Honor Lost
Love and Death in Modern Day Jordan
by Norma Khouri
Atria, 224 pp., $24 IMAGINE that you are an accountant, residing in your family home in Amman, Jordan, the father of four handsome sons and a twenty-five-year-old daughter. But you are troubled by news that your daughter has been seeing a Christian man. So, early one morning, you take a knife and stab her twelve times. You wait ten minutes to be sure she is dead. Then you call an ambulance.
The daughter's name was Dalia, and the nonfiction tale of her life and death is told by Norma Khouri in "Honor Lost." A poet and short story writer who composed this book secretly in an Internet café, and now a reluctant émigrée from Amman, Khouri was Dalia's closest friend. From the beauty salon they founded together, they ran headlong into the deadly rage that underlies the misogynistic culture of Arab men.
For a long time, we have been told that we need to develop a deeper understanding of Arab culture, contemplate its predicament, and not be so inclined to condemn a whole civilization. The antiglobalists, multiculturalists, and postmodernists have argued that tensions between the West and the Middle East are attributable entirely to the United States. The provenance of such conflict, the argument goes, resides in American ignorance of Arab history and culture.
Norma Khouri's "Honor Lost" won't incline the reader towards greater forbearance. Were a Jordanian man to murder his son, he would face severe penalties. Under Jordanian law, a son enjoys all the rights of a person, while a daughter is property. She can be sold to a suitor, abandoned, or put to death.
To be sure, even in Amman, the murder of a daughter requires some consideration by the police. But once that murder has been determined to be merely the result of an "honor killing," no further criminal investigation by the police ensues. As Khouri puts it, "someone charged with neglecting to wear a seat belt while driving faces stiffer penalties than the perpetrator of an honor crime. Where anyone found publicly criticizing the king automatically faces three years in prison, a man performing an honor killing spends less than three hours in front of the Sharia's courts."
Khouri's account makes graphically clear the moral gap separating the West from the Arab world. No Western system of ethics--not Kantianism, utilitarianism, Thomism, or any of the rest--is going to countenance the slaying of one's child because she was holding someone's hand. The chasm between the two civilizations appears in this simple act of touching--and reveals, along the way, the deep Arab fear and hatred of female sexuality. Rather than funnel the idea of a sexual woman into an artistic medium, for instance, Arab culture simply denies it--and kills it in the name of honor when it encounters a sign of it as small as the intertwining fingers of two people.
Khouri performs a valuable service to the West by presenting in moment-to-moment detail the tragedy of her friend Dalia's murder. She makes it clear that whether we understand it or not, the moral organization of the Arab world raises the question of whether or not the West can ever reach an accommodation with it.
This is not a matter of mere cultural difference, but of the core beliefs that define the boundaries of possible thought. Khouri does not appear to have meant to raise this question in "Honor Lost," but by the end of this short, powerful book, the reader cannot escape it.
Irwin Savodnik is a psychiatrist who teaches at UCLA.