I'm not surprised by this...More aggravated. I read in a photo blog that Israel is having a hard time getting laws passed to kick out illegal Africans, because they feel after the holocaust they need to be open to other people. Excuse me... What about the people who already live there, and are more or less in a ghetto by Israel's choice? This latest bombardment killed over 150 people, half civillian, and its the Palestinian's fault? As a teen I was optimistic, but as the years go by I don't think that the Israelis are ever going to open up enough to allow peace in Israel/Palestine. They are afraid and the Palestinians are the ones that suffer. They are becoming as bad as the Nazis and Russians they fled :o(
By GERSHOM GORENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02jewishness-t.html?em&ex=1204779600&en=49a7c12948eb384c&ei=5087%0A
Published: March 2, 2008
One day last fall, a young Israeli woman named Sharon went with her fiancé to the Tel Aviv Rabbinate to register to marry. They are not religious, but there is no civil marriage in Israel. The rabbinate, a government bureaucracy, has a monopoly on tying the knot between Jews. The last thing Sharon expected to be told that morning was that she would have to prove — before a rabbinic court, no less — that she was Jewish. It made as much sense as someone doubting she was Sharon, telling her that the name written in her blue government-issue ID card was irrelevant, asking her to prove that she was she.
Sharon is a small woman in her late 30s with shoulder-length brown hair. For privacy’s sake, she prefers to be identified by only her first name. She grew up on a kibbutz when kids were still raised in communal children’s houses. She has two brothers who served in Israeli combat units. She loved the green and quiet of the kibbutz but was bored, and after her own military service she moved to the big city, which is the standard kibbutz story. Now she is a Tel Aviv professional with a master’s degree, a job with a major H.M.O. and a partner — when this story starts, a fiancé — who is “in computers.”
This stereotypical biography did not help her any more at the rabbinate than the line on her birth certificate listing her nationality as Jewish. Proving you are Jewish to Israel’s state rabbinate can be difficult, it turns out, especially if you came to Israel from the United States — or, as in Sharon’s case, if your mother did.
In recent years, the state’s Chief Rabbinate and its branches in each Israeli city have adopted an institutional attitude of skepticism toward the Jewish identity of those who enter its doors. And the type of proof that the rabbinate prefers is peculiarly unsuited to Jewish life in the United States. The Israeli government seeks the political and financial support of American Jewry. It welcomes American Jewish immigrants. Yet the rabbinate, one arm of the state, increasingly treats American Jews as doubtful cases: not Jewish until proved so.
More than any other issue, the question of Who is a Jew? has repeatedly roiled relations between Israel and American Jewry. Psychologically, it is an argument over who belongs to the family. In the past, the casus belli was conversion: Would the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew coming to Israel, apply to those converted to Judaism by non-Orthodox rabbis? Now, as Sharon’s experience indicates, the status of Jews by birth is in question. Equally important, the dividing line is no longer between Orthodox and non-Orthodox. The rabbinate’s handling of the issue has placed it on one side of an ideological fissure within Orthodox Judaism itself, between those concerned with making sure no stranger enters the gates and those who fear leaving sisters and brothers outside.
Seth Farber is an American-born Orthodox rabbi whose organization — Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center — helps Israelis navigate the rabbinic bureaucracy. He explained to me recently that the rabbinate’s standards of proof are now stricter than ever, and stricter than most American Jews realize. Referring to the Jewish federations, the central communal and philanthropic organizations of American Jewry, he said, “Eighty percent of federation leaders probably wouldn’t be able to reach the bar.” To assist people like Sharon, Farber has become a genealogical sleuth. He is the first to warn, though, that solving individual cases cannot solve a deeper crisis.
Judaism, traditionally, is matrilineal: every child of a Jewish mother is automatically considered a Jew. Zvi Zohar, a professor of law and Jewish studies at Bar-Ilan University, told me that in Judaism’s classical view of itself, Jews are best understood as a “large extended family” that accepted a covenant with God. Those who didn’t practice the faith remained part of the family, even if traditionally they were regarded as black sheep. Converts were adopted members of the clan. Today the meaning of being Jewish is disputed — a faith? a nationality? — but in Israeli society the principle of matrilineal descent remains widely accepted. Sharon’s mother was Jewish, so Sharon knew that she was, too. And yet it seemed impossible to provide evidence that would persuade the rabbinate.
Sharon left the office infuriated. Her mother was Jewish enough to leave affluent America for Israel; her brothers had fought for the Jewish state. Now, she felt, she was being told, “For that you’re good enough, but to be considered Jews for religious purposes you’re not.”
Sharon’s mother, Suzie, is 66, a dance therapist, even tinier than her daughter, a flurry of movement in the living room of her kibbutz bungalow. Suzie’s maternal grandfather, David Ludmersky, was born in Kiev. When he was drafted into the czar’s army, he deserted, fled to America and worked to send a ticket to Rose, the girl he left behind. The Merskys (an Ellis Island clerk shortened the name) moved to the small Wisconsin town of Wausau, where their daughter, Belle (Suzie’s mother), was born. Suzie has heard that they didn’t like the place, that they consulted a fortuneteller, that she told them to move west to Minneapolis. There David Mersky indeed made his fortune, working his way from peddling fruit to owning one of the city’s first supermarkets.
I recount this family history because of its pure American Jewish normality. In Minneapolis, Belle Mersky married Julius Goldstein in a Conservative ceremony. This, too, was typical: Conservative Judaism was the common choice for American Jews leaning toward tradition. Julius’s brother became a Conservative rabbi. Belle and Julius raised their family on Minneapolis’s North Side, “a totally Jewish neighborhood then,” Suzie recalled. She went to Sunday school at Beth El Synagogue, a Conservative congregation.
Suzie began college at the cusp of the 1960s, attending the University of Minnesota, rooming with a friend from a Zionist summer camp. Her uncle, the Conservative rabbi, paid for her to go to Israel one summer on a student tour. When she returned to Israel after graduation, even the motor-scooter accident was practically part of the standard restless-youth experience. She broke her foot, put off her plan to join a dance company and took a room in a Tel Aviv rooming house. “I was sitting there with my foot up, crutches in the corner, and this handsome guy came in,” she told me. He was British. He and his best friend were living in Holland, “wanted to go somewhere” and drove overland to Israel.
“He ended up being my husband,” Suzie said with a laugh. He wasn’t Jewish, a twist in the story line. They left Israel together to wander through Europe and married in a civil ceremony in England. Those details would later loom immense: Had he been Jewish, had they married in Israel, she would have had a ketuba, or religious marriage contract issued by the rabbinate, for her daughter to show years later. In the excitement after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, they decided to return to the country. “He always wanted to live here,” she said, and “we were adventurous.”
Fast forward: Sharon, on her 38th birthday, took the day off from work to make wedding arrangements. First stop was the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court.
The rabbinic courts are an arm of the Israeli justice system. Formally, the judges — rabbis with special training — are appointed on professional grounds. In practice, positions in the courts and in the state rabbinate are parceled out as patronage by religious political parties. The main function of the rabbinic courts is divorce, also a purely religious process in Israel. A secondary function is providing judicial rulings on whether a person is Jewish. For that, the main clientele is immigrants from the former Soviet Union. A fairly standard procedure exists for them. It includes examining Soviet-era documents, like birth certificates, that list a citizen’s nationality. (In the Soviet system, “Jewish” was a nationality, parallel to “Russian” or “Uzbek,” listed in everyone’s official papers.)
At the court, Sharon told me, the clerk who opened her file told her to bring her mother’s birth certificate and her parents’ marriage certificate. “I said: ‘But my mother’s birth certificate doesn’t say “Jewish.” It’s from the United States. They don’t write that. And the marriage license — they had a civil wedding.’ ” After she waited hours to see a judge, he told Sharon to return with “any document that would testify to her mother’s Jewishness.” She asked a court official if a letter from a Conservative rabbi would solve the problem. Her mother has a cousin in Florida who is a rabbi, son of the uncle who originally sent Suzie to Israel. No, the official said, “that won’t help. It has to be someone Orthodox.”
“When Sharon called me, she was crying,” Suzie told me. Her daughter said the court wanted testimony from an Orthodox rabbi who had known Suzie all her life. “Even if there was such a thing, he would be dead by now,” Suzie said. Lacking an official document labeling her a Jew and without a childhood connection to Orthodoxy, Suzie was again a typical American Jew. Nonetheless, she got on the phone. Her cousin in Florida told her to phone a colleague from Israel’s small movement for Conservative Judaism. He, in turn, said Seth Farber would help her. He was right.
Since genealogy is basic to this story, I will point out that Seth Farber’s great-great-great-grandfather was the pre-eminent Central European rabbi Moshe Schreiber, father of ultra-Orthodoxy. My guess is that Rabbi Schreiber would be confused by Farber’s approach to religion. Better known as the Hatam Sofer, or Seal of the Scribe, the name of his work of religious scholarship, he bitterly opposed fitting Judaism to modernity and was known for his principle, “Anything new is forbidden by the Torah.” An iconic portrait shows him with a long gray beard and a fur hat.
Farber, 41, has a round, clean-shaven face and frameless glasses that make him look like an earnest grad student. He grew up in Riverdale, N.Y., attending the kind of Orthodox parochial school that, he told me, “celebrated Americanism,” that turned the American bicentennial into the focus of an entire school year. In college, he maintained that balance of Orthodoxy and integration by cycling the length of Manhattan twice daily: mornings studying Talmud at Yeshiva University on 185th Street, afternoons at New York University for philosophy. He could have done his secular studies as well at the Orthodox university, he said, but he wanted “to understand the broad world, to meet non-Jews, to be exposed to broad ideas” — in short, to span the moat between traditional Judaism and modernity that his ancestor devoted his life to digging.
