already known then – some of that had to wait till the trial) in the context of her independence from her Muslim family?
Oh, yes, and let’s make the sweeping assumption that in those “3 every 4 days” cases of German women, most of the victims were either Christians or atheists. Will one find any cases at all in which Christian or atheist schoolchildren will be found to say they had it coming to them because of the way they lived? There is a damned good reason beyond the murder itself that this case made all those headlines.
I don’t remember the source and it did concern child abuse, but the statistic was that 70% of the abused become abusers themselves (whether this was with or without treatment wasn’t stated, but I assume that this is without treatment). This is a statistic that sticks in my mind, so that, although shocked, I am not surprised if the mother ordered the killing.
If a cultural relativist is reading this, could you answer one question, why should the allies have stopped the Nazi genocide programmes as this surely was only a cultural expression, like wife-beating, head-hunting, cannibalism, or indeed any act that an obvious ‘cultural imperialist’ like myself would regard as an abuse?
[Actually the source of my statistic is from a Batman graphic novel (yes, a comic), but it did come from a legitimate source in turn. The story was about Batman infiltrating a group of child abusers.]
Mike Rogers – Abuse Macht Frei…
I don’t know if it’s actually 70%, but I know the figure is very high because my girlfriend works with extremely abused (all kinds) teenagers, and this is exactly the problem. The abused abuse.
But let’s not forget a cultural relativist probably wouldn’t see this as abuse… their position would by nature, sell it as empowerment, liberation, or some made up term only they know.
God this species is fubar-ed….
Do the cultural relativists ever realise how self-contradictory their position is? What is the proposition that you shouldn’t make value-judgements about other cultures if not a proposed universal value – just what the relativists say is impossible.
For example, let’s assume for the sake of argument that western society is as racist and imperialistic as its fiercest critics say it is – they then have no basis for criticising it, because hey, that’s our culture.
In practice, they’re universalists or relativists depending on which regimes or groups are seen as ‘progressive’ at the time. I didn’t hear too much cultural relativism from the left at the time of the Pinochet trial, for example; it was all universal human rights then (and quite right too).
The logic of cultural relativism is that you shouldn’t support Amnesty, or the universal declaration of human rights. But they never draw these conclusions.
I think the real principle is – cultural relativism applies to any group which is (or can be claimed to be) opposed to the west. Everyone else is subject to universal values.
Personally I prefer to start from the standpoint that we’re all human, and no-one wants to be beaten up or murdered, and take that as the starting-point for my values. Why does that seem so unfashionable?
But beating up (or even murdering) some people (typically the rebellious…or women) is perfectly fashionable, Harry in most circles in the world. It’s for their own good, don’t you know?
Or, at least the thrashin’ provides a nice example for those thinking of straying from the mandates of the loving God.
The front page of yesterday’s Boston Globe (2006-1-16)carried the story of Hatun Surucu and the unjustifiably harsh treatment she received for simply wanting to live her life independently.
This past fall I read Fatima Mernissi’s book, Le Harem politique: le Prophete et les femmes (1987). I learned that the Prophet Mohammed was kind to women and articulated a public policy in support of equal rights between men and women. I wish more Muslims could find out about this side of their religious leader and look to him as a role model in these respects.