Читать книгу Honor, Face, and Violence - Mine Krause - Страница 13

1. Honor cultures

Introduction to honor cultures: Gender-specific, collectivistic honor

The concept of honor is a traditional one, deeply rooted in the ancient culture of desert tribes. We can understand honor generally as “the concept that structures the value of individuals and groups within a wider social context” (Oprisko 31). By linking practices throughout society, and mutually configuring cognitive, libidinal-aesthetic, and ethico-political regions, it is “the axiological total social fact” (Oprisko 48, 146) – as the definite article “the” indicates, not just one among several.³⁶ It also “shaped the formation of both Western and Islamic family law” (Hussain 227). Such an understanding associates value study and the sociology of circular, reciprocal obligation. Especially relevant in our context is the external rather than internal honor system (as in Stewart 32). On this basis, as a social and relational process, honor hinges upon an individual’s “internalization of the identification with the value that the group has so inscribed” (Oprisko 113). Such internalization can occur to individually differing degrees.

Through the centuries, reflections about the significance of honor have accompanied humanity all over the world. However, for our purposes we are less concerned with honor values in connection with military conflicts or male-male insults. Today certain honor-related behavioral codes are of more concern to honor cultures, which include the Middle East, Mediterranean countries, South America, and some North African regions, than they are to so-called dignity cultures such as Europe and North America (according to Leung and Cohen).³⁷ ←31 | 32→In this context we wish to emphasize that the term “culture” is not necessarily co-extensive with any particular nation or country, since within them there are likely to be regions, communities, and individuals not bound by such codes.³⁸ When it comes to the respective manifestations of this virtue, two main dichotomies should be mentioned: while in dignity cultures, honor is perceived as a gender-neutral and individualistic value, in honor cultures it is regarded as gender-specific and largely collectivistic.³⁹

Firstly, in dignity cultures the expression “honor” can include notions of morality, dignity, good reputation, honesty, integrity, or sincerity which, at least ideally, do not necessarily depend on a person’s gender or on an evaluation of one’s self by the outside world (see Leung and Cohen, Üskül et al., Severance et al.): “[…] every person, simply by virtue of his or her humanity, is one whose dignity calls for our respect. Nothing we do or suffer can deprive us of the dignity that belongs to each person” (Meilaender 7). This is a modern formulation of Immanuel Kant’s eloquently presented principles in his 1797 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre (6:434–35). In terms of such a concept of dignity, “the notion of comparing or weighing values has no place at all” (Meilaender 86). It would, however, be wrong to assume that in the geographical areas called dignity cultures individuals cannot suffer from a negative moral reputation or will not be rejected by others (Ermers 34–35). Individuals can “attempt” to project their will, but without psychological liberty “do not need to do so successfully” (Oprisko 126). In honor cultures, at any rate, the honor value more often goes hand in hand with explicit, gender-specific behavioral guidelines that must be followed.⁴⁰

←32 | 33→

As many instances which we are about to discuss will show, an attempt to erase difference actually magnifies it – which becomes evident in the ensuing fear of an overwhelming Otherness, requiring obsessive concern for boundary maintenance. The concept of honor is closely associated with social appearances and external judgement by family members, friends and neighbors: in honor-shame communities, honor concerns “a person’s worth in the eyes of others,” not a private sense of self (Churchill 79). Internal honor all but merges with external honor. Yet their difference per se, which is more than diversity or Otherness, has a prior value, if we can assume that difference is essential to explain real experience with attention to its coming about, its genetic conditions (see for instance Deleuze 36 ff.). Honoring is a “social process,” one that often requires a story, a narration, whereas dignity clearly has a “personal nature” (Oprisko 121). Pierre Bourdieu has offered a microcausal, agent-centered account of honor in relation to gender and to face: inscribed in the body, the ethic of male honor “requires a man to face up to others and look them in the eye”; it signifies “to face, face up to, and in the upright posture” (Masculine 17, 27). This bridges the two types of culture we are analyzing. Honor in this sense is an “investment in the social games” in which men, “the holders of the monopoly of the instruments of production and reproduction of symbolic capital, aim to secure the conservation or expansion of this capital” (Masculine 48).⁴¹ Their games are aptly synonymized with a ludic practice, a “fundamental illusio” (Masculine 48, 74).⁴² The honor ethic is thus “the self-interest ethic of social formations […] in whose patrimony symbolic capital figures prominently” (Outline 48).

The gender-related connotations of honor in honor cultures have been examined by Cihangir, Rodriguez Mosquera et al., King, Sev’er and Yurdakul, and ←33 | 34→Meeker, among others. A woman’s violation of behavioral guidelines has a direct impact on the proper functioning of family life, in the symbolic violence of masculine domination (as diagnosed by Bourdieu). King points out that “namus” is “a term borrowed from Arabic to Kurdish, Farsi, Turkish, and related languages” (King 61), referring to a woman’s sexual honor or female chastity as “a sacred quality, mirrored in communal opinion, modeled on communal convention” (Meeker 268), which needs to be protected by all means. While the honor-specific expressions vary depending on the respective language, it can nevertheless be claimed that there is a tendency to distinguish linguistically between male and female honor in honor cultures (which can sometimes even lead to translation problems because languages of “dignity cultures” mostly lack such linguistic nuances).

Sev’er and Yurdakul state that “şeref” (which is the Turkish equivalent of the Arabic “sharaf”) is “androcentric.” Churchill also describes “sharaf” as mainly used to describe a man’s honor (87): “sharaf is generally not ascribed to women, and certainly never in virtue of feminine traits”; male honor is dynamic, which means that it can “increase or decrease; likewise, it can be lost and then regained.” Being dependent on social judgment, it is equally exposed to competition. In contrast, namus is a type of sexual honor that presupposes physical and moral qualities that women ought to have” (Sev’er and Yurdakul 972–73).⁴³ Reddy argues in a similar vein by underlining the “dualistic notions of male ‘honour’ and female ‘shame’, whereby masculinity is largely constructed in terms of female chastity” (“Gender” 307). Cihangir, Çetin, Glick et al., Sakallı Uğurlu and Akbaş, King, Meeker and others associate “namus” with “female chastity,” and in this context mention gender-specific honor codes in honor cultures.⁴⁴ As soon as a ←34 | 35→woman’s “namus” is lost, honor immediately turns into a group value since the whole family’s reputation is ruined. The idea of “honor surrounding female chastity and self-restraint” is associated with the expression “ird” (Abu-Rabia 34; see also Rexvid 23 and Awwad, “Virginity” 106), which means “absolute chastity” (Churchill 89; Ermers 42). Churchill nevertheless mainly defines ‘ird as “the core aspect of sharaf-honor” (87), and thus as partaking of a male-related concept. Somewhat like Stewart (143), he treats “ ‘ird” as a part of male honor, while other researchers rather focus on its female connotations. Churchill’s observations that both men and women participate in ‘ird (88) and that ‘ird and sharaf are interrelated concepts are partly true: when ‘ird is lost, “no increase in ‘sharaf’ can compensate” for it (90). This presumes that the woman has already lost her ‘ird.

Ermers gives a semantic overview of different honor nuances that can be found in Turkish⁴⁵ and Arabic, of which particularly the definitions of “şeref”/“šaraf” and “namus”/‘ird will serve our purposes. He provides rather non-gendered connotations of “şeref” in Turkish, seeing it as a sign of high social status, pride, non-sexual moral standing, respectability, and good reputation (38–39).⁴⁶ However, in the context of honor-based violence, it must be stated that “şeref” just like “šaraf” is not gender-neutral, as it mostly refers to the honor of the man whose reputation is damaged by the fact that a female relative loses her honor “namus.” In general, Ermers is against a “gender bias” (31), claiming that, for instance, allocating “sexual restraint as an honor attribute exclusive to women” is not justified (34). Yet the fact that there is a specific expression to describe the sexual honor of women (namus/’ird), with none exclusively depicting the notion of male sexual honor that can be lost, speaks for itself and thus against Ermers’s statement that sexual restraint is positively evaluated “for both genders” (34). We will show in the following that men who have a “reputation of not controlling their sexual desires,” who make undesired sexual advances or who are accused of rape (34) are often judged less severely in honor cultures than a woman who does the same.

Similarly to Reddy as well as Sev’er and Yurdakul, Bilgili and Vural insist on the fact that the expression “sharaf” (or “şeref”) stands for a man’s honor, which is the sum of his own masculinity, his social status, and his power to protect his ←35 | 36→own and his family’s name (see Bilgili and Vural 66; on “warrior masculinity,” Churchill 138 ff.).⁴⁷ Delaney stresses that “a man’s honor depends on his ability to control ‘his’ woman” (39), which at the same time highlights a woman’s being regarded as a man’s property. Among other duties, the responsible male always has to keep an eye on the female relative’s immaculate appearance in public. Whereas in dignity cultures individual honor is at least theoretically opposed to individual guilt, in honor cultures female shame (originally individual, but then made public), resulting from a woman’s violation of existing honor codes, can quickly trigger the loss of collective honor. Taking all these different aspects into account, we can thus claim that, in honor cultures, there exist some kinds of gender-specific honor that can usually not be found in dignity cultures.