Farber was ordained as a rabbi at Yeshiva University, and in the mid-90s he moved to Israel. He completed a doctorate at Hebrew University in American Jewish history and started his own synagogue. It was the kind of place that ran a Passover charity drive, collecting the leavened food that religious Jews would normally throw away before the holiday and donating it to a welfare society in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem. He also got permission from the state rabbinate to perform weddings.
His organization, Itim, was born of a hike that he and his wife, Michelle, took in a barren gorge through the Judean desert. When they arrived at the gorge, they found they would need ropes to descend the cliffs into the freezing pools along the bottom, and another couple offered to share equipment. Along the way, their hiking companions said they weren’t married because “they couldn’t find a rabbi they could relate to.” Most secular Israelis imagine a rabbi looking more like the Hatam Sofer than the hiker in soaked shorts who offered to perform the ceremony. At the wedding, as nearly the only Orthodox Jew among 600 people, Farber said he began to understand how “disenfranchised” many Jews in Israel feel when dealing with state-run religion.
He decided to “create a place where the representatives of Judaism” aren’t government clerks. Itim distributes booklets that explain to Israelis how to arrange a circumcision, marriage or funeral. It helps secular couples find rabbis sensitive to their desires for their ceremonies. For the last five years, it has run a hot line for Israelis who face trouble in the rabbinic bureaucracy. Early on, Farber began receiving calls from people unable to prove they were Jews. Many were immigrants from the former Soviet Union, but some were Americans. Even a letter from an Orthodox rabbi didn’t always help. The state rabbinate no longer trusts all Orthodox rabbis.
Trust — or lack of it — is the crux. Zvi Zohar of Bar-Ilan University explained to me that historically, if someone said he was a Jew, “if he lived among us, was a partner in our society and said he was one of us, we assumed he was right.” Trust was the default position. One reason was that Jews were a persecuted people; no one would claim to belong unless she really did. The leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Israel in the years before and after the state was established, Avraham Yeshayahu Karlitz (known as the Hazon Ish, the name of his magnum opus on religious law), held the classical position. If someone arrived from another country claiming to be Jewish, he should be allowed to marry another Jew, “even if nothing is known of his family,” Karlitz wrote.
Several trends have combined to change that. In an era of intermarriage, denominational disputes and secularization, Jews have ceased agreeing on who belongs to the family, or on what the word “Jew” means. Ultra-Orthodox Jews increasingly question the Jewishness of those outside their own intensely religious communities. The flood of immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel deepened their doubts. In the Soviet Union, when someone with parents of two nationalities received identity papers at age 16, he could pick which nationality to list. A child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could put down “Jew.” The religious principle of matrilineal descent was irrelevant.
In the United States, the Reform movement responded to rising intermarriage by deciding in 1983 to accept children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother as Jews if they were raised within the faith. The denominations also diverge on how to accept a convert into Judaism. Orthodox Jews generally do not regard conversions by non-Orthodox rabbis as valid — either because the rabbis do not strictly follow religious law or because they do not require the converts to do so. The number of people in America “recognized by some movements as Jewish but not by others” is “certainly in six figures,” according to Jonathan D. Sarna, a Brandeis University professor and the author of “American Judaism: A History.”
Denominational rules are only part of the story. In much of the world, Jewish identity has become fluid, part ethnicity, part religion, a matter of choice. “In the United States and also in Western Europe there are many kinds of Jews,” Prof. Menachem Friedman, a Bar-Ilan University sociologist of religion, told me. “People can change religions and identities quickly.” But in Israel, belonging has practical consequences: The 1950 Law of Return grants every Jew the right to immigration. In 1970, the Knesset defined the term “Jew” as meaning “one who was born to a Jewish mother or who converted to Judaism.” That was a partial victory for those demanding traditional religious criteria. But to keep the door open to those who didn’t fit that definition, the amendment also granted the right of immigration to the child, grandchild or spouse of a Jew. Each time religious parties sought to go further and define conversion by Orthodox rules, Sarna recounts, “American Jewry would go into crisis mode,” its leaders insisting that Israel couldn’t delegitimize the non-Orthodox denominations.
In 1986, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the Interior Ministry’s Population Registry to list Shoshana Miller, a Reform convert from America, as Jewish on her ID card. The ultra-Orthodox interior minister resigned in protest. In practice, though, the rabbinate paid scant attention to ID cards. Couples registering to marry were asked to bring two witnesses who could testify that the applicants were Jews under Orthodox law. The two arms of the state, secular and religious, operated according to separate rules.
And in the rabbinate, power was shifting to the ultra-Orthodox — the wing of Judaism that segregates itself from the surrounding society and culture. In the early years of the state, those serving in the rabbinate generally identified with the project of building a Jewish state and felt a connection with secular Jews. Politics changed that. Thirty years ago, ultra-Orthodox parties held 5 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Today, they hold 18. Secular politicians need their support to build a stable coalition government. One way to gain it is to back ultra-Orthodox candidates for rabbinic posts. It is one of the stranger alliances that politics can create: the secular politicians regard “Jewish” mainly as a nationality, an ethnic identity that includes both believers and nonbelievers. For the rabbis they have empowered, “Jewish” is exclusively a religious category, and secular Jews are at best estranged cousins.
The true Era of Mistrust began in the 1990s, with the exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. A semiclandestine agency called Nativ (Route) was responsible for checking whether would-be immigrants qualified under the Law of Return. To establish Jewish identity, the agency scrutinized Soviet documents.
At the state rabbinate, marriage registrars adopted their own policy of doubt. Increasingly, rabbinate clerks sent anyone not born in Israel, or whose parents weren’t married in Israel, to a rabbinic court to prove that he or she was Jewish. Rabbi Osher Ehrentreu, the official at the rabbinic courts responsible for checking Jewish status, can’t name a date for the change, which apparently emerged without an explicit decision. The courts sought the same kind of documents as Nativ did, like birth certificates of the applicant’s mother and maternal grandmother listing them as Jews.
The traditional willingness to trust a person who said he was Jewish, Ehrentreu asserts, presumed that no one had anything to gain by it. Today, he told me, there are ulterior motives — to be able to leave another country and come to Israel, “to be recognized here as Jewish, to be able to get married.” That is, Israel’s prosperity, its attractiveness to immigrants, is now a reason for doubt.
Friedman, the reigning academic expert on ultra-Orthodox society in Israel, suggests that the deeper reasons for doubt are difficult for the rabbis to articulate. In contrast to Orthodox Jews like Farber, the ultra-Orthodox have little sense of risk that by raising doubts they might exclude a person who is really Jewish. “If you don’t keep the Torah and the commandments, O.K., so I excluded you. In any case you weren’t a complete Jew,” is how Friedman explains the attitude.
The policy of suspicion is applied to all immigrants. Rabbi Rasson Arussi, chairman of the Chief Rabbinate’s committee on marriage, told me that “populations where there is doubt about Jewishness” include those from Western countries, specifically “the sectors connected to Reform Jews.” The rabbinate’s expectations, however, are a poor fit with the United States. American Jews generally don’t have government papers testifying to their Jewishness. While a British Jew might turn to his country’s chief rabbinate for certification that he is Jewish, the very idea of a chief rabbi sounds outlandish in the United States.
And as Farber points out, the reign of doubt at the Israeli rabbinate began as it was becoming steadily less likely that an American Jew would be able to dig an Orthodox marriage contract out of her mother’s drawer. In the generation after World War II, most American Jews moved away from even a nominal connection to Orthodoxy. Today, young American-born Jews are likely to be two or three generations removed from any tie with Orthodoxy.
Strikingly, the rabbinate’s doubts extend even to Orthodox rabbis in America. “They’re not familiar with them,” Friedman told me. “They say: ‘The rabbis in the United States, in England, aren’t the kind we know. Someone can define himself as an Orthodox rabbi, but really he’s Reform.’ ” A marriage registrar given a letter from an Orthodox rabbi abroad certifying that a person is Jewish is now expected to check with the office of Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, which maintains a list of diaspora clergy whose letters are to be trusted. The list is not publicly available. If the rabbi who wrote the letter is not on the list, the applicant is asked for other proof or referred to the rabbinic courts.
Converts, even the children of converts, potentially face greater difficulties, because the rabbinate has also become more skeptical about Orthodox conversions performed abroad. What’s more, under pressure from Chief Rabbi Amar, the main association of Orthodox clergy in the United States, the Rabbinical Council of America, is establishing its own regional rabbinic courts for conversion. A recent council position paper warns that the group makes no commitment to stand behind conversions performed by other rabbis. The paper also stresses that converts are expected to accept Orthodox religious law, or Halakhah.
The policy has divided the American group. Advocates say that standardization will ensure that converts are accepted by all religious Jews. A former council president, Marc Angel, a sharp critic, told me the group “decided to capitulate” to Amar and robbed individual rabbis of their prerogative to measure the needs and commitment of prospective converts. “The rabbinate in Israel has put the Orthodox rabbinate” — meaning Orthodox rabbis in the United States — “on the same level as Reform rabbis,” Angel said. He now advocates a position once unthinkable among R.C.A. rabbis: Israel would be better off if it instituted civil marriage and cut the state’s ties with the rabbinate.
Not surprisingly, leaders of non-Orthodox denominations in the United States sound both pained and vindicated when discussing the rabbinate’s policies. “There is quite an irony in this,” Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, told me. In the past, “Orthodox authorities in America have basically defended the system, and they’ve embraced this religious monopoly as being important and necessary, thinking all the while that it was directed primarily against us, us meaning the non-Orthodox community.” Now their own bona fides are in doubt.
