Laughing with friends no more
Hira Anwar, 14, lived in two contrasting worlds in New York, where she was born and raised. Outside her home, she was a typical American teenager, laughing with friends, posting videos on TikTok and dreaming of a boundless future.
Inside the home, her reality was very different. Her parents, Pakistani immigrants who had settled in the United States over two decades ago, expected her to adhere to their cultural and religious values, which demanded modesty from women.
So laughing with friends, posting on TikTok, and dreaming of a future=not modest? She should be friendless, silent and invisible, hopeless?
That’s not modesty, it’s annihilation.
Hira was fatally shot by her father and an uncle on Monday night, several days after arriving in Pakistan on what she had been told was a family vacation, the police said. The authorities called her death an “honor killing.”
In a chilling confession in Quetta, the capital of the southwestern province of Balochistan, Hira’s father, Anwar ul-Haq, said she had brought shame to the family by posting what he called inappropriate videos online, the police said.
And so he murdered her.
Is there any room for affection in Islam? For jokes, chat, frivolity, laughter, exploration, friendship, interests, learning? Are women just tubes for the production of terrorized submissive girls or terrorizing domineering boys?
I have long maintained that Islam is entry-level fascism. And still do.
Dude. How hard is it to understand that there is nothing more ‘shameful’ to your family than killing your own child?
Honestly, if they want to at least slow the honor killing bullshit, they need to make the punishment castration. This would actually make the men afraid, since they won’t get to enjoy their 72 virgins.
I have also long maintained that the body of Osama bin Laden, instead of being given a respectful funeral at sea by the US Government, as it was, should have been placed in a steel trunk, immersed fully in pig shit, sealed up and ceremonially dumped into a very deep ocean.
No entry into Paradise and 72 virgins for him, no matter how many prayers were said. And an example and a warning to all his fellow Islamists.
Omar
I’m not above taking a certain grim satisfaction in fantasizing about making Bin Laden (or Hitler, or Anders Breivik, or Putin, or Trump, or…) pay in the most painful and humiliating ways imaginable, but I’m under no illusion that it would do anything to make their followers see the error of their ways and turn around. As they say, that last thing you want to do is turn your enemies into martyrs.
(And yes, I realize your comment was tongue in cheek).
Well said Ophelia. I fear, though, that this statement might fall foul of the definition proposed by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims: ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’ When the Labour MP Tahir Ali recently called in the House of Commons for laws to tackle Islamophobia, the Prime Minister passed up the opportunity to reaffirm his commitment to basic freedoms, and burbled instead about the need to tackle Islamophobia “in all its forms”.
Allah hates women; we get to hate him right back.
Sigh. Omar’s comment @ 3 wasn’t so much tongue in cheek as pointlessly vulgar – Trumpish, in short. The post isn’t even slightly about Osama bin Laden, or pig shit. The way submission to an evil male god prompts men to kill their own daughters and nieces is actually a serious subject and not an occasion for trashy jokes.
So the father had to wait till he had his daughter in an Islamic country? Not a very overwhelming sense of shame, was it? He had a pretty cool eye on what the law would let him get away with.
Islam is toxic. The best we can get is a watered-down, de-fanged version of Islam which has picked up enlightenment values and pretends that’s real Islam. Whenever it’s given free rein in society, it turns into this shit.
There’s like this weird civilizational curve to this sort of brutality. As a hunter gatherer you probably wouldn’t do it much if at all; daughters are a valuable resource for the tribe. Get enough surplus piled on and you can end up with “spares” that allow for honor culture status trading. Then further on there’s enough nicer ways to gain and display status that few even consider it.
It seems – I emphasise ‘seems’ – to me that these so-called ‘honour killings’ ‘(‘dishonourable; disgusting & cowardly murders’ more like) are particularly common among Muslims of Pakistani origin, and perhaps in Afghanistan ? Are they so common in other parts of the Muslim world, I wonder.
South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, per Encyclopedia Brittanica. A mostly, but not exclusively, among Muslims—Hindus do it as well.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/honor-killing
Thank you, Maroon. Oh, dear.
Well, it’s understandable. Women have two strikes – one, not as strong as men, two, the source of future people. They must be policed, and they’re easy to police.
Yeah, patriarchy in action.
(Also, my @11 should probably read “And Hindus”, if I can read my morning mind. I do so like starting sentences with conjunctions.)