Secondly, honor cultures are generally characterized by a complex interrelation between mostly collectivistic but also partly individualistic understandings of honor-related issues, because people wish to maintain a positive self-image as well as a positive group image.⁴⁸ Members of honor-shame communities display “some collectivist characteristics” and at the same time “affinities with individualist cultures” (Churchill 95). This idea of honor as a group value is opposed to a characteristically individualistic perception of honor in dignity cultures, which is one of the main reasons why Fischer et al. distinguish between “individualistic versus honour-related values” (Fischer et al. 149). According to Caffaro et al. as well as Cihangir, only a few studies take the aspects of individualism versus collectivism into account when examining particular understandings of honor. However, especially in the context of immigration, these factors need to ←36 | 37→be examined to get a better grasp of the overall concept.⁴⁹ When individuals have qualities on which others reflect, they undergo a formal reduction, based on “a particular relational identity” (Oprisko 30). As a result, for immigrants who have been living in a dignity culture for several generations, honor-related rumors about their family that might be spreading in their neighborhood still have a lastingly negative impact on their family name, regardless of the fact that they are far away from their homeland.

Concerning rumor and gossip, which can be a direct consequence of honor loss, Karen Adkins stresses that gossip “functions selectively”: “we sort through information to figure out what we want to pay attention to”; in using gossip “we synthesize, we combine disparate bits of information (often that don’t intrinsically appear to belong together) into a story or explanation for some sort of dissonant behavior, act, value, or person” (3). The backdrop of “our previous ideas, beliefs, and sometimes prejudices,” of which we may be unaware, is decisive (Adkins 3). Though the terms “gossip” and “rumor” are frequently used as (near-)synonyms, Adkins argues that there is “an assumed relationship of trust, or some common background, present in gossip, from its infancy, that doesn’t exist for rumor” (11); accordingly, “gossip’s origins are in intimacy, rumor’s in anonymity” (Adkins 78). Thus gossip can be “a rich medium for revealing, critiquing, or reinforcing power dynamics,” within institutions but also by extension within communities (Adkins 77).⁵⁰ Here we should note that in her essay collection Aramızdaki Ağaç, Sema ←37 | 38→Kaygusuz describes “dedikodu” (meaning both “rumor” and “gossip” in Turkish) as a form of communication which makes humankind a frightening community. It is a sort of cannibalism because somebody’s “human flesh” is provided and then this “meat” is eaten (“ötekinin etini vermek”/“insan eti yemek”: 100). Someone is thus eaten alive, turning her/him into a socially dead person as a consequence of a community’s destructive judgment.⁵¹

Social studies and literature show that honor automatically turns into a collective matter which needs to be defended and/or restored, as soon as a woman violates honor-specific codes through her immoral behavior. At this point, saving the family’s reputation in public is regarded as a collective responsibility which mostly concerns male family members but sometimes also requires women as their helpers.⁵² Considerable efforts to cleanse family honor are a key characteristic or even a requirement of honor cultures, sometimes leading to an honor killing (see Churchill 59, Ermers 273) or other types of violence.⁵³ In contrast, ←38 | 39→the honor code women are expected to follow is not so much about honor itself since, according to patriarchal thinking, they can only lose their honor but not restore it; it is rather about how to keep their (sexual) purity intact and avoid (sexual) shame so that they do not stain the intact (collective) family honor by becoming the source of neighborhood gossip.

According to Cihangir, King, Rodriguez Mosquera et al. and others, the ideologeme of a woman’s sexual purity is directly linked to her family’s reputation and social status. Since a person’s honor is not an individual but a collective matter that is permanently exposed to external judgment, this group value is extremely fragile. The patriarchal structure typical of honor cultures promotes ←39 | 40→male power and male honor, which explains why the focus lies not so much on a woman’s honor but rather on her shame.⁵⁴ In Hofstede’s analysis of cultural dimensions, the scoring results concerning power distance also reflect the patriarchal structure of such societies,⁵⁵ which goes hand in hand with an over-emphasis on both masculinity and collectivism. The fact that there are no words in dignity cultures to describe male and female honor separately may once again serve to prove that such a concept does not exist in cultures where honor is not a gender-specific, collective issue.

As it is not possible to cover all fiction dealing with honor-based topics, this book can only present a selection of contemporary literary works focusing on honor cultures. In terms of languages, this scope is mostly limited to novels and short stories in English and French original texts or translations and to those written in Turkish. However, the range of represented countries is relatively wide, comprising among others Afghanistan, Algeria, India, Iran, Morocco, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, and also immigrant communities of England. For our comparative analysis, we have tried to choose a fairly equal number of male and female authors whose works were published in the period between 1985 and 2017. In alphabetical order of authors’ last names, the list of works includes

• Khader Abdolah: Persian-Dutch; My Father’s Notebook (2000) is partly set in Saffron Village and Isfahan, depicting recent Iran, with occasional flashbacks ←40 | 41→to the Pahlavi kingdom under Reza Shah, and partly in the Dutch region Flevopolder.

• Leila Aboulela: Sudanese; Minaret (2005) is set in Khartoum and London between the years 1984 and 2004.

• Ramziya Abbas al-Iryani: Yemeni; short story “Misfortune in the Alley” (2005) presumably set in Yemen, included in Dalya Cohen-Mor’s literary anthology.

• Nazik al-Mala’ika: Kuwaiti; born in Iraq; poem “Washing off disgrace” (“Ghaslan lil ‘Ar”: 1957), included in Women of the Fertile Crescent.

• Saphia Azzeddine: French-Moroccan; Bilqiss (2015) mostly takes place in an unnamed Muslim country.

• Tahar Ben Jelloun: French-Moroccan; L’Enfant de Sable (1985) takes place in Marrakesh; La Nuit Sacrée (1987), which is the sequel to L’Enfant de Sable and has the same setting.

• Kamel Daoud: Algerian; Zabor ou Les Psaumes (2017) takes place in an Algerian village called Aboukir (today Mesra).

• Négar Djavadi: French-Iranian; Désorientale (2016), partly set in the waiting room of a hospital in Paris and partly in different places of Iran, covering the end of the 19th century through flashbacks up to the present.

• Mehmet Eroğlu: Turkish; Kıyıdan Uzakta (2018) takes place in contemporary Turkey, on the seaside of the Karaburun Peninsula in the Aegean Region.

• Saleem Haddad: of Lebanese-Palestinian and Iraqi-German origin; Guapa (2016) is set in a nameless Arab country, covering 24 hours with flashbacks to the 1980s and to the protagonist’s stay in America.

• Khaled Hosseini: Afghan-born American; The Kite Runner (2003) takes place in Kabul, Peshawar and Fremont (California) between the years 1975 and 2002; A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), mostly set in Kabul and a village outside of Herat in the years between 1958 until today.

• Sema Kaygusuz: Turkish; Barbarın Kahkahası (2015), meaning The Barbarian’s Laughter, takes place in the motel Mavi Kumru in mid-August of an unknown year and lasts four days; also a few works from her short story collection The Well of Trapped Words (2015).

• Yasmina Khadra (pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul): Algerian; Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (2008), set in Algeria between the 1930s and 1962, with the last chapter taking place in today’s Aix-en-Provence.

• Sahar Khalifeh: Palestinian; The Inheritance (1997) takes place in New York and the outskirts of Wadi al-Rihan today with flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood.

• Zülfü Livaneli: Turkish; Bliss (2002), mostly set in an Anatolian village.

←41 | 42→

• Sindiwe Magona: South African; Mother to Mother (1998), set in Guguletu, a suburb of Capetown in August 1993, with occasional flashbacks to 1972.

• Orhan Pamuk: Turkish; Silent House (1983), set in a village not far from Istanbul in 1980.

• Atiq Rahimi: French-Afghan; Syngué Sabour. Pierre de patience (2008), set in Afghanistan or somewhere else (“Quelque part en Afghanistan ou ailleurs”), according to the writer.

• Saliha Scheinhardt: Drei Zypressen (1986), includes three short stories (Erzählungen) that are set in both Turkey and Germany.

• Elif Shafak: Turkish; The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) set in Istanbul and America, as well as Honour (2011), which takes place in a village near the Euphrates and London between the 1970s and today.

• Ayfer Tunç: Turkish; Kapak Kızı (1992) [Cover Girl], takes place on a train between Ankara and Istanbul; Yeşil Peri Gecesi (2010) [The Night of the Green Fairy], partly based on Kapak Kızı and set in Istanbul.

• Robin Yassin-Kassab: British; The Road from Damascus (2008), mostly set in London, with a small part of the plot taking place in Syria.

This list is not exhaustive and we apologize for any omissions.

1.1 Sources of female honor violation

Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists alike “view values as the criteria people use to select and justify actions and to evaluate people (including the self) and events” (Schwartz, “Universals” 1; similarly “Basic” 259). The value of honor can indeed serve as a means of measurement in this sense, providing a scale to evaluate a person’s reputation in a larger social context. It goes hand in hand with the sensations of guilt (in dignity cultures), shame (in honor cultures), and the experience of losing face (in face cultures).⁵⁶ In honor cultures, this virtue is not only a sentiment internal to an individual inside or outside a group but also “external to him – a matter of his feelings, his behaviour, and the treatment that he receives” (Pitt-Rivers 503).