Arnold M. Eisen, chancellor of the American Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, stresses the damage to Israel-diaspora relations: “All the data shows a growing rift between American Jews and Israeli Jews, and the younger you are as an American Jew, the less that you care about the state of Israel. This is just terrible. And one of the reasons for it — not the only reason, but one of the reasons for it — is this kind of insulting treatment of the majority of American Jews by the Israeli rabbinate.”
Seth Farber, a pragmatic idealist, does not expect either the rabbinate or the basic disagreements about who is Jewish to disappear. What he rather desperately believes, he said, is that “a conversation has to begin” on how Orthodox Jews — including the rabbinate — and non-Orthodox Jews can agree “to trust each other” despite the disputes. The Israeli rabbinate, that is, should trust a Reform rabbi’s testimony that a person’s mother is Jewish. For Farber, there is a price to overwhelming doubt: It means “writing thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, out of the Jewish world.”
With no grand compromise in the offing, Farber works on individual cases. Over the last five years, he said, he helped more than 100 people prove to the rabbinate that they were Jewish. The amount of detective work he undertakes demonstrates his own dedication. But it also shows how difficult it can be for people from typical American Jewish backgrounds to provide evidence of an identity they regard as self-evident.
Mark Rashkow, whose wedding was saved by Farber’s intervention, described him as “relentless.” Rashkow came to Israel from Chicago in 2003 to woo the woman he loved as a young volunteer 30 years before at Kibbutz Hazorea. Both he and she were at the end of long marriages. A year later, just days before their wedding, the local rabbinate informed him that he had yet to show he was Jewish. A rabbinate official in the town of Afula, near Hazorea, dismissed a letter from his Conservative rabbi in America, saying, according to Rashkow: “It doesn’t interest me. He’s a goy.”
Growing up in Chicago, Rashkow said, “I thought my first name was ‘kike’ until I was 12.” But when he found Farber via an Internet search just a few days before his planned wedding, the only leads Rashkow could provide him with were his maternal grandmother’s name and her approximate year of death. “Seth Farber, to me, was like an angel sent from heaven,” said Rashkow, who told his story at an exuberant pace. Farber began phoning Jewish cemeteries, working late into the Israeli night to reach Chicago in daytime. On the fourth or fifth call, he succeeded: the voice at the other end had the name listed in a section of the graveyard belonging to a society of Jews who’d come from Sokolow, in Poland. A cemetery employee sent pictures by e-mail of the gravestone, which was replete with Hebrew.
The next step was finding a birth certificate for Rashkow that showed his mother’s name, and one for his mother that listed her mother — thereby establishing his link to the gravestone. A lawyer whom Rashkow knew in Chicago rushed to the courthouse to get the papers. Farber then contacted the Chicago Rabbinical Council, an Orthodox body recognized by the Israeli rabbinate, to certify Rashkow as Jewish. The faxed letter arrived a day before the wedding, and Rashkow was able to marry the woman he had dreamed of for 30 years.
Suzie, Sharon’s mother, called Farber on a Sunday morning, the start of the Israeli workweek. He asked her for her grandmother’s maiden name, which she didn’t recall, and told her to ask someone in Minnesota to find her maternal grandparents’ tombstones.
“The hunt is on,” he wrote me in an e-mail message that night. He contacted the Chicago Rabbinical Council, which provided the names of the rabbi of an Orthodox synagogue in Minneapolis and his predecessor. Farber called both. Neither knew Suzie’s family, and the synagogue had no record of her grandmother. An old friend of Suzie’s in Minneapolis went to the courthouse and got a copy of her parents’ marriage license, signed by a rabbi. Farber did a Google search for his name and found that he had been a leading figure in the Conservative movement — meaning the license was at best weak supporting evidence before an Israeli rabbinic court. Once again, the link to an Orthodox community was missing.
Farber went to the Web site of Ellis Island and ran searches for Suzie’s family members in the repository of records of the “teeming masses” that arrived there. The manifests of arriving ships list “race or people” of immigrants, and “Hebrew” — meaning Jew — is one designation. But he was unable to locate any record of Suzie’s grandmother. “I’m a little less confident than I was,” he told me on the third day of his hunt.
Online, he found the Portage County Historical Society of Wisconsin. He sent the group an e-mail message about Suzie’s mother, born as Belle Mersky in 1907, asking “if, by any chance, there might be synagogue records of her birth available to you.” It was a geographical near miss; Wausau is in neighboring Marathon County. His message was forwarded to Rabbi Dan Danson of Wausau’s sole synagogue, a Reform congregation. But it had no archives of births from before 1988. Another dead end.
By now, though, Farber had phoned the Marathon County Register of Deeds, seeking Suzie’s mother’s birth certificate. The request, he was told, had to come from an immediate relative. Fortunately, Danson offered to help, and Suzie sent him the necessary information by e-mail. By Friday morning — five days after Suzie first called Farber — Danson was at the Wausau courthouse with the papers and $20 of his own money. Belle Mersky’s birth certificate, faxed to Farber’s home, showed that her mother’s maiden name was Rose Reuben.
Suzie’s niece visited the Jewish cemetery in Minneapolis where her grandparents were buried. The tombstones, originally placed flush with the ground, were now covered with grass and sod. She went home, returned with a shovel, and uncovered the evidence. In the photo of the gravestone that she sent by e-mail, above the name Rose Mersky in English was Hebrew: “Rachel, daughter of Moshe,” with the date of death, the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Elul, in the year 5714 (1954).
A week into the search, evidence was coming together. In a school project her son once did, Suzie found a family photo of her grandmother’s grandfather, Mikhael Ludmersky, an archetypal 19th-century Eastern European Jew with a white beard and black cap. From her family’s Conservative congregation in Minneapolis she received yahrzeit cards for her grandparents — records used to remind relatives of the anniversaries of their loved ones’ deaths, when the kaddish prayer should be recited. Even given the source, it was supporting evidence.
Farber arrived at the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court about two weeks after Sharon’s first visit. He’d called and arranged with a judge to be squeezed in before the day’s docket of divorces. He had power of attorney, so Sharon didn’t need to appear. He wore a black suit and a gold tie, and his face was narrow and taut. “Now I’ve moved up from detective to lawyer,” he said. He was ushered into a tiny courtroom, where three rabbis, dressed in the black coats of the ultra-Orthodox, sat at a raised bench. Farber approached and made his case to one. He showed the series of birth certificates of Sharon’s maternal line, with the surnames Goldstein, Mersky, Reuben. “These are all clearly Jewish names,” he said. He presented the picture of the tombstone of Rachel, daughter of Moshe, and the photograph of Mikhael Ludmersky in his black cap, and the rest of his exhibits. The judge said to wait outside.
Twenty minutes later, a clerk called Farber in and presented him with a one-sentence judgment stating that Sharon is a Jew.
Gershom Gorenberg is the author of “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.” His last article for the magazine was about the construction of Israel’s security barrier through the West Bank.
04 March 2008
25 February 2008
Thesis Chapter 4
4 – The Jordanian Penal Code
AMMAN – A Jordanian who killed his divorced sister over rumors that she had a lover was cleared of premeditated murder because he acted in a ‘fit of rage,’ after his family dropped charges. The verdict was handed down Wednesday, five months after the 19-year-old university student shot to death his 22-year-old sister, 10 minutes after he was told that she had a lover out of wedlock, quoting court papers. The student received a three month jail sentence and walked free for time already served. ‘The 10 minute interval between hearing of his sister’s immoral actions and meeting her face-to-face is proof that he did not plot the murder,’ a court statement said. The young man had turned himself in to the police after the murder claiming that he acted to ‘cleanse the family’s honor’ and initially received a six month prison sentence. But the court slashed the verdict by half and changed the charge from premeditated murder to a misdemeanor ‘because the defendant killed his sister in a fit of rage,” in line with Article 98 of he penal code. It also argued that the ‘victim brought disgrace to her family and the defendant and tarnished their honor [because] her actions were against religion and social norms’ in the conservative Muslim country. The court said that it also opted for a reduced sentence ‘because his family dropped the charges against him and because he is a student.’ Medical sources however, said that an autopsy performed on the victim after the murder showed that the woman had not been sexually active before she was killed. But the court continued: ‘It is possible the victim had changed her clothes…before she was killed to hide evidence that would show she was engaged in an illegitimate affair’ (Jordan Times 02/01/2007)
The Jordanian judicial system has sought to control the practice of honor crimes, while also attempting to restrain the emergence of new "subversive" sexual types. Yet, crimes may be a response to these new sexual practices (i.e. open homosexuality, sex outside the context of marriage, etc) that are often seen as not only sinful, but shameful to society. The judicial system reacts to not only the violence, but also the unusual sexual practices by seeking to control both through crimes of honor by allowing them to continue to a certain degree so asocial individuals understand how devastating their actions may be to not only themselves, but their family as well. Divergent sexual types emerge as a response to the balance between both types of violence, social and official. In saying, a crime of honor is not merely an act that is created in a vacuum, but a cycle that feeds off of volatile social issues within a culture, such as a societies need to suppress issues it sees as unstable and immoral (Abu-Odeh 141).
The Jordanian Penal Code (no. 16, 1960), Article 340, first of three listed as, "Excuse in Murder":
i) He who catches his wife, or one of his female unlawfuls committing adultery with another, and he kills, wounds, or injures one or both of them, is exempt from any penalty.
ii) He who catches his wife, or one of his female ascendants or descendants or sisters with another in an unlawful bed, and he kills or wounds or injures one or both of them, benefits from a reduction of penalty.
