Islamic Law

The Death of a Muslim Woman [Excerpts]

In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe? The deaths have sparked momentary outrage, but will they change the grim reality for Muslim women?

Hatin Surucu just wanted to live her own life. Instead, she became Berlin's latest victim of honor killings. Her Turkish Muslim brothers allegedly gunned her down for adopting Western ways.

Hatin's crime, it appears, was the desire to lead a normal life in her family's adopted land. The vivacious 23-year-old beauty, who was raised in Berlin, divorced the Turkish cousin she was forced to marry at age 16. She also discarded her Islamic head scarf, enrolled in a technical school where she was training to become an electrician and began dating German men. For her family, such behavior represented the ultimate shame -- the embrace of "corrupt" Western ways. Days after the crime, police arrested her three brothers, ages 25, 24 and 18. The youngest of the three allegedly bragged to his girlfriend about the Feb. 7 killing. At her funeral, Hakin's Turkish-Kurdish parents draped their only daughter's casket in verses from the Koran and buried her according to Muslim tradition. Absent of course, were the brothers, who were in jail.

Precise statistics on how many women die every year in such honor killings are hard to come by, as many crimes are never reported, said Myria Boehmecke of the Tuebingen-based women's group Terre des Femmes which, among other things, tries to protect Muslim girls and women from oppressive families. The Turkish women's organization Papatya has documented 40 instances of honor killings in Germany since 1996.

In many cases, fathers -- and sometimes even mothers -- single out their youngest son to do the killing, Boehmecke said, "because they know minors will get lighter sentences from German judges."

The November murder in neighboring Holland of filmmaker Theo van Gogh -- who was shot and stabbed to death by an Islamic extremist angry over his depiction of the violence inflicted on Muslim women in forced marriages -- galvanized the Netherlands and sent shock waves across Europe. As a result, Germans, too, began to take a second look at the 3.2 million immigrants -- 2.5 million of whom are Turkish -- living among them and to talk about the serious flaws of the nation's 1960's immigration policies. The program brought thousands of Turkish workers to Germany, but provided no real means of integrating the Muslim Turks or helping them understand Western concepts like individualism, human rights and equality. Now, Cileli said, perhaps, honor killings and other horrors experienced by Muslim women will finally be given the scrutiny they have long deserved (Jody K. Biehl, Spiegel Online - March 2, 2005, Berlin).