←42 | 43→

A notion of honor that is closely associated with the “purity” of the female body can be considered an essential element of some, often non-Western value systems. Within them, “the greatest dishonour of a man derives from the impurity of his wife” (Pitt-Rivers 52). Not only in the respective home countries, but also abroad,⁵⁷ the sources of female honor violation are manifold. These can be provoked by a girl’s or a woman’s lost virginity before marriage,⁵⁸ her disrespect for existing dress codes, her immoral behavior in public like laughing out loud on the street or talking to a man outside her family, her committing adultery, her giving birth to an illegitimate child or only to girls, her infertility, as well as her being the victim of a rape.⁵⁹ Both in the social imaginary of literary works and in a reality reflected by numerous studies, these seem to be the most frequent causes for a woman to lose her honor and, by doing so, to put her family’s reputation at stake. Even though the novels mentioning blasphemy, alcoholism, or homosexuality are rather rare, these can also be good enough reasons for a woman’s honor loss, followed by private or public punishment. In any of these cases, a woman’s violation of the existing honor codes triggers a more or less violent chain of male actions which need to be visible in public.⁶⁰ In general, the source or cause of honor loss should not be conceptually separated from its effects. It is not difficult to see that cause is “actual” only in its effect, which is then “the manifestation of the cause”; accordingly cause and effect entail each other (Hegel, The Science of Logic, Vol. 1, Book 2, Section 3, Chapter 3, here p. 494). However, we unfortunately cannot extend our investigation to the various violent consequences of honor and face loss in the space of this volume. A further volume concentrating on such consequences (including honor killings and suicide, among others) is planned to address these matters, also further intercultural situations.

←43 | 44→

In their novels, writers like Khaled Hosseini, Sema Kaygusuz, Sindiwe Magona, Yasmina Khadra, Robbin Yassin-Kassab, Ayfer Tunç, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak, Négar Djavadi, and many others describe how a male, traditional understanding of honor codes which often results in an honor-related crime can lead to serious violations of the female body and soul, while at the same time having a lifelong impact on the perpetrator’s and his family’s conscience. Owing to the nature of the topic, literary research sources in some cases tend to foreground the fictional works’ referential quality. Existing research generally clusters around very few of the authors and works we are studying, in particular the work of Ben Jelloun and of Khaled Hosseini, while our analyses go well beyond these. In the following, we will examine the various sources of both female and male honor violation from the perspective of social sciences as well as literary studies, since literature sometimes presents realistic situations which women interviewed in case studies might not have the courage to talk about. In doing so, we are mindful of Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim in Genealogy of Morality (1887) that one should know

how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge. […] There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity” be. (85)

Only if we employ more than one “seeing,” can we recognize the ways in which literature offers “a counterdiscursive staging and semiotic empowering” of what is marginalized (Zapf 63).⁶¹

1.1.0 Mothers and disobedient daughters

In honor cultures, mothers pass on the gender-specific notions of female honor as an essential value to their daughters by underlining the importance of a girl’s modesty and decency. Any form of disobedience to honor-based rules that are closely related to a respectable social appearance can lead to the daughter’s immediate honor loss. Having carried out a study with university students, Gursoy et al. confirm that certain ideas related to the female body, a woman’s sexuality, ←44 | 45→and her appropriate behavior in public “are most likely formulated from early childhood within the societal structures of the family and the community” (196). Protecting her honor is one of the main duties a girl or woman has to fulfill during a lifetime, which also requires obedience to her parents’ rules. In contrast to dignity cultures, where the concept of honor does not play a significant role in a child’s education, in honor cultures mothers generally make their daughters understand the importance of honor-related values like sexual purity and innocence very early, thus providing them with precise guidelines for their future. Sev’er and Yurdakul’s statement that “[w];omen are also expected to protect the namus of other women and girls related to them, for example their daughters and granddaughters” (973) follows the same logic.

Spenlen creates a clear link between educational efforts and social appearances in honor cultures by pointing out that a family’s good reputation in public often depends on how children are brought up by their parents, meaning especially how daughters are trained by their mothers and warned about the consequences of potential disobedience: “Auf die Familie darf kein schlechtes Licht fallen, die Selbstdarstellung in der Öffentlichkeit muss positiv ausfallen, und die Meinung der Umwelt wird Gradmesser für den Erfolg elterlicher Erziehung” (142). If daughters do not behave in an adequate way and therefore bring shame on their family’s name, this failure is automatically traced back to bad parenting techniques.⁶² The patriarchal structure of honor cultures promotes inequality in the upbringing of boys and girls: “Es wird zu einer Ungleichheit zwischen Mann und Frau, Bruder und Schwester, Vater und Sohn erzogen” (Spenlen 141; see also Churchill 110–12). Since, according to Pitt-Rivers, honor can be considered a “hereditary quality” (52) in honor cultures, “the shame of the mother is transmitted to the children and a person’s lack of it may be attributed to his birth, hence the power of the insults, the most powerful of all, which relate to the purity of the mother” (52). It is in the mother’s interest to prove her own honor through the education of her daughter(s) toward obedience: “The purity of the daughter reflects that of her mother, and thereby, the honour of her father” (53).

Sana Al-Khayyat emphasizes that in the “socializing process” of girls, “the most important issue for the mother – and other adults in the family – is how to make them totally submissive. A girl is taught to be obedient from an early age and will be punished if she refuses to do what adults in the family demand of her. It is aib (shameful, immodest) for her to disobey, although it is not necessarily aib for a boy.” (31–32). Gursoy et al. also state that “women are raised from early ←45 | 46→childhood with concepts such as ‘forbidden’ or ‘disgrace’ attached to female sexuality” (197). In her article “Motherhood Creating Its Killer” (in Turkish with an abstract in English), İlknur Meşe questions feminine and masculine roles in the education of children through an analysis of Elif Shafak’s novel Honour. Among other observations she underlines that mothers tend to devalue and belittle their daughters by not expecting anything from them except becoming “marriage material” by finding a husband (see p. 403). By doing so, they treat them like they were treated by their own mothers, remaining an active part of a cycle that has been working for generations. This also appears to be a way for a mother to “make sense of her own suffering”: “she will force her daughter, whether consciously or unconsciously, to surrender to the very same gender system that she herself has surrendered to” (Ghanim, Gender 145). Apart from a few articles which mention the influence of mothers on their daughters, the social sciences do not seem to pay much attention to the responsibility women have in honor cultures by shaping their children’s understanding of gender-specific, collectivistic honor. Here and in other respects, sociology and literature as “collateral (never identical) processes of meaning construction” are not unconnected but rather complementary to each other (Longo 147, see also 36).

“I wanted nothing more than to fit in and be a respectful wife and bring my daughter up to do the same. Like my mother and her mother before her” (118), writes Sarbjit Kaur Athwal in her autobiographical novel Shamed, confirming that mothers bring up their daughters so that they are “programmed to be the perfect wife” (150). Fictional works dealing with this topic often highlight that girls are taught innocence, obedience, modesty, and decency as well as feelings of guilt and shame by their mothers. Zülfü Livaneli’s Bliss, which focuses on different forms of honor-based violence (which also include the planning of an honor killing), tells three parallel stories with three protagonists. Two of them, i.e., Meryem⁶³ and her cousin Cemal, become directly involved in an incident of honor loss which has consequences for the whole community. The novel highlights honor-related behaviors and reactions from a female and male perspective, giving insights into the corresponding gender-specific value systems. In the novel’s course, Meryem complains that she is taught the shame of being a woman and is punished for it: “I was blamed for everything I did: Don’t laugh loudly, Meryem; don’t flirt, Meryem; you’re grown up now, Meryem; don’t play ←46 | 47→with boys!” (98). Elif Shafak, who writes both in English and Turkish, expresses similar thoughts in an article on honor killings published in The Guardian in 2011:

Since my childhood I have heard more than once old women advising young women to be modest. Traditionally, females and males are thought to be cut of different cloth. Women are cut of the lightest cambric whereas men of thick, dark velvet. The colour black doesn’t show stains, unlike the colour white, which reveals even the tiniest speck of dirt. A woman who is believed to have lost her modesty is at times worth no more than a chipped coin. There are always two sides of the coin: dignity or disgrace, and little consolation for those who get the wrong side. (“Turkey”)

In Shafak’s novel Honour, which (as its title indicates) treats honor as its main subject, we find the same “cambric” metaphor when Pembe’s mother Naze teaches her daughters always to stay in the background: “It was all because women were made of the lightest cambric, […] whereas men were cut of thick, dark fabric. That is how God had tailored the two: one superior to the other” (16). Textile production as a primary marker of gender identity has a long history, associated with social values (e.g., white, stainless clothes reflecting innocence) which easily become reified.