The historical and structural origins of this article come from three separate countries that made an impact on the early effects of the modernization of Jordan. The article itself is a combination of the French Penal Code of 1810 and the Ottoman Penal Code of 1858. Article 324 of the French Penal Code was abolished by Article 17, Law no. 617/75 issued on the 7th of November 1975:
Porra beneficier d'une excuse absolutoire quiconque, ayant surprise son conjoint, son ascendante, sa descendante ou sa soeur en flagrant delit d'adultere ou de rapports sexuels illegitimes avec un tiers se sera rendu coupable seu la personne de l'un ou l'autre de es derniers, d'homicide ou de lesion non premedites.
L'auteur de l'homicide ou de la lesion pourra beneficier d'une excuse attenuante s'il a surprise son anjoint, son ascendante, sa descendante ou sa soeur avec un tiers dans une attitude equivoque.
"In order to have an absolute excuse for a person who has committed adultery or sexual intercourse out of wedlock he needs to have told about this misdeed to his spouse, his parent, his child, or his sister. By doing that the fault of the crime is transmitted to the person with whom he slept.
If a person who has committed a murder or injury to a person who has committed adultery, has warned or has told to his spouse, his parent, his child, or his sister about his intentions, this confession becomes an extenuating circumstance in his case."
Article 188 of the Ottoman Penal Code states:
He who has seen his wife or any of his female unlawfuls with another in a state of zina' (meaning "adultery", referring to illicit sexual relations whether the party is married or not within the Shari'a, Islamic Law) and then beat, injured, or killed one or both of them will be exempt from penalty. And he who has seen his wife or one of his female unlawfuls with another in an unlawful bed and then beat, injured or killed one or both of them, will be excused (Abu-Odeh 143).
Article 340 assumes the terms, "female unlawfuls" and "unlawful bed" from the Ottoman Penal Code; and from the French Penal Code it takes the phrase "ascendante, descendante," and "une excuse attenuante", which is a reduction of sentencing. French terminology is also used that subsequently benefits only men (fathers, husbands, and brothers) who find themselves in such circumstances (Abu-Odeh 144-145).
The structure itself of the Jordanian Criminal Code is taken directly from that of the Egyptian jurisprudence. Since Egypt is seen as the birthplace of Arab jurisprudence and also where it is thought to be most developed, it was adopted almost without change in numerous Arab countries, including Jordan. This has made it nearly as untouchable as the Islamic Hadiths in realms of tradition, and rather than being critiqued and made to stand as an independent historical subject, it has been followed and imitated for nearly a hundred years. This in itself carries the processes of tribal mentality (i.e. the values that play into that of an agonistic culture; supporting the honor of a tribe, family, or in-group seeking to reduce the chance of shame.) into modern day judicial systems, which continue to violate essential human rights (Abu-Odeh 145-146, 157, Malina 1993).
Commentators on the subject of the Egyptian court agreed that three conditions must be met before the article is to apply to a defendant: 1) the defendant must be related to the victim as father, husband or brother. 2) Surprising the victim in the act, thus having proof, and not basing deeds on rumors. 3) The act of killing itself has to be immediate and impulsive. On this note the Egyptian Court of Cassation decided that if a man tried to kill his wife/daughter/sister after her discovery and she escapes to her family and he finds her two hours later and kills her he is not to benefit from the reduction in penalty – At that point it is no longer seen as an act of passion that did not have premeditation. As is seen by this and many other examples, the Egyptian provisions apply more to cases of passion than to cases of traditional honor. Holding true to this form the Jordanian code also finds it necessary for the element of passion to be involved in the murder, once again an aspect that is not part of the traditional view of honor in the honor/shame society of the Arab world (Abu-Odeh 147).
For a crime that is committed out of passion, there must be an intimate relationship between the two people to place substance in the emotions that are being felt. The misconduct of one or the other is seen as a personal assault to an individual's feelings, instead of their public reputation that would become something shameful to the family and community. Thus, it has less to do with honor, and more to do with a personal relationship that is between two individuals. For example, a traditional crime of honor would be the murder of a bride on her wedding night when she has not been found to be a virgin; at which point the family's reputation is at stake and it is the duty of the men in the family to cleanse this honor with her blood (Abu-Odeh 155).
Because the honor/shame social system of the Middle East produces what is called "honor crimes" the legal system seeks to intervene in the way it sees best. Since they are also coming from the same honor/shame mentality some crimes are legitimized while others are not. In the end governmental attempts to strike a balance between both crimes of passion and crimes of honor, while seeking to subdue various aspects of female sexuality that is traditionally seen as haram, or sin (Abu-Odeh 148-149).
In looking at real cases from 1953-1982, one is hard pressed to see any of this holding any significance in the light of the actual dealings of honor crimes. Between the years of 1953 and 1965 Article 333 (changed to 340 in 1960) was never used in relation to honor crimes, because a different article was favored by the judges of the time. Article 93 (which changed to 98 in 1960) states:
He who commits a crime in a fit of fury caused by an unrightful and dangerous act on the part of the victim benefits from a reduction of penalty.
The Jordanian Court of Cassation (JCC) began to debate against the application of Article 98 beginning in 1953. First and foremost, in the cases of the time it did not appear that the victim's behavior was an "unrightful and dangerous act" against the defendant with regards to Article 98. The JCC found that nothing less than "a minor case of self-defense" would justify applying this article. In 1954 the JCC began to take a different approach by stating that Article 98 was general and Article 340 was specific, so Article 340 should be used on the specific crime it was meant for. Yet, in 1964 there was a change in the JCC's position, as it was decided that there were not any problems with applying Article 98 to honor crimes that were committed in a state of fury. It was at this point in the Jordanian legal history that a man's honor became synonymous with himself and the court saw the victim's acts as an unrightful act against the defendant and his honor.
A 1975 decision exemplified this change when the JCC stated: "The victim's act of adultery is a material act that touches the defendant's honor and that is why it is not a violation of the law to grant him a reduction in penalty." It was after this massive change in the system that the JCC became concerned with three issues regarding honor crimes: 1) the nature of the victim’s act itself; is it an unrightful act against the family's honor? 2) The passage of time between the defendant's knowledge of the victim's unrightful act and the killing. 3) The defendant's knowledge of the victim's act. In 1978 a court case found an illegitimate pregnancy to fit these criteria, because it was of a "dangerous nature according to our society's traditions." In 1973 a man killed his sister a day after he learned rumors of her licentious behavior were true and the court granted him a reduction in sentence. They deemed it an insufficient time for a man to gain his senses, regardless of the fact that the Egyptian court cases, that Jordanian law is modeled after, found two hours too much of a time lapse for a reduction in sentencing based on the contingency that it was a crime of fury. A 1981 case where the defendant murdered his sister after only hearing rumors, did not find the man applicable for the reduction in penalty, but a 1970 case where a man asked his sister about rumors and had them confirmed was granted the reduction (Abu-Odeh 157-160).
AMMAN – A Jordanian who killed his divorced sister over rumors that she had a lover was cleared of premeditated murder because he acted in a ‘fit of rage,’ after his family dropped charges. The verdict was handed down Wednesday, five months after the 19-year-old university student shot to death his 22-year-old sister, 10 minutes after he was told that she had a lover out of wedlock, quoting court papers. The student received a three month jail sentence and walked free for time already served. ‘The 10 minute interval between hearing of his sister’s immoral actions and meeting her face-to-face is proof that he did not plot the murder,’ a court statement said. The young man had turned himself in to the police after the murder claiming that he acted to ‘cleanse the family’s honor’ and initially received a six month prison sentence. But the court slashed the verdict by half and changed the charge from premeditated murder to a misdemeanor ‘because the defendant killed his sister in a fit of rage,” in line with Article 98 of he penal code. It also argued that the ‘victim brought disgrace to her family and the defendant and tarnished their honor [because] her actions were against religion and social norms’ in the conservative Muslim country. The court said that it also opted for a reduced sentence ‘because his family dropped the charges against him and because he is a student.’ Medical sources however, said that an autopsy performed on the victim after the murder showed that the woman had not been sexually active before she was killed. But the court continued: ‘It is possible the victim had changed her clothes…before she was killed to hide evidence that would show she was engaged in an illegitimate affair’ (Jordan Times 02/01/2007)
The Jordanian judicial system has sought to control the practice of honor crimes, while also attempting to restrain the emergence of new "subversive" sexual types. Yet, crimes may be a response to these new sexual practices (i.e. open homosexuality, sex outside the context of marriage, etc) that are often seen as not only sinful, but shameful to society. The judicial system reacts to not only the violence, but also the unusual sexual practices by seeking to control both through crimes of honor by allowing them to continue to a certain degree so asocial individuals understand how devastating their actions may be to not only themselves, but their family as well. Divergent sexual types emerge as a response to the balance between both types of violence, social and official. In saying, a crime of honor is not merely an act that is created in a vacuum, but a cycle that feeds off of volatile social issues within a culture, such as a societies need to suppress issues it sees as unstable and immoral (Abu-Odeh 141).
The Jordanian Penal Code (no. 16, 1960), Article 340, first of three listed as, "Excuse in Murder":
i) He who catches his wife, or one of his female unlawfuls committing adultery with another, and he kills, wounds, or injures one or both of them, is exempt from any penalty.
ii) He who catches his wife, or one of his female ascendants or descendants or sisters with another in an unlawful bed, and he kills or wounds or injures one or both of them, benefits from a reduction of penalty.