A similar observation about conduct can be made in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de Sable, which especially highlights gender inequality by also touching on different manifestations of honor.⁶⁴ Its protagonist stresses that all female members of the family have been brought up to be obedient and keep silent: “Dans cette famille, les femmes s’enroulent dans un linceul de silence.⁶⁵ … elles obéissent…. Mes sœurs obéissent” (46). Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, which now and then describes honor-related aspects in an intercultural environment, ←47 | 48→provides us with Najwa’s statement “I was a girl and Mama’s responsibility. […] I was going to get married to someone who would determine how the rest of my life flowed” (78). The image of flow suggests an easy course after assenting to marriage, a course whose channel is not hers to carve.⁶⁶

One of the main reasons why female family members often feel inferior to their male counterparts is their lack of education. It is mostly the mothers who hinder their daughters from going to school. Instead of promoting them intellectually, they rather focus on showing them how to cook and do chores, so that they are well equipped to get married off easily. In her novel Désorientale, Négar Djavadi briefly describes the inequality between boys and girls⁶⁷ that is frequently promoted by their mothers, who are in charge of their children’s education. She highlights that from generation to generation, certain behavioral codes have been passed on concerning the way sons and daughters should be brought up. These gender-specific rules include “girls must help their mothers”⁶⁸ (“fille qui aide maman,” 219), and also deal with their respective futures. The obsession with how to become an excellent wife and mother who later on can teach her own daughter(s) modesty, obedience, and decency explains why the notion of female (especially sexual) honor remains so important for each generation of women in honor cultures, regardless of the country they live in.

In both Elif Shafak’s Honour and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, which both reveal various types of honor-based violence, the mothers Naze and Nana explicitly speak out against their daughters’ getting a school education. Naze in the novel Honour thinks that any intellectual skills could diminish her daughters’ chances of finding a husband, because they might develop the capacity to question male authority and start to rebel against ←48 | 49→existing honor codes: “Meanwhile, their mother, Naze, didn’t see the point in their going to such lengths to master words and numbers that would be of no use, since they would all get married before long” (10). Moreover, she draws attention to the material damage that comes with the girls’ walking to school: “ ‘Every day they walk all that way back and forth. Their shoes are wearing out,’ Naze grumbled. ‘And what for?’ ” (10). Education becomes reified in a commodity that could drain the family resources. The only question on her mind with regard to a girl’s possible intellectual development is “How’s that going to help my daughters get married?” (11). In a similar vein, Mariam’s mother Nana in A Thousand Splendid Suns answers the mullah’s request “Let the girl have an education” with the words: “What’s the sense schooling a girl like you? […]. There is only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they don’t teach it in school. […] And it’s this. Tahamul. Endure” (18). She repeats a last warning twice: “No more talk about school” (18), subconsciously knowing like Shafak’s Naze that education brings a certain independence with it which might cause women to rebel openly against the patriarchal system, lead to the loss of their honor, and put their own lives at stake.

Depriving a girl of her school education is a general tendency, especially in rural regions, where the villagers “would like their daughters to be modest and virtuous, and yet they wanted them to get married and have children in due course” (34), as Elif Shafak depicts it in Honour. The indirect warning of Laila’s mother in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is similar: “The reputation of a girl, especially one as pretty as you, is a delicate thing, Laila. Like a mynah bird in your hands. Slacken your grip and away it flies” (160). This evokes an incongruous image of having held a bird all her life to prevent it from flying, which would disable her from using her hands for any other purpose. Obviously, Naze’s comparable efforts to teach her daughter decency bear fruits, since Pembe does not miss any opportunity to teach her own daughter Esma the notion of female honor “namus” and, especially, of shame: “It would be one of the many ironies of Pembe’s life that the things she hated to hear from Naze she would repeat to her daughter, Esma, word for word, years later, in England” (16). Naze’s obsession with morals and appearances surely leaves a lasting impact on Pembe’s own behavior. It is therefore not surprising that her son Iskender can “touch her guilt” and “smell her shame” (51), inscribing his moral codes on her body, when Pembe starts to have an affair, thus breaking with the rules she has been obeying all her life. She even catches herself “smoothing down her skirt beneath her knees as if she suddenly found it too short” (133), which can be read as an automatic, subconscious gesture reflecting her shame.

←49 | 50→

In the Turkish translation rewritten by Elif Shafak, this notion of disgrace is expressed even more clearly with the words “as if she felt unprotected.”⁶⁹ Such a reflex can be traced back to the understanding of female honor she was taught by her mother, associating white fabric with a woman’s innocence which can be easily stained: “What mattered was that the black didn’t show stains, unlike the colour white, which revealed the tiniest speck of dirt” (16). Here too, the image reifies the coded normativity. Throughout her life, these sensations accompany Pembe like a “sneaky serpent” (315) that “settled on your skin, sucked your blood, laid its eggs everywhere” and “infested her soul” (282).

In Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother, which is mainly about racial segregation but occasionally deals with gender inequality, the female protagonist describes a similar situation: “Mama had not told me how to be with a boy. She had told me never to be with one. Never,” making her understand that being with a man before getting married would “disgrace our families” (111).⁷⁰ These examples illustrate that in honor cultures girls are shown from an early age how to avoid bringing shame on their families. Partly, their mothers’ education makes these daughters victims of a patriarchal system promoting a gender-specific understanding of honor with its related restrictions.⁷¹ Daughters will appeal in vain to their mothers, as Nazik al-Mala’ika’s poem “Washing off ←50 | 51→disgrace” (1957) illustrates: “ ‘Mother!’/A last gasp through her teeth and tears” (Women 20). Rather than any mother, it is “the meadows and the roseate buds,” the “date palms,” that are listening and then disseminate the disgraced daughter’s cry, making it the despair of nature.

Ramziya Abbas al-Iryani in “Misfortune in the Alley,” which treats honor-related violence as a prominent issue, creates a setting of darkness owing to a power crash in “a long, narrow alley covered with dirt and scraps of paper, and littered with trash” (Cohen-Mor 73): readers are evidently invited to gather this spatial information into a cognitive map, attributing symbolic meaning to the location (see Ryan). The narrow alley brings the whole neighborhood together when Hajj Abdallah shouts that his daughter Samira has vanished. His wife Latifa (who is her aunt) provides material for gossip by telling everyone “I saw her myself yesterday talking to a cab driver. And the other day I saw her getting out of the same cab” (74), thus turning the girl into a sinner. The neighbor woman Safiyya shouts at her “what you say can ruin her reputation!”, while Nuriyya the baker defends the girl by portraying her as a victim: “Samira cannot be blamed if she ran away today. You beat her every day, so she became fed up with her life. The housework and the care of your children are upon her shoulders.” Fatima the henna painter seconds her: “[…] God will take care of her and ease her way. The blood that dripped from her nose and mouth yesterday is still visible on the stairs. Surely you haven’t forgotten that you pushed her down the rooftop stairway!”

Having been unable to find his daughter, Hajj Abdallah reappears looking “to the right and left in humiliation and dejection as tears silently rolled down his face” (75), the tears making him lose his masculinity. Latifa’s “malicious, vengeful voice” breaks the silence: “I tried to go after her. Death before dishonor.” But her husband hits back: “Your hypocrisy killed my daughter. I used to believe you and go to extremes in punishing her. You broke her spirit and destroyed her life.” He blames the assembled neighbors for not having protected the girl, which is a rather unexpected turn of events: “What have you done other than whisper and gossip about what goes on in my house?” (76). Finally, light symbolically bursts onto the alley scene, as a noise enables the father to find Samira hiding outside a neighbor’s house: “crouching among the spiky pieces of firewood, blood dripping from her hands and legs!” He shouts his relief: “Come out to show them that my honor is well protected, and that shame did not and will never enter my house!” Evidently Samira cannot believe that “she would escape punishment” – for once. The vividly narrated incident demonstrates the precarious nature of the father’s honor, and the aunt’s (replacing the perhaps deceased mother’s) extreme devaluing and belittling of her niece. Community gossip is the ←51 | 52→response to a girl’s suffering, while other narratives underline its significance in response to perceived transgressive conduct (as for instance Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns). Nonetheless, in this incident some community members turn against the oppressive aunt, vindicating the father’s honor. This may be one of the few examples in literature where a father defends his daughter and some community members back up the victim, which appears to be a rather unrealistic reaction. Here, fiction shows a way out where social reality often does not.

Another rare case of a man criticizing female obedience can be found in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Nuit Sacrée where the protagonist’s father says about his wife: “une femme sans caractère, sans joie, mais tellement obéissante, quel ennui! Être toujours prête à executer les ordres, jamais de révolte, ou peut-être se rebellait-elle dans la solitude et en silence” (24–25). It becomes clear that this behavior is the result of educational patterns: “Elle avait été éduquée dans la pure tradition de l’épouse au service de son homme” (24). In the following, we will examine various cases of disobedience that occur despite the daughters’ initially flawless upbringing by their mothers and that result in female honor loss, staining the whole family’s reputation.

1.1.1 Lost virginity before marriage

Since early times, several cultures have regarded a woman as a man’s property. Even though the term “honor” can have different meanings, in honor cultures this value is often associated with sexual and familial roles expected from women (according to the UN Commission, “in terms of women’s assigned sexual and familial roles as dictated by traditional family ideology”; see also Welchman and Hossain 5). It is due to these strictly defined sexual roles that a direct link between the purity of the female body and the value of honor can be observed in honor cultures. Consequently, a girl or woman who loses her virginity before marriage not only ruins her own but also her family’s reputation.

It seems that a woman can only compensate for her existence, which is sinful by nature, by ostensibly protecting the purity of her body, especially in public. Writing about “Honor as Property,” Johanna Bond draws attention to this point: “in the honor context, the ‘previously unowned or undiscovered territory’ is the virginal, female body. The value of honor property is correlated with the notion of the undiscovered female body” (236). Cihangir explains that “sexual purity of female family members is an important indicator of the status of family honor” (3). If, for whatever reason, virginity is lost before marriage, this means that “the female body has been ‘discovered’ ” and thus “[…] the familial honor ←52 | 53→is so devalued that it triggers an attempt to reclaim that value through violence directed at the female family member” (Bond 236). The so-called method of “virginity testing” is sometimes used in honor cultures (e.g., if the bride does not bleed during her wedding night) to make sure that the female body in question is indeed pure and the value of the girl or woman who is to become her husband’s property not diminished through premarital intercourse. When a girl runs away from home with a man, for instance, gossip about her lost virginity starts to spread. In such cases, it can be deemed necessary to use virginity testing as a method to clarify the situation and find out whether the girl can still be married off.

In one of the interviews carried out by Doğan, a male 20-year-old perpetrator narrates how the assumption of his sister’s lost virginity has stained his family’s reputation in general and his father’s patriarchal status in particular: “After my sister eloped, my father could not go out. He even could not go to his own brother’s house. If you are involved in something dishonorable, in my community people stare at you in anger” (“Dynamics” 12). Very rarely, virginity testing can turn into a way to prove the girl’s innocence and thus save her life, but mostly neighborhood gossip already serves as sufficient proof for her lost virginity. Ilkkaracan explains this issue of lost virginity as a potential source of honor loss in detail as follows: “Unmarried women are generally expected to remain virgins until their wedding night, and virginity is not only the symbol of a woman’s purity and chastity, but also an icon of her family’s honor. Sexual relations outside marriage on the part of a married woman, including rape, are generally understood primarily as assaults on men’s honor” (257). Sana Al-Khayyat also mentions that a “girl who loses her virginity is liable to be punished with physical or ‘moral’ death; the latter involves isolation and virtual house arrest. If, on the wedding day, she was found not to be a virgin she would be divorced. Such a divorce is, of course, accompanied by fadiha (scandal)” (34–35).

Amani Awwad convincingly observes that “[t];he social constructs of honor and shame are at the core of virginity control and gender based violence in Turkey,” which seems to be a valid observation for honor cultures in general. Case studies illustrate that “a powerful system of social control was created to protect the sexual purity of women in the Middle East” (“Virginity” 105–06). Part of this system is the honor-shame-punishment mechanism that even makes women pretend that they are virgins in order to escape death. Since honor is a gender-specific concept, men, however, do not have to prove their purity to protect their reputation, as Awwad underlines by quoting Pitt-Rivers: “honor and shame, when they are not equivalent, are linked exclusively to one sex or the other and are opposed to one another” (Pitt-Rivers 43). As briefly mentioned in ←53 | 54→the general Introduction above, this notion of female chastity is also reflected in different languages, for instance in the Arabic expression “ ‘ird” that describes female chastity of unmarried women, or in the Turkish and Persian “namus” as well as the Afghan equivalent “namoos” which all refer to a woman’s sexual purity and corresponding honor, on which the reputation of the male family members strongly depends. It is therefore expected of women to protect their virginity by all means until they are married off safely.

Already in 1982, Fatima Mernissi bluntly claimed that “[t];he concepts of honor and virginity locate the prestige of a man between the legs of a woman” (183). The patriarchal structure of honor cultures facilitates setting up double standards with regard to different social roles of men and women, as asymmetrical positional dyads. Since the honor-based codes established by men include strict punishment in cases of inappropriate behavior, “women take extreme measures to prove their virginity or conceal their false virginity in the face of mounting pressure by society. To these women, the wedding night could be their worst nightmare, especially if they fail the virginity test and no visible blood stains the sheets to display to the public as a proof of virginity” (Awwad, “Virginity” 107). Awwad furthermore points out that “ ‘[v]irginity control’ includes forced virginity exams and false virginity, which entails a medical procedure to restore the hymen” (107). Social pressure in the form of repeated threats or hints at the death of other women who had premarital intercourse serves to control the actions of female relatives, starting from a very young age. Glick et al., who analyze sex roles in Turkey for instance, summarize the situation of women who are thought to have lost their honor as follows: “they may be warned verbally, forced to take virginity examinations, punished physically or even killed” (545).⁷²

←54 | 55→

Jacobson explains that “[i];n an honor society, patriarchal and tribal traditions dictate that a woman’s body belongs to and serves the community” (4). For this purpose, its purity needs to be guaranteed. Among others, Pitt-Rivers as well as Sev’er and Yurdakul highlight the ideologically marked use of honor-related “female purity,” which is linked to a strict “control of women’s sexuality and cultural obsession with virginity” (Sev’er and Yurdakul 994). Particularly in economically poorer regions, “the only property that men seem to have is the lives and bodies of their women” (Sev’er and Yurdakul 986, similarly Tahira Khan 67). As a female body is regarded as a sort of commodity which needs to be married off as quickly as possible, it loses its entire exchange value if it turns out to be “impure.” The results described in a number of studies about virginity testing correspond to fictional depictions insofar as they all show how the fixation on female chastity from a very early age creates an enormous pressure on girls. Different methods of virginity testing⁷³ (and proving), though supposed to protect the honor of their families, at the same time do psychological harm to them.

In a review on this highly controversial issue, Rose McKeon Olson and Claudia García-Moreno state that “[f];rom a human rights perspective, virginity testing is a form of gender discrimination, as well as a violation of fundamental rights,⁷⁴ and when carried out without consent, a form of sexual assault.” ←55 | 56→They furthermore draw attention to the fact that there are communities where “only the ‘pure’ females are to be married, have certain jobs, or be respected,” and describe the whole procedure as “physically, psychologically, and socially devastating to the examinee.” Quoting Zeyneloğlu, Kısa, and Yılmaz as well as Christianson & Eriksson, Juth, and Lynöe and Awwad et al., Robatjazi et al. underline a similar aspect in their article “Virginity Testing Beyond a Medical Examination,” highlighting that “[v]irginity testing for cultural reasons has been declared as sexual violence against women by the World Health Organization” and that it “has been criticized as a patriarchal belief, gender inequality, and violent behavior against women” (152–53).⁷⁵ It is not surprising that in social studies details of virginity examinations can rarely be found since women would often not be able to speak about such a traumatic experience, also because they are in danger of being killed. Literature in this case can provide us with realistic scenarios, as the following examples will show.

Kader Abdolah briefly describes the tradition of virginity⁷⁶ testing in his novel My Father’s Notebook by providing us with information on a striking feature. In order to find out whether the first wife of protagonist Aga Akbar is “pure,” a female relative hides behind the curtains of the bridal chamber to keep an eye on the situation during the wedding night: “It was the custom back then. I was supposed to watch in secret and see if everything went all right. To see if the woman …” (52–53). When “the marriage had been consummated” (53) according to ←56 | 57→the rules, this aunt needs to testify the woman’s virginity so that the celebrations can begin. It is thanks to the omniscient narrator who introduces himself in the first chapter that we learn something about this practice, which would otherwise have remained a family secret. Another aspect of virginity testing is depicted in the novel The Night of the Green Fairy by Turkish writer Ayfer Tunç, who appears to be one of the rare outspoken authors with regard to this topic. We follow the nameless female protagonist from her early childhood through her adolescence to her mid-forties, getting to know bits and pieces of her difficult life through regular flashbacks and flashforwards. Among the traumatizing experiences of her teenage years is a violent scene taking place in the house of her mother’s new husband Ekrem who is a doctor at a maternity clinic. Because his son has seen her walking on the street with a boy, he and Ekrem beat her up together. The statement of Ekrem’s son “I can’t go to school because of her! They call me the slut’s stepbrother!”⁷⁷ shows that the stage of gossip is already reached, which obviously makes Ekrem doubt the purity of his step-daughter’s body even more:

Ekrem grabs my arm. As he pulls me away, he says, “You know what’ll happen if we find out she’s not a virgin!” My mother begs him, “Don’t do it!” She tries to hold Ekrem back, clinging to his waist, his legs. She tries to pull me from his hands. Ekrem kicks my mother. […] Ekrem calms down a little after examining me. Then he threatens me, wagging his finger before my eyes. His saliva splatters on my face as he shouts. I see the snot clinging to the nose hairs hanging out of his blackhead-riddled nose. My eyes fixate on the snot. I see his mouth moving but I don’t hear any of his words. It’s as if my ears are stuffed. I lock the door as soon as Ekrem leaves.