The historical and structural origins of this article come from three separate countries that made an impact on the early effects of the modernization of Jordan. The article itself is a combination of the French Penal Code of 1810 and the Ottoman Penal Code of 1858. Article 324 of the French Penal Code was abolished by Article 17, Law no. 617/75 issued on the 7th of November 1975:
Porra beneficier d'une excuse absolutoire quiconque, ayant surprise son conjoint, son ascendante, sa descendante ou sa soeur en flagrant delit d'adultere ou de rapports sexuels illegitimes avec un tiers se sera rendu coupable seu la personne de l'un ou l'autre de es derniers, d'homicide ou de lesion non premedites.
L'auteur de l'homicide ou de la lesion pourra beneficier d'une excuse attenuante s'il a surprise son anjoint, son ascendante, sa descendante ou sa soeur avec un tiers dans une attitude equivoque.
"In order to have an absolute excuse for a person who has committed adultery or sexual intercourse out of wedlock he needs to have told about this misdeed to his spouse, his parent, his child, or his sister. By doing that the fault of the crime is transmitted to the person with whom he slept.
If a person who has committed a murder or injury to a person who has committed adultery, has warned or has told to his spouse, his parent, his child, or his sister about his intentions, this confession becomes an extenuating circumstance in his case."
Article 188 of the Ottoman Penal Code states:
He who has seen his wife or any of his female unlawfuls with another in a state of zina' (meaning "adultery", referring to illicit sexual relations whether the party is married or not within the Shari'a, Islamic Law) and then beat, injured, or killed one or both of them will be exempt from penalty. And he who has seen his wife or one of his female unlawfuls with another in an unlawful bed and then beat, injured or killed one or both of them, will be excused (Abu-Odeh 143).
Article 340 assumes the terms, "female unlawfuls" and "unlawful bed" from the Ottoman Penal Code; and from the French Penal Code it takes the phrase "ascendante, descendante," and "une excuse attenuante", which is a reduction of sentencing. French terminology is also used that subsequently benefits only men (fathers, husbands, and brothers) who find themselves in such circumstances (Abu-Odeh 144-145).
The structure itself of the Jordanian Criminal Code is taken directly from that of the Egyptian jurisprudence. Since Egypt is seen as the birthplace of Arab jurisprudence and also where it is thought to be most developed, it was adopted almost without change in numerous Arab countries, including Jordan. This has made it nearly as untouchable as the Islamic Hadiths in realms of tradition, and rather than being critiqued and made to stand as an independent historical subject, it has been followed and imitated for nearly a hundred years. This in itself carries the processes of tribal mentality (i.e. the values that play into that of an agonistic culture; supporting the honor of a tribe, family, or in-group seeking to reduce the chance of shame.) into modern day judicial systems, which continue to violate essential human rights (Abu-Odeh 145-146, 157, Malina 1993).
Commentators on the subject of the Egyptian court agreed that three conditions must be met before the article is to apply to a defendant: 1) the defendant must be related to the victim as father, husband or brother. 2) Surprising the victim in the act, thus having proof, and not basing deeds on rumors. 3) The act of killing itself has to be immediate and impulsive. On this note the Egyptian Court of Cassation decided that if a man tried to kill his wife/daughter/sister after her discovery and she escapes to her family and he finds her two hours later and kills her he is not to benefit from the reduction in penalty – At that point it is no longer seen as an act of passion that did not have premeditation. As is seen by this and many other examples, the Egyptian provisions apply more to cases of passion than to cases of traditional honor. Holding true to this form the Jordanian code also finds it necessary for the element of passion to be involved in the murder, once again an aspect that is not part of the traditional view of honor in the honor/shame society of the Arab world (Abu-Odeh 147).
For a crime that is committed out of passion, there must be an intimate relationship between the two people to place substance in the emotions that are being felt. The misconduct of one or the other is seen as a personal assault to an individual's feelings, instead of their public reputation that would become something shameful to the family and community. Thus, it has less to do with honor, and more to do with a personal relationship that is between two individuals. For example, a traditional crime of honor would be the murder of a bride on her wedding night when she has not been found to be a virgin; at which point the family's reputation is at stake and it is the duty of the men in the family to cleanse this honor with her blood (Abu-Odeh 155).
Because the honor/shame social system of the Middle East produces what is called "honor crimes" the legal system seeks to intervene in the way it sees best. Since they are also coming from the same honor/shame mentality some crimes are legitimized while others are not. In the end governmental attempts to strike a balance between both crimes of passion and crimes of honor, while seeking to subdue various aspects of female sexuality that is traditionally seen as haram, or sin (Abu-Odeh 148-149).
In looking at real cases from 1953-1982, one is hard pressed to see any of this holding any significance in the light of the actual dealings of honor crimes. Between the years of 1953 and 1965 Article 333 (changed to 340 in 1960) was never used in relation to honor crimes, because a different article was favored by the judges of the time. Article 93 (which changed to 98 in 1960) states:
He who commits a crime in a fit of fury caused by an unrightful and dangerous act on the part of the victim benefits from a reduction of penalty.
The Jordanian Court of Cassation (JCC) began to debate against the application of Article 98 beginning in 1953. First and foremost, in the cases of the time it did not appear that the victim's behavior was an "unrightful and dangerous act" against the defendant with regards to Article 98. The JCC found that nothing less than "a minor case of self-defense" would justify applying this article. In 1954 the JCC began to take a different approach by stating that Article 98 was general and Article 340 was specific, so Article 340 should be used on the specific crime it was meant for. Yet, in 1964 there was a change in the JCC's position, as it was decided that there were not any problems with applying Article 98 to honor crimes that were committed in a state of fury. It was at this point in the Jordanian legal history that a man's honor became synonymous with himself and the court saw the victim's acts as an unrightful act against the defendant and his honor.
A 1975 decision exemplified this change when the JCC stated: "The victim's act of adultery is a material act that touches the defendant's honor and that is why it is not a violation of the law to grant him a reduction in penalty." It was after this massive change in the system that the JCC became concerned with three issues regarding honor crimes: 1) the nature of the victim’s act itself; is it an unrightful act against the family's honor? 2) The passage of time between the defendant's knowledge of the victim's unrightful act and the killing. 3) The defendant's knowledge of the victim's act. In 1978 a court case found an illegitimate pregnancy to fit these criteria, because it was of a "dangerous nature according to our society's traditions." In 1973 a man killed his sister a day after he learned rumors of her licentious behavior were true and the court granted him a reduction in sentence. They deemed it an insufficient time for a man to gain his senses, regardless of the fact that the Egyptian court cases, that Jordanian law is modeled after, found two hours too much of a time lapse for a reduction in sentencing based on the contingency that it was a crime of fury. A 1981 case where the defendant murdered his sister after only hearing rumors, did not find the man applicable for the reduction in penalty, but a 1970 case where a man asked his sister about rumors and had them confirmed was granted the reduction (Abu-Odeh 157-160).
Thesis Chapter 3
3 – The Influence of Economic Status on Culture and Tradition
On September 29th, 2006 in Amman, Jordan two boys confessed to murdering their sister for reasons related to family honor two weeks previously, and then dumped her body in a canal in Karak. A shepherd initially discovered the woman’s body clad only in undergarments, but officials later found her clothes stained with blood and coroners detected light burn marks on her body as well as traces of gasoline. Her family had not reported her missing, and investigators fear there may be a male victim whose body was not found. The initial investigation found that the brothers drove their sister from Irbid to a deserted area near the Queen Alia International Airport outside of Amman, beat her up, and then strangled her, later dumping her body in Karak where they tried to set it on fire to cover their traces. A source told the Jordan Times that, “The suspects claimed they were cleansing their family’s honor because their sister often left the house without their permission and her behavior brought them disgrace.” Three months previously the victim, who was twenty-two at the time of her death, had been referred to the administrative governor after her father and two brothers beat her up, the source also said. On October 6th a twenty-six year old man was charged with the premeditated murder and attempted burning of his younger sister, though earlier reports indicated that other family members were involved. The suspect claimed to have acted alone and he only strangled her after medical examinations proved she was not a virgin, though medical reports indicated that from the extent of injuries sustained she had been sexually assaulted (Jordan Times).
Ghosson Rahal, a lawyer and independent researcher, thought that economic status played an important role for both the perpetrator and the victim. In a study done by the Human Forum for Women's Rights (HFWR) in 1998 31% of victim's families feel into an income range of 101-150 Jordanian Dinar (JD) a month, which supported on average a family of seven. Likewise, 32% of perpetrator's families lived on a monthly income of 50-100 JD (Nasser 17, 21). It also must be noted that people of a lower economic status often are the bearers of tradition and it is those of a higher economic status that abandon traditional norms for modern values that promote achievement and egalitarianism (Ingelhart).
On a positive note, it is the higher economic status Jordanian families that has allowed for the liberation of women . More women are entering university each year and proving that they are just as valuable as their male counterparts . While families still hope for sons, it is no longer the shame and disappointment it once was to have daughters .
On September 29th, 2006 in Amman, Jordan two boys confessed to murdering their sister for reasons related to family honor two weeks previously, and then dumped her body in a canal in Karak. A shepherd initially discovered the woman’s body clad only in undergarments, but officials later found her clothes stained with blood and coroners detected light burn marks on her body as well as traces of gasoline. Her family had not reported her missing, and investigators fear there may be a male victim whose body was not found. The initial investigation found that the brothers drove their sister from Irbid to a deserted area near the Queen Alia International Airport outside of Amman, beat her up, and then strangled her, later dumping her body in Karak where they tried to set it on fire to cover their traces. A source told the Jordan Times that, “The suspects claimed they were cleansing their family’s honor because their sister often left the house without their permission and her behavior brought them disgrace.” Three months previously the victim, who was twenty-two at the time of her death, had been referred to the administrative governor after her father and two brothers beat her up, the source also said. On October 6th a twenty-six year old man was charged with the premeditated murder and attempted burning of his younger sister, though earlier reports indicated that other family members were involved. The suspect claimed to have acted alone and he only strangled her after medical examinations proved she was not a virgin, though medical reports indicated that from the extent of injuries sustained she had been sexually assaulted (Jordan Times).
Ghosson Rahal, a lawyer and independent researcher, thought that economic status played an important role for both the perpetrator and the victim. In a study done by the Human Forum for Women's Rights (HFWR) in 1998 31% of victim's families feel into an income range of 101-150 Jordanian Dinar (JD) a month, which supported on average a family of seven. Likewise, 32% of perpetrator's families lived on a monthly income of 50-100 JD (Nasser 17, 21). It also must be noted that people of a lower economic status often are the bearers of tradition and it is those of a higher economic status that abandon traditional norms for modern values that promote achievement and egalitarianism (Ingelhart).
On a positive note, it is the higher economic status Jordanian families that has allowed for the liberation of women . More women are entering university each year and proving that they are just as valuable as their male counterparts . While families still hope for sons, it is no longer the shame and disappointment it once was to have daughters .
Thesis Chapter 2
2 -Definition and Predominance of Honor Crimes
“The definition of ‘crimes of honour’ is by no means straightforward, and the imprecison and ‘exoticisation’ (in particular in the West) of its use are among the reasons for caution in use of the phrase. At it’s most basic, the term is commonly used as shorthand, to flag a type of violence against women characterized by (claimed) ‘motivation’ rather than by perpetrator […] Definitions tend to be by way of illustration; thus, in a highly significant article on ‘crimes of honour’ and the construction of gender in the Arab world, Lama Abu Odeh explains that a paradigm example of a crime of honour is the killing of a woman by her father or brother for engaging in, or being suspected of engaging in, sexual practices before or outside of marriage (Welchman and Hossain).”
Numerous communications discussing honor crimes are reported to the United Nations (UN) each year, and in this circumstance honor is defined in the context of a women’s sexual and familial roles as dictated by the family, who are consequently directed by social and cultural norms. Adultery, premarital relationships – whether they may or may not include sex – rape and falling in love outside of an engagement may all be considered violations of sharaf al-‘aylah , or family honor. A woman’s virginity is of great importance to her family, as not only their honor is tied to it, but also rights of inheritance and the continuance of family lines (Welchman & Hossain 4-5).
Traditionally speaking, the virginity of the women in a household is the center of the male gender identity, especially for the eldest brother. It is his job to guard, chaperone, and defend against possible social wrongs on his sister's part. To be a man is to engage in daily activities that were an important part of insuring the virginity of those women who are part of their family. In the Arab culture, a man is that person whose sister's virginity is a social question for him. Because a man is seen to have a certain amount of ownership over his women folk he is easily shamed by her actions, and may resort to killing her to regain his position in society as a strong man. Without this action he may be seen as an effeminate; a wimp, a girl, or a ninny; that cannot perform the most basic expectations in life. These fears, also known as "castration anxiety” , speak of a psychological battle that may be waged within the man, finally forcing him to act out to bring peace to his own state of mind (Cogan, Porcerelli, & Dromgoole). These men who have been raised to be "macho, heartless, purposeful, conquering, and triumphant over women" may feel conflicted because they have been raised in a traditionally conservative fashion (Abu-Odeh 151-153).
In his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton defines spiritual virginity as, “a point untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth ... which belongs entirely to God, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point ... of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us." Since all Arabic nations are infused with a heady dose of Islam it is safe to say that at least to some degree the family’s spirituality is wrapped up in their daughter’s virginity, or at least in the idea of an all pervasive innocence that allows for the lessons of the Qur’an and Hadith to seep in untainted. When this illusion is burst by rumor or action a sense of disillusion in not only religion, but in everything the culture has taught the family through generations may pervade daily life (Norris).
Sharon Lang states in her ethnography,
“A ‘family honor (sharaf al-‘aylah) killing’ cane be defined generally as a premeditated murder of a girl or woman, committed by her brother, father, or combination of male agnates in the name of restoring the family’s social reputation […] The transgression of a woman, who defies her kin group by not marrying the proper spouse, or by committing some sexual offense, is a deeply-felt, fundamental violation of Arab norms and values. Once the family’s reputation has been damaged in this way, the sister or daughter involved is in danger of being killed. The killer, most often the woman’s brother, perceives his action as ghassal is-sharaf or ‘cleaning the honor,’ masaha buqa’a sharaf al-‘a’ileh, ‘wiping away a stain on the family honor.’ Ironically this cleansing process is accomplished by the spilling of blood (dam)” (Lang 44-45).
The etymology of Arabic says a great deal about how the Arab people culturally view the place of women within their society. “Haram!” Is a word that is heard throughout the day in nearly every conversation. The general idea behind the word when used in an informal conversation is shame or embarrassment, and may be used in reference to the skyrocketing price of gas, when a taxi driver is tries to cheat a passenger, when a man goes beyond his boundaries with a woman, scandalous conduct on television, bombings, etc. What is fascinating about Arabic is that each word is connected to a series of other words by the root word that forms that one particular word. The actual translation of haram is “forbidden,” but it is also connected to unlawful, excommunication, denied/refused, etc and while it is the root word it goes on to form the word ahataram, or to honor, venerate. The list continues with the “Sacred territory at Mecca”, al-harm. From these two polar opposites comes the word for both sacredness and wife – hurmah or juhram. A word that Westerners are used to hearing in reference to the Middle East is, harem, and this word is also connected to this line and translates as “the women of a household.” Throughout the history of the Arab people women have been seen as sacred, something that must be protected and held close to the hearth and home. If this sacredness is violated it becomes a blemish on the honor of the family, especially the males in the family who were charged with safeguarding this venerated sacred person in the household (Wortabet & Porter).
While women conventionally become victims of crimes of honor it is not unheard of for men to also be victimized as well. In 1998 in Sindh, Pakistan the Human Rights Commission investigated reports of 97 men and 158 women in karo-kari (honor crimes) (Welchman & Hossain 6). Individuals of homosexual orientation also have a high risk of becoming victims of honor crimes, as their behavior is seen as implicitly and overtly out of social boundaries.
Traditionally within Bedouin society if impropriety were suspected of a man and woman they would both be either killed for their crime against the tribe, or they would be ostracized together. It is only more recently with conflicts between the values of tradition and modernization that there has been a greater shift towards punishing the woman alone. Since most honor crimes come from the poorest and most over-crowded portions of cities and villages it is assumed that in the face of the confusion that can be caused by a rapid switch to modernization these people are desperately clinging to a way of life that has held meaning to their people for centuries (Adnan Abu-Odeh).
Purna Sen, in the book ‘Honour:’ Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women, edited by Lynn Welchman Sara Hossain lists six key concerns that need to stay at the forefront of the mind in regarding crimes of honor,
1) Gender relations that problematise and control women’s behaviours, shaping and controlling women’s sexuality in particular;
2) The role of women in policing and monitoring women’s behaviour;
3) Collective decisions regarding punishment, or in upholding the actions considered appropriate, for transgressions of these boundaries;
4) The potential for women’s participation in killings;
5) The ability to reclaim honour through enforced compliance or killings;
6) State sanction of such killings through recognition of honour as motivation and mitigation (Welchman & Hossain 50).
Each of these issues represents a major problem facing the societies where these crimes take place and as such must be addressed with all due concern from both those within the society and without.
In the West it is common to look at honor crimes and to automatically equate them with developing nations or countries where Islam is the predominant religion. Yet, research has shown time and again that it is not necessarily economics or religion that reinforces this behavior, but that of the “belt of classical patriarchy” or the principles in patriarchy that lead to domestic violence (Welchman & Hossain 47).
The issue of domestic violence, of which honor crimes are an uber example, is one that can be observed throughout the world’s cultures and societies, as well as throughout time. It is not limited to one specific culture, set of circumstances, or people, but sadly an issue that affects the entirety of humanity. As previously stated in the section on society and culture, great disparities still remain, and “in many places, most women’s lives remain wretched,” especially where there are rigid gender roles usually defined through patriarchy (Inglehart & Norris 3).
Where these crimes are most predominant are those countries that continue to struggle between the values of tradition and modernization. It is human nature to rapidly revert back to a safe and trusted way of life when change rears its head and in the case of countries where modernization has not come as easily (or where there may be warfare, famine, and other related hardships) as expected a trend of patriarchy and domestic violence becomes more apparent. This is particularly the case with older generations that find it harder to change their way of life and those younger generations who eagerly seek to adopt the new changes. A clash of values ensues, and in the case of women who are generally dependent on their families for numerous assets it is common to find them caught between two worlds. If the battle becomes such that social disgrace may occur (or has occurred) the father, brother, or uncle may resort to a forced marriage (which is vastly different from an arranged marriage that a woman willingly enters) or murder (Welchman & Hossain 46-47).
“The definition of ‘crimes of honour’ is by no means straightforward, and the imprecison and ‘exoticisation’ (in particular in the West) of its use are among the reasons for caution in use of the phrase. At it’s most basic, the term is commonly used as shorthand, to flag a type of violence against women characterized by (claimed) ‘motivation’ rather than by perpetrator […] Definitions tend to be by way of illustration; thus, in a highly significant article on ‘crimes of honour’ and the construction of gender in the Arab world, Lama Abu Odeh explains that a paradigm example of a crime of honour is the killing of a woman by her father or brother for engaging in, or being suspected of engaging in, sexual practices before or outside of marriage (Welchman and Hossain).”