Depicted in lapidary, choppy sentences that reflect the mechanical rhythm of the act itself, this rape-like examination⁷⁸ combined with an outburst of male-related violence is meant to intimidate the girl and teach her a lesson about appropriate behavior in public so that another misconduct of this kind will not happen again. Centering the action on the bodily images highlights its ugliness, forcing an escape route for the “soul” which is futile. However, the protagonist keeps breaking with the existing honor codes by continuing to spend her time with boys outside, which leads to a second incident of virginity testing: “Ekrem examines me again. I get the feeling he enjoys it, that he gets some sort of pleasure from ←57 | 58→examining me. This time my mother doesn’t cry and she doesn’t try to break it up. She’s angry. After Ekrem’s done with me she comes to me and snaps ‘Why can’t you smarten up? Are you doing this on purpose?’ ” While the mother’s lack of solidarity with regard to her daughter might be surprising, such reactions by female family members can be observed quite frequently in fiction (and apparently also in reality)⁷⁹ when it comes to defending their family’s honor. Before the protagonist’s disrespect of honor-specific rules can turn into a major source of neighborhood gossip, she is sent off to a girls’ boarding school in Istanbul where her virginity will be protected and she will be taught morals. Both her mother and Ekram seem to believe that she is a sinner, whereas in the narrative process of the whole novel she is rather portrayed as a victim who is judged within the existing value system.

The writer portrays Ekrem as a sort of rapist who enjoys touching a teenage girl under the pretext of proving her virginity. In an email to Mine Krause, Ayfer Tunç confirms the interpretation that Ekrem hides his perverse ulterior motives by using his profession as an excuse to pretend an interest in a merely objective, medical examination. She adds that by describing this scene, she wanted to underline the abusive nature of female honor “namus” as a general concept.⁸⁰ When Krause remarked that only a few writers have been dealing with this issue in such detail, she recalled her own difficulties while writing this part of her novel. She concluded that enduring the shame that already comes with even imagining and putting to paper violent acts like this might have made writers shy away from this undertaking altogether.

Another case of virginity testing is presented in Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother. Here, the regular examination of the female protagonist Mandisa’s body is not carried out by a male relative, but by her own mother, who makes her daughter lie down on a white towel and controls whether she “remained ‘whole’ or ‘unspoilt’ as she said. […]. I was the one who felt dirty” ←58 | 59→(95). She is so obsessed with these proofs of virginity that she even threatens to ask the men of the family to examine Mandisa when she refuses to go through this monthly “routine” (98) again and again: “I’m calling your fathers to come and do it themselves. I will not be responsible for anything untoward happening to you” (98). While Mandisa experiences this procedure as “the beginning of many a trial, for me” (95), her mother perseveres in her role as protector of the family honor, thus taking over a traditionally patriarchal role. She even brings the village midwife to their home, who “looked at me the way Mama had done” (112). Paraphrased as acts of “inspect[ing] me” (98) or “see[ing] me” (99), these examinations are regular checks on Mandisa’s appropriate behavior. Their results are supposed to provide sound evidence “that I was still a whole girl, complete and untouched” (99).⁸¹

Scheinhardt describes the fictive fate of three Turkish girls in Drei Zypressen, depicting mostly stereotypical views through the eyes of her female narrators. This makes her approach rather simplistic despite the topic’s complexity. However, in the case of Zeynep Z., she presents to the reader a mother’s realistic preoccupation with her daughter’s virginity, which is here mentioned as her “being untouched”: “Ihr ging es in diesen Gesprächen aber hauptsächlich darum, im Auftrag meines Vaters herauszufinden, ob ich noch unberührt war oder nicht” (112). Moreover, it is pointed out that a method exists to repair the hymen and thus make it possible for “impure” girls to get married off despite their lost virginity – an operation that apparently took six minutes and cost 2500 Deutsche Mark at the time: “Es hatte sich unter den Türken herumgesprochen, daß ein Frauenarzt die jungen türkischen Mädchen, die nicht mehr Jungfrau waren, operierte, also ihre Jungfernhaut flickte, damit die Eltern des Mädchens sie als Jungfrau verkaufen konnten” (112). The use of the word “verkaufen,” which means “to sell,” speaks for itself in this context, stressing that women are often regarded as commodified objects.

Leila Aboulela in her novel Minaret briefly hints at a similar operation. The protagonist Najwa’s boyfriend Anwar critically observes that “Like every other Arab girl […] you’ve been brainwashed about the importance of virginity” (175). In the course of this discussion, we hear about “his stories of prospective Sudanese brides paying for operations to restore their virginity” (175). Just like the “disobedient” girls who suddenly disappear from their Anatolian villages ←59 | 60→and are never heard of again in Zülfü Livaneli’s Bliss, those in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret are confronted with a comparable fate: “They weren’t lost, these girls, they weren’t missing – they were killed by their brothers or fathers then thrown in the Nile” (175).

In Elif Shafak’s novel Honour, a part of which takes place in a Kurdish village, Jamila, the twin sister of the male protagonist’s mother Pembe, is described as “impure.” She lives alone in a Kurdish region and is called the “Virgin Midwife” (172). A flashback to the year 1961 highlights that Jamila had been kidnapped some time ago and nobody exactly knows what happened to her during this period of time: “A midwife examined her. She says Jamila has no hymen but some girls are born like this” (97). With the words “Your father says you may not be a virgin” (98), Adem confronts Jamila with this scandalous information: “Jamila had not defended herself or sworn her chastity, and her silence was so unsettling. What if she was not a virgin? How could he live with this doubt for the rest of his life? What would his brother Tariq say when he learned that he had found himself a tainted wife […]?” (99). Adem’s thoughts reflect that a woman’s virginity before marriage plays a considerable role with regard to the whole community into which she is married off. His decision to ask for the hand of a woman whose virginity is not a proven fact might have stained his family’s name, which had already suffered when his mother ran away with another man.

In her novel Bilqiss, which describes various violations of existing honor codes, Saphia Azzeddine’s protagonist of the same name states that in some countries it is already a provocation in itself to be born a female: “Dans beaucoup de pays naître femme était déjà une provocation en soi” (47). In Bliss, Zülfü Livaneli goes even further by making Meryem’s uncle, who in his role as a traditional patriarch does not undergo any character development (in contrast to his son Cemal) say that “[t];o be born a woman was punishment enough in itself. Women were devils, dirty and dangerous. Like their forerunner, Eve,⁸² all of them got men into trouble” (8). Robin Yassin-Kassab refers to “sexual morality” (221) in general, adding that “[i]t’s the tribal background that turns women’s bodies ←60 | 61→into suitcases of honour” (285) – a trope which hints at the opening and closing “mechanism” of the female body, the former leading to a loss of honor whereas the latter guarantees its remaining innocent. Sema Kaygusuz‘s observation in her novel Barbarın Kahkahası sums up the obsession with a woman’s virginity in honor cultures in a short sentence: “In order to preserve the manhood of men, Mary needs to be chaste.”⁸³

1.1.2 Immoral behavior in public

Among the behavioral codes that need to be respected by women in honor cultures are also rules regarding their decent appearance in public. These indicators of a girl’s or woman’s sexual purity, include “maintaining virginity before marriage, modesty, decorum in dress, and sexual purity in social relations – particularly with men” (Cihangir 3). Vandello and Cohen also claim that “honor cultures often establish norms where female chastity, purity, and modesty are valued” (998). Mayeda and Vijaykumar speak of “honor codes that minimize overstepping of sexual boundaries,” and sum up the the findings of several social scientists by stating that “women may be expected to dress modestly, not interact with male strangers, refrain from initiating separation from a male partner, and/or not leave domestic spaces without being accompanied by a male family member, particularly during evenings” (354). Comparing gender-specific honor codes, Vandello and Cohen conclude that “whereas the code dictates precedence and toughness for males, norms for females stress modesty, shame, and the avoidance of behaviors that might threaten the good name of the family (e.g., adultery or sexual immodesty)” (998). Peter Glick at al. share similar findings, highlighting that “being a ‘good man’ or a ‘good woman’ by enacting gender-traditional traits and roles becomes equated with being a moral, religious individual” (547), but also make it clear that the majority of social codes that need to be respected are meant for women and reinforce patriarchal values including female subordination: “Women maintain honor through obedience to men, sexual modesty, and religious piety” (Glick et al. 543). The expression “modesty,” a recurring one in the context of both social sciences and literary works, refers to the decent, appropriate behavior of women in public spaces, especially when men are around.