Numerous communications discussing honor crimes are reported to the United Nations (UN) each year, and in this circumstance honor is defined in the context of a women’s sexual and familial roles as dictated by the family, who are consequently directed by social and cultural norms. Adultery, premarital relationships – whether they may or may not include sex – rape and falling in love outside of an engagement may all be considered violations of sharaf al-‘aylah , or family honor. A woman’s virginity is of great importance to her family, as not only their honor is tied to it, but also rights of inheritance and the continuance of family lines (Welchman & Hossain 4-5).
Traditionally speaking, the virginity of the women in a household is the center of the male gender identity, especially for the eldest brother. It is his job to guard, chaperone, and defend against possible social wrongs on his sister's part. To be a man is to engage in daily activities that were an important part of insuring the virginity of those women who are part of their family. In the Arab culture, a man is that person whose sister's virginity is a social question for him. Because a man is seen to have a certain amount of ownership over his women folk he is easily shamed by her actions, and may resort to killing her to regain his position in society as a strong man. Without this action he may be seen as an effeminate; a wimp, a girl, or a ninny; that cannot perform the most basic expectations in life. These fears, also known as "castration anxiety” , speak of a psychological battle that may be waged within the man, finally forcing him to act out to bring peace to his own state of mind (Cogan, Porcerelli, & Dromgoole). These men who have been raised to be "macho, heartless, purposeful, conquering, and triumphant over women" may feel conflicted because they have been raised in a traditionally conservative fashion (Abu-Odeh 151-153).
In his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton defines spiritual virginity as, “a point untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth ... which belongs entirely to God, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point ... of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us." Since all Arabic nations are infused with a heady dose of Islam it is safe to say that at least to some degree the family’s spirituality is wrapped up in their daughter’s virginity, or at least in the idea of an all pervasive innocence that allows for the lessons of the Qur’an and Hadith to seep in untainted. When this illusion is burst by rumor or action a sense of disillusion in not only religion, but in everything the culture has taught the family through generations may pervade daily life (Norris).
Sharon Lang states in her ethnography,
“A ‘family honor (sharaf al-‘aylah) killing’ cane be defined generally as a premeditated murder of a girl or woman, committed by her brother, father, or combination of male agnates in the name of restoring the family’s social reputation […] The transgression of a woman, who defies her kin group by not marrying the proper spouse, or by committing some sexual offense, is a deeply-felt, fundamental violation of Arab norms and values. Once the family’s reputation has been damaged in this way, the sister or daughter involved is in danger of being killed. The killer, most often the woman’s brother, perceives his action as ghassal is-sharaf or ‘cleaning the honor,’ masaha buqa’a sharaf al-‘a’ileh, ‘wiping away a stain on the family honor.’ Ironically this cleansing process is accomplished by the spilling of blood (dam)” (Lang 44-45).
The etymology of Arabic says a great deal about how the Arab people culturally view the place of women within their society. “Haram!” Is a word that is heard throughout the day in nearly every conversation. The general idea behind the word when used in an informal conversation is shame or embarrassment, and may be used in reference to the skyrocketing price of gas, when a taxi driver is tries to cheat a passenger, when a man goes beyond his boundaries with a woman, scandalous conduct on television, bombings, etc. What is fascinating about Arabic is that each word is connected to a series of other words by the root word that forms that one particular word. The actual translation of haram is “forbidden,” but it is also connected to unlawful, excommunication, denied/refused, etc and while it is the root word it goes on to form the word ahataram, or to honor, venerate. The list continues with the “Sacred territory at Mecca”, al-harm. From these two polar opposites comes the word for both sacredness and wife – hurmah or juhram. A word that Westerners are used to hearing in reference to the Middle East is, harem, and this word is also connected to this line and translates as “the women of a household.” Throughout the history of the Arab people women have been seen as sacred, something that must be protected and held close to the hearth and home. If this sacredness is violated it becomes a blemish on the honor of the family, especially the males in the family who were charged with safeguarding this venerated sacred person in the household (Wortabet & Porter).
While women conventionally become victims of crimes of honor it is not unheard of for men to also be victimized as well. In 1998 in Sindh, Pakistan the Human Rights Commission investigated reports of 97 men and 158 women in karo-kari (honor crimes) (Welchman & Hossain 6). Individuals of homosexual orientation also have a high risk of becoming victims of honor crimes, as their behavior is seen as implicitly and overtly out of social boundaries.
Traditionally within Bedouin society if impropriety were suspected of a man and woman they would both be either killed for their crime against the tribe, or they would be ostracized together. It is only more recently with conflicts between the values of tradition and modernization that there has been a greater shift towards punishing the woman alone. Since most honor crimes come from the poorest and most over-crowded portions of cities and villages it is assumed that in the face of the confusion that can be caused by a rapid switch to modernization these people are desperately clinging to a way of life that has held meaning to their people for centuries (Adnan Abu-Odeh).
Purna Sen, in the book ‘Honour:’ Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women, edited by Lynn Welchman Sara Hossain lists six key concerns that need to stay at the forefront of the mind in regarding crimes of honor,
1) Gender relations that problematise and control women’s behaviours, shaping and controlling women’s sexuality in particular;
2) The role of women in policing and monitoring women’s behaviour;
3) Collective decisions regarding punishment, or in upholding the actions considered appropriate, for transgressions of these boundaries;
4) The potential for women’s participation in killings;
5) The ability to reclaim honour through enforced compliance or killings;
6) State sanction of such killings through recognition of honour as motivation and mitigation (Welchman & Hossain 50).
Each of these issues represents a major problem facing the societies where these crimes take place and as such must be addressed with all due concern from both those within the society and without.
In the West it is common to look at honor crimes and to automatically equate them with developing nations or countries where Islam is the predominant religion. Yet, research has shown time and again that it is not necessarily economics or religion that reinforces this behavior, but that of the “belt of classical patriarchy” or the principles in patriarchy that lead to domestic violence (Welchman & Hossain 47).
The issue of domestic violence, of which honor crimes are an uber example, is one that can be observed throughout the world’s cultures and societies, as well as throughout time. It is not limited to one specific culture, set of circumstances, or people, but sadly an issue that affects the entirety of humanity. As previously stated in the section on society and culture, great disparities still remain, and “in many places, most women’s lives remain wretched,” especially where there are rigid gender roles usually defined through patriarchy (Inglehart & Norris 3).
Where these crimes are most predominant are those countries that continue to struggle between the values of tradition and modernization. It is human nature to rapidly revert back to a safe and trusted way of life when change rears its head and in the case of countries where modernization has not come as easily (or where there may be warfare, famine, and other related hardships) as expected a trend of patriarchy and domestic violence becomes more apparent. This is particularly the case with older generations that find it harder to change their way of life and those younger generations who eagerly seek to adopt the new changes. A clash of values ensues, and in the case of women who are generally dependent on their families for numerous assets it is common to find them caught between two worlds. If the battle becomes such that social disgrace may occur (or has occurred) the father, brother, or uncle may resort to a forced marriage (which is vastly different from an arranged marriage that a woman willingly enters) or murder (Welchman & Hossain 46-47).
Iran's 'diagnosed transsexuals'
By Vanessa Barford
BBC News
Homosexual relationships are banned in Iran, but the country allows sex change operations and hundreds of men have elected for surgery to change their lives.
"He wants to kill me. He keeps telling me to come home so he can kill me. He had put rat poison in my tea."
For Ali Askar, at age 24, the decision to become a woman came at a heavy cost. His father threatened to kill him if he went ahead with surgery.
Now renamed Negar, she says she would not have had the operation if she did not live in Iran.
"If I didn't have to operate, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't touch God's work."
But as Ali, he felt he had no identity.
Islam has a cure for people suffering from this problem. If they want to change their gender, the path is open
Hojatol Kariminia, Iranian cleric
He could not work with men because they sexually harassed him and made fun of him. But he could not work with women because he was not officially a woman.
"I am Iranian. I want to live here and this society tells you: you have to be either a man or a woman".
"Diagnosed transsexuals"
Sex changes have been legal in Iran since Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution, passed a fatwa - a religious edict - authorising them for "diagnosed transsexuals" 25 years ago.
Today, Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand.
The government even provides up to half the cost for those needing financial assistance and a sex change is recognised on your birth certificate.
"Islam has a cure for people suffering from this problem. If they want to change their gender, the path is open," says Hojatol Islam Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, the religious cleric responsible for gender reassignment.
He says an operation is no more a sin than "changing wheat to flour to bread".
Yet homosexuality is still punishable by death.
"The discussion is fundamentally separate from a discussion regarding homosexuals. Absolutely not related. Homosexuals are doing something unnatural and against religion," says Kariminia. "It is clearly stated in our Islamic law that such behaviour is not allowed because it disrupts the social order."
Sex change surgery
I wanted to live like everyone else, like all the other boys and girls walking around. My goal was simply to find my own identity
Anoosh
Dr Mir-Jalali, a Paris-trained surgeon, is Iran's leading specialist in sex change surgery.
He claims to have performed over 450 operations in the last 12 years.
Many of his patients are struggling to figure out what to do because they do not fit into the norm. They see Dr Mir-Jalali as a saviour.
"Transsexuals feel that their body doesn't match how they feel," he says. "Whatever you do, psychiatrists, pills, prison, punishment, nothing helps".
Another of his patients, Anoosh, 21, was deeply unhappy before surgery and felt pressured to leave school because of his feminine behaviour and appearance.
"I wanted to live like everyone else, like all the other boys and girls walking around. My goal was simply to find my own identity."