←61 | 62→

Ideally, women should not go out without male company, so that they can be immediately admonished in case they walk in a sexy way, laugh loudly on the street, or violate further honor-related codes in any other possible way. The focus here always lies on the “morally appropriate behavior of the female family members” (Caffaro et al. 297) since “the role of a woman is to maintain her man’s and family’s honour by behaving accordingly, regardless of whatever situation she is involved in (including rape and arranged or unhappy marriage)” (297). This limits a woman’s freedom and condemns her to a rather passive existence, as she is always trying to avoid the risk of losing her honor and thus bringing shame to her family.⁸⁴

According to Annie George, “subdued body language, dress, and demeanor” belong to the criteria of appropriate female conduct (37). Recep Doğan stresses that a “mere suspicion that their daughters, wives or sisters have defied the accepted social norms by behaving improperly will provide strong grounds for punishing or even killing them” (“Different” 367). Various male participants of this study claim that the “ideal honorable woman” must be “obedient and loyal,” “modest in behavior,” “not on the lips of men,” must “behave in a certain manner,” “not go out without permission from her husband,” “not let unrelated people enter her house,” be “honest,” respectful,” dignified” and “modest in her dress”; furthermore, she must not be “cheeky, or impertinent, or flirtatious.” An unmarried honorable woman should be “respectful, obedient, and modest in behavior and keeping virginity before marriage” (375). A dishonorable woman, however, is “sexually immodest, flirtatious, cheeky, or impertinent,” “adulterous,” not conforming to existing norms with regard to a woman’s “non-sexual behavior and social status,” “unfaithful,” “disrespectful,” “disobedient”; she “leaves the house without permission” or “tells a lie to her husband” (376). In another article, the same author includes interviews with some men who committed an honor killing, among the reasons for which the inappropriate ways the victims used to dress are also mentioned. Statements of different perpetrators such as “[My sister] used to wear a head scarf. But, I saw that she got her hair ←62 | 63→color changed, wore a colored contact lens, make-up and no head scarf” (8) or “[Our mum] wore décolleté clothes on her body or clothes through which you can see her body” (9) indeed show the violation of honor-related dress codes as one source of stained family honor in men’s opinion. Depending on the regions of a certain country, these norms in the respective honor cultures can be more or less strict.

Sen points out that honor-related codes for women illustrating their decency include “modest sexual behaviour, fidelity in marriage, no pre-or extramarital relationships with men, no unchaperoned rendezvous with men outside the family,⁸⁵ meeting motherly obligations to children, meeting wifely obligations to husband, meeting daughter’s obligation to parents, meeting daughter-in-law obligations to parents-in-law, and so on” (Sen 47). To make sure that their seductive characteristics are kept to a strict minimum, in various honor cultures men insist on their female relatives’ wearing a veil which covers their hair and sometimes also a part of their face. The notion of “modesty” that is included in the understanding of female honor dictates the covering up of certain body parts that might attract the attention of any men outside the family. Atiq Rahimi explains that “[i];n Afghan society there is the idea that if a woman’s ankle or her hair is visible then it is enticing. […] You have to be sexually obsessed to think that way. So yes, indeed, a woman is reduced to her sexual function” (Grey).

The veil plays an important role with regard to a woman’s rather limited room for action both indoors and outdoors. Lama Abu-Odeh describes the link between moral purity and the veil as follows:

To wear the veil was to be a virgin in fact. To wear the veil was to be spatially segregated from men, the walls of the separation now redefined as the boundaries of the veiled body itself. […] [W];hereas the traditional era expanded the hymen from the biological to the spatial, the Islamic condensed its signification to that of the physical. (“Honor” 950)

The veil thus becomes the public proof and the symbol of a woman’s high morality, showing that she is concerned about protecting her own honor. If she does not correctly cover her hair, however, this indicator makes the men surrounding her assume that she might be willing to break other honor-related codes as well.

←63 | 64→

Comparing the aspect of gender discrimination in Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, Iis Sugianti speaks of the “prohibition and limitation of the role of women in the public area” (43). In a similar vein, Susan Taha Al-Karawi and Ida Baizura Bahar, while analyzing Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret, give significant sociological insights into the importance of the veil, which serves as a crucial part of a woman’s clothing in many honor cultures: “[The veil] is positively associated with modesty, protection from unwanted male attention and desire, and liberation from the demands of consumerist capitalist economies and their investment in women’s bodies. It signifies security and agency, and functions as a means of mobility in the public sphere” (256). In many novels that deal with the controversial issue of female honor, wearing the veil in an inappropriate manner, not wearing it at all or any other inadequate behavior such as laughing loudly in public quickly turns into a source of honor loss. Only in the case of birth and death are women’s voices allowed to be loud, according to Kamel Daoud’s hints in his novel Zabor ou Les Psaumes: “Curieux renversement: les femmes deviennent visibles, audibles dans les ruelles, exubérantes comme faca à une concurrente (‘La mort est feminine, comme la naissance’)” (192).

In Ayfer Tunç’s novel Kapak Kızı, Anahit is obviously aware of her immoral conduct when she sits with Sadi in a tea garden. The fact that she looks around her all the time to be sure that nobody from her neighborhood catches her with this man shows her emotional distress (see p. 68). She knows that she has already lost her honor by committing the “sin” (“günah,” 69) of having a relationship with a man to whom she is not married. In The Night of the Green Fairy, which can be read as a sequel of Kapak Kızı, we come across other behavioral codes the female protagonist is expected to follow: “I was to speak properly, and not to use any foul language in any way, shape or form. In fact, it would be much better if I were not to speak at all. I was not to wear revealing clothing, no low-cut dresses. I was to be ladylike, well behaved, neat, tidy, courteous and clean. No playing up.” The female protagonist’s well-educated but conservative father-in-law, a professor, has the following perception of honor: “In this invaluable book on morality, you say that honour, the motherland and the flag are the principal values worth dying for; that wearing make-up has many harmful side effects, the most important ones being it makes women seem unchaste and causes premature aging; you advise young Turkish girls to stay chaste and young. […]” The inverse semiotic association of make-up and the flag is ominous in its anticipation of “dying for” appearances. Making women wear a veil or a burqa is one way to hinder other men from seeing them, as does religious Rasheed in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. He explains to his wives Mariam and Laila the benefits of this garment, which according to him is used for their ←64 | 65→“own protection” (217), symbolizing a woman’s decency.⁸⁶ A woman’s leaving the house unveiled and without a male family member by her side can be interpreted as immoral behavior, which Rasheed underlines as follows: “I ask that you avoid leaving this house without my company […]. I also ask that when we are out together, that you wear a burqa. For your own protection, naturally. It is best. So many lewd men in this town now. Such vile intentions, so eager to dishonor even a married woman” (217). To Mariam, Rasheed describes the decadence of “uncovered” women who directly talk to him in the presence of their husbands, look him “in the eye without shame,” “wear makeup and skirts,” “show their knees” while “their husbands stand there and watch,” not understanding that “they’re spoiling their own nang and namoos, their honor and pride” (69).⁸⁷

Rasheed adds that a “wrong look” or an “improper word” from a woman can lead to the spilling of blood (69). He stresses that as a husband it is his duty to “guard not only your honor but ours, yes, our nang and namoos.⁸⁸ That is the husband’s burden” (217), showing the heroic qualities of a man in defending his wife’s honor. In these statements, the direct link between a woman’s physical appearance and male honor becomes perfectly clear. It is not without reason that the laws established for women by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan all focus on a woman’s modest appearance in public. For instance, “it is not proper for women” (271) to show their faces, wear make-up, nail polish, jewelry, or tight clothes, “make eye contact with men,” “laugh in public” (271), get any education ←65 | 66→or work, which corresponds to the above-mentioned findings of the social sciences. If a man makes a woman lose her honor, this is regarded as her fault: she must have provoked him by behaving in an inappropriate way, for example by openly seducing him with her feminine charms.⁸⁹

Everything rises and falls with a woman’s appearance, as Elif Shafak summarizes with the metaphor “Modesty is a woman’s only shield” (15) in her novel Honour. Modesty is also a recurring topic in the works of Yasmina Khadra. He provides insights into the lives of Algerian women, claiming that they are often victims of a man’s abuse (sometimes related to a demonstration of male honor), a major reason for heartbreak and a source of frustration.⁹⁰ Where the male protagonist Younes in Ce que le jour doit à la nuit comes from, every adult female wears a headscarf to protect her honor. His obedient mother, who rarely opens her mouth, is “hidden behind a veil, barely distinguishable from the sacks and bundles” (10) and is used to disappearing completely when her husband shows up with other men in their home. This is how women in the rural regions ←66 | 67→have to behave, following certain gender-related codes: “In our world, when men meet, women are expected to withdraw; there is no greater sacrilege than to see one’s wife stared at by a stranger” (11).

Men like the broker, for instance, announce themselves by loudly clearing their throats, giving women enough time to get out of sight: “[The broker] asked us to wait in the street, then cleared his throat loudly to let the women know to disappear – as was the custom if a man was about to walk into a room” (21). In the village as well as in the slum community of Jenane Jato, such honor codes continue to exist, defining what is right and wrong. Here, people are not pardoned for their inappropriate conduct. Once they have lost the respect of their community, they can no longer show their faces in public and hope for forgiveness. The greater the poverty, the more a man’s self-esteem depends on the intact honor of his female relatives. Once again, one of the most important virtues of a woman is her “modesty” (in French “pudeur”), an expression that is frequently used in Khadra’s novel, especially in contexts that might endanger female honor and thus the reputation of the whole family.

However, while the lives of rural women are full of restrictions, including strict dress codes, those in the city are rather free in comparison. In Algeria’s second biggest town Oran, a woman’s honor is not in danger just because she shows her hair and face: “This was Oran […] Curiously, I saw, the women in the city did not wear the veil. They walked around with their faces bare; the old women wore strange headgear, but the younger ones went bare-headed, their hair on show for all to see, seemingly unperturbed by the men all around them” (17). This description is very similar to a paragraph in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, where Khaled Hosseini depicts women’s emancipated behavior in Kabul before the rise of the Taliban, contrasting them with the oppressed ones living in the countryside. To make a clear difference between both kinds of women, Yasmina Khadra uses the expression “city girl” who, in general, is “not like the girls round here” (295; see also 230). The mother of one of Younes’s friends, Madame Scamaroni, is obviously an independent urban woman who “lived by her own rules and was the only woman in the whole district to drive a car. The wagging tongues in Rio Salado constantly gossiped about her, but Madame Scamaroni didn’t care” (131). These city girls or urban women do not seem to know anything about the values and rules that need to be respected in traditional communities. Apparently, they also do not always have to fear punishment if they behave in an “inappropriate” way, maybe because of the anonymity in big cities, which makes the spreading of gossip more difficult.

In little towns like Río Salado (today El Malah), however, the importance of the public eye and judgment can be felt in every context of daily life on which the ←67 | 68→reputation of a family depends. The question “what would people say?”, i.e., what the people of the village and friends might think if they witnessed a violation of certain codes is an omnipresent one, for both men and women alike. Any act that might be “outraging the whole village” (245) and become a source of gossip must therefore be avoided by all means: “This is a small town, mademoiselle, people talk” (236). As a consequence, the person who does not live according to certain traditions can “lose face” (“perdre la face”), an expression Yasmina Khadra uses a few times to highlight the loss of a man’s honor. Being surrounded by one or several “impure women” (43) immediately leads to a man’s bad public reputation. A woman can easily cause a sensation of shame in a man, also diminishing his sense of pride and honor, as becomes clear in Younes’s description of his mother: “I was ashamed by her greed, ashamed of the unkempt hair she had clearly not brushed for ages, ashamed of the tattered haik: draped like an old curtain round her shoulders, ashamed of the hunger and the pain that distorted her face, this woman who, once, had been as beautiful as the dawn” (128). This link between a woman’s honor and her appearance highlights the frequent dependence of this concept on superficial criteria which are not answered by empathy. All “taboos and propriety” (189) are passed on from parents to children, which explains why “[…] in Rio Salado generation followed generation and nothing ever changed” (190).

In Zülfü Livaneli’s Bliss, Meryem complains about the “punishment of being a woman” (9) who has to cover herself and hide away from the public eye, who must serve men and respect all honor codes which follow Meryem around since her early childhood.⁹¹ In Parinoush Saniee’s The Book of Fate, which depicts the submissive life of the female protagonist Massoumeh, we find the rule that “when a girl laughs, her teeth shouldn’t show and no one should hear her” (7). Those who do not obey have to endure severe punishment, which can range from being beaten up to being stoned to death. The female protagonist in Saphia Azzeddine’s Bilqiss, who is also one of the novel’s three narrators, is imprisoned and accused in court of inappropriate behavior, or more precisely of approximately 20 infractions of “good conduct” which are first described from her perspective: “Un expert en droit islamique avait répertorié une vingtaine d’infractions au code de bonne conduite” (17). Among the offenses (“délits”) that are listed, ←68 | 69→we find the possession of make-up, high heels, feminine underwear, a man’s portrait, journals, Iranian poetry, ginger, a scented candle, recordings of songs, a toy, perfume, tweezers and other inappropriate things (“choses inappropriées,” 17) which make her suspected of wanting to seduce men. She is considered a toxic woman (“femme toxique,” 41) and a sinner (“pécheresse,” 124) who never wears her headscarf correctly and thus distracts the men on the street, also with her painted nails and a bracelet on her foot ankle. Moreover, she is known to buy vegetables of phallic shape, but not asking the vendor to cut them before taking them home (see p. 92). At the age of 14 she was seen talking to a foreign photographer (in itself already a proof of her inappropriate behavior) and taking off her burqa to pose for him, which is also regarded as a sign of disrespect. Having been married off at the age of 13, this kind of immoral conduct endangers the reputation of her husband.

Especially Bilqiss’s act of not entirely covering her head and behaving in a provocative way is a recurring topic that leads to arguments between her and the judge Hasan in her prison cell. In the second part of the novel, in which the judge becomes the narrator and protagonist, this issue is explained from his male perspective, underlining the protective aspect of the veil. Like Rasheed in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hasan explains to his wife Nafisa, who does not want to cover her head, the protective function of the veil: “C’est pour vous protéger, vous, les femmes, que nous faisons cela” (71). We also come across another observation in the same spirit, making it clear that women should, among other behavioral guidelines, never question the necessity of the headscarf: “Ce sont des choses qu’il ne faut jamais remettre en question. Le voile, c’est la protection de la femme” (56). A different approach is presented in Azzeddine’s novel, when the American-Jewish journalist Leandra Hersham is introduced as a representative of a dignity culture. She is investigating Bilqiss’s case, and highlights the aesthetic aspect of covering garments like headscarves, hijabs or burqas, which she herself enjoys putting on because of their exotic touch.

Being the novel’s third narrator and protagonist, Leandra adds a detached and more superficial perspective to the interpretation of the veil. In this intercultural clash between dignity cultures and honor cultures, there is a focus on Western ignorance concerning honor-related codes, reducing the situation ad absurdum with Leandra’s shallow statements like “je trouvais cela magnifique. Je n’avais à vrai dire rien vu d’aussi beau depuis longtemps” (107) when she sees a woman in a burqa, or “Cela me donnait très envie d’en porter un moi aussi” (109), while at the same time she reminds herself of “cette pauvre femme musulmane opprimée.” Bilqiss shares with the reader her critical thoughts on Leandra’s enthusiasm, finding it ridiculous to see her wear a burqa when in her case a simple headscarf ←69 | 70→would have sufficed: “Leandra portait la sienne comme un déguisement, alors que, pour nous, c’était une seconde peau” (153). She stresses the fundamental difference between those Western women who are free to wear what they want and those who have no choice and for whom these garments have become part of their skin, necessary in order for them to stay alive.

The honor-related codes that reflect the power of a patriarchal system again become obvious when the judge’s wife Seniz, in the role of a perfectly virtuous woman, comes to visit Bilqiss in her prison cell. Seniz describes her own line of moral conduct as eat well, satisfy all senses, and do your duty: “Bien manger, satisfaire tous les sens et faire son devoir, c’est ma ligne de conduit morale” (177). She is everything the rebellious Bilqiss does not want to be but should have been in order to live in peace. In the same prison cell, another contrast is created with Leandra, whom Bilqiss constantly provokes with her criticism concerning the Western vision of Muslim women, claiming “Vous avez vu trois ou quatre vidéos, elles vous ont émue et vous avez immédiatement pris le parti de cette pauvre femme voilée car elles vous font de la peine, les femmes voiles” (113). Leandra herself admits that she is not familiar with these cultural rules, for example when she says: “je débarque ici sans connaître vos codes” (135). This unfamiliarity with honor-related norms can lead to problems when the value systems of dignity cultures and honor cultures clash, together with the existing stereotypes on both sides. The reader is provided with Leandra’s biased perception and lack of understanding of female honor as a general concept, explaining (even though in a slightly exaggerated way) how cultural misunderstandings make problematic situations even worse.⁹² It seems as if men’s way of manipulating women into certain behavioral patterns, including the honor-related rule that dictates them to cover their hair and bodies while their male (and sometimes even female) relatives convince them of the advantages these garments offer them, is not discussed as explicitly in the social sciences as it is in literary works.

The question of which kind of behavior is appropriate for a woman under which cultural circumstances also becomes relevant in Robin Yassin-Kassab’s novel The Road from Damascus, which focuses on general problems of integration and a clinging to one’s own culture of origin that comes with living abroad. Here the women who wish to wear a hijab in their immigrant community in England seem to be in the majority. Again, the “principle of modesty” (98) reflected by ←70 | 71→these dress codes is pointed out, among others by the protagonist Sami’s brother-in-law Ammar, who congratulates him on his wife Muntaha’s moral conduct: “Yeah, you should be proud. It’s a rare thing in this country, a modest woman. A woman with religion. A very rare thing. These Englishmen don’t care if their women walk around topless. These women, anyone can have them. Even our women in this country, they got the sickness too. That’s the tragedy” (118). Westernized conduct is troped as disease, presumably contagious, thus naturalizing a cultural code (see also Fairclough) and apparently making women from honor cultures want to rely even more on their own value system in order to protect their reputation in their community.⁹³ The women depicted in this novel do not take off their hijab in the presence of other men, even male relatives, be it in their homeland or abroad. Among them are aunt Fadya and aunt Hasna, the former wearing a “white scarf which she didn’t remove, despite her blood relationship to Sami, even after the door was shut” (3), the latter keeping her hijab on, “for she wasn’t Muntaha’s mother and so theoretically, very theoretically, Sami could marry her. She could be halal for him, according to sharia, and so he was haram for her” (111).⁹⁴