Like many young people in Iran, Anoosh struggled to reconcile his sexual identity with the wishes of family, community and culture. He says he was continuously harassed and threatened with arrest by Iran's morality police before he had his sex change.
His boyfriend was also keen for him to go ahead with the sex change because 90% of the people they passed in the street said something nasty.
"When he goes out in female clothes and has a female appearance it is easier for me to persuade myself that he is a girl. It makes the relationship better," he says.
For Anoosh's younger brother, Ali Reza, it was harder to come to terms with Anoosh's desire to become a woman.
"I have had a brother for many years. I can't just suddenly accept him as my sister. If I refer to him as my brother he gets upset. But it's hard for me to believe this".
Anoosh's mother, Shahin, raised her children alone and had high hopes for her son.
"My child was meant to be the star of the family. I counted on him to be something other than this".
Avoiding shame
If you are a male with female tendencies, they don't see that as something natural or genetic. They see it as someone who is consciously acting dirty
Tanaz Eshaghian, TV Documentary maker
Documentary film maker Tanaz Eshaghian spent weeks filming Anoosh, Ali and other transsexuals in Iran. She thinks that part of what is driving many of the boys to operate is the desire to avoid shame.
"If you are a male with female tendencies, they don't see that as something natural or genetic. They see it as someone who is consciously acting dirty."
Being diagnosed as a transsexual makes it a medical condition, not a moral one.
Once a doctor has made a diagnosis - and an operation is in the pipeline - the transsexual can get official permission from his local government official to cross-dress in public.
"They look for a solution that will at least allow them to be attracted to the gender they are naturally attracted to - without feelings of shame, sin and wrong-doing - and move around in society without harassment. The price is often being disowned by your family," says Tanaz Eshaghian.
After surgery
Ali Askar - now renamed Negar and aged 27 - said that after the sex change operation she was initially depressed.
"But now, it's like I have been born again and I am in a new world."
But her family's reaction has taken its toll. Although they warned her she would be disowned, she thought that they would change their mind after the operation.
"They pray for me to die soon. If I'd known that my family would truly shun me like this, I would never have done it."
She now lives with other transsexuals who have had a sex change. She has had to work as a prostitute to make ends meet.
Rejection by her parents has affected her deeply: "When parents can kill the love for their own child inside themselves, I have killed love in my being. I will never fall in love".
But for Anoosh - who has changed her name to Anahita - there is a more positive outcome.
"Now when someone is attracted to me, it is as a girl," she says.
She is now engaged to her boyfriend and even her mother is happy.
"A boy will always just get married and leave his mum, but a girl stays, a girl is always yours and will never leave, and now I will never experience the sadness that occurs when a boy leaves.
"I always wanted a daughter and I think it's a gift from God that I finally got one."
Transsexual in Iran will be broadcast on BBC Two on Monday 25 February 2008 at 2100 GMT.
The original film, Be Like Others directed by Tanaz Eshaghian had its premier this month at the Berlin Film Festival. You can see clips at the film's website
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7259057.stm
Published: 2008/02/25 10:55:03 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
BBC News
Homosexual relationships are banned in Iran, but the country allows sex change operations and hundreds of men have elected for surgery to change their lives.
"He wants to kill me. He keeps telling me to come home so he can kill me. He had put rat poison in my tea."
For Ali Askar, at age 24, the decision to become a woman came at a heavy cost. His father threatened to kill him if he went ahead with surgery.
Now renamed Negar, she says she would not have had the operation if she did not live in Iran.
"If I didn't have to operate, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't touch God's work."
But as Ali, he felt he had no identity.
Islam has a cure for people suffering from this problem. If they want to change their gender, the path is open
Hojatol Kariminia, Iranian cleric
He could not work with men because they sexually harassed him and made fun of him. But he could not work with women because he was not officially a woman.
"I am Iranian. I want to live here and this society tells you: you have to be either a man or a woman".
"Diagnosed transsexuals"
Sex changes have been legal in Iran since Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution, passed a fatwa - a religious edict - authorising them for "diagnosed transsexuals" 25 years ago.
Today, Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand.
The government even provides up to half the cost for those needing financial assistance and a sex change is recognised on your birth certificate.
"Islam has a cure for people suffering from this problem. If they want to change their gender, the path is open," says Hojatol Islam Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, the religious cleric responsible for gender reassignment.
He says an operation is no more a sin than "changing wheat to flour to bread".
Yet homosexuality is still punishable by death.
"The discussion is fundamentally separate from a discussion regarding homosexuals. Absolutely not related. Homosexuals are doing something unnatural and against religion," says Kariminia. "It is clearly stated in our Islamic law that such behaviour is not allowed because it disrupts the social order."
Sex change surgery
I wanted to live like everyone else, like all the other boys and girls walking around. My goal was simply to find my own identity
Anoosh
Dr Mir-Jalali, a Paris-trained surgeon, is Iran's leading specialist in sex change surgery.
He claims to have performed over 450 operations in the last 12 years.
Many of his patients are struggling to figure out what to do because they do not fit into the norm. They see Dr Mir-Jalali as a saviour.
"Transsexuals feel that their body doesn't match how they feel," he says. "Whatever you do, psychiatrists, pills, prison, punishment, nothing helps".
Another of his patients, Anoosh, 21, was deeply unhappy before surgery and felt pressured to leave school because of his feminine behaviour and appearance.
"I wanted to live like everyone else, like all the other boys and girls walking around. My goal was simply to find my own identity."
Like many young people in Iran, Anoosh struggled to reconcile his sexual identity with the wishes of family, community and culture. He says he was continuously harassed and threatened with arrest by Iran's morality police before he had his sex change.
His boyfriend was also keen for him to go ahead with the sex change because 90% of the people they passed in the street said something nasty.
"When he goes out in female clothes and has a female appearance it is easier for me to persuade myself that he is a girl. It makes the relationship better," he says.
For Anoosh's younger brother, Ali Reza, it was harder to come to terms with Anoosh's desire to become a woman.
"I have had a brother for many years. I can't just suddenly accept him as my sister. If I refer to him as my brother he gets upset. But it's hard for me to believe this".
Anoosh's mother, Shahin, raised her children alone and had high hopes for her son.
"My child was meant to be the star of the family. I counted on him to be something other than this".
Avoiding shame
If you are a male with female tendencies, they don't see that as something natural or genetic. They see it as someone who is consciously acting dirty
Tanaz Eshaghian, TV Documentary maker
Documentary film maker Tanaz Eshaghian spent weeks filming Anoosh, Ali and other transsexuals in Iran. She thinks that part of what is driving many of the boys to operate is the desire to avoid shame.
"If you are a male with female tendencies, they don't see that as something natural or genetic. They see it as someone who is consciously acting dirty."
Being diagnosed as a transsexual makes it a medical condition, not a moral one.
Once a doctor has made a diagnosis - and an operation is in the pipeline - the transsexual can get official permission from his local government official to cross-dress in public.
"They look for a solution that will at least allow them to be attracted to the gender they are naturally attracted to - without feelings of shame, sin and wrong-doing - and move around in society without harassment. The price is often being disowned by your family," says Tanaz Eshaghian.
After surgery
Ali Askar - now renamed Negar and aged 27 - said that after the sex change operation she was initially depressed.
"But now, it's like I have been born again and I am in a new world."
But her family's reaction has taken its toll. Although they warned her she would be disowned, she thought that they would change their mind after the operation.
"They pray for me to die soon. If I'd known that my family would truly shun me like this, I would never have done it."
She now lives with other transsexuals who have had a sex change. She has had to work as a prostitute to make ends meet.
Rejection by her parents has affected her deeply: "When parents can kill the love for their own child inside themselves, I have killed love in my being. I will never fall in love".
But for Anoosh - who has changed her name to Anahita - there is a more positive outcome.
"Now when someone is attracted to me, it is as a girl," she says.
She is now engaged to her boyfriend and even her mother is happy.
"A boy will always just get married and leave his mum, but a girl stays, a girl is always yours and will never leave, and now I will never experience the sadness that occurs when a boy leaves.
"I always wanted a daughter and I think it's a gift from God that I finally got one."
Transsexual in Iran will be broadcast on BBC Two on Monday 25 February 2008 at 2100 GMT.
The original film, Be Like Others directed by Tanaz Eshaghian had its premier this month at the Berlin Film Festival. You can see clips at the film's website
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7259057.stm
Published: 2008/02/25 10:55:03 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
18 February 2008
Two Gatherins in Beruit
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=92e492c3cca2a488149d109da1b95117c054127a
Marriage Beyond Reach
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=3b4514d0475403ef66dd102886021d893aef75ad
11 February 2008
U.S. Seeking Execution for 6 Guatanomo Bay Detainees
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: February 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/us/11gitmo.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday.
The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as Monday and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
A Defense Department official said prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because “if any case warrants it, it would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale.” The officials spoke anonymously because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case.
A decision to seek the death penalty would increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial.
“The system hasn’t been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been presented with to date,” said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
In addition to Mr. Mohammed, the other five to be charged include detainees officials say were coordinators and intermediaries in the plot, among them a man labeled the “20th hijacker,” who was denied entry to the United States in the month before the attacks.
Under the rules of the Guantánamo war-crimes system, the military prosecutors can designate charges as capital when they present them, and it is that first phase of the process that is expected this week. The military official who then reviews them, Susan J. Crawford, a former military appeals court judge, has the authority to accept or reject a death-penalty request.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on Sunday.
Some officials briefed on the case have said the prosecutors view their task in seeking convictions for the Sept. 11 attacks as a historic challenge. A special group of military and Justice Department lawyers has been working on the case for several years.
Even if the detainees are convicted on capital charges, any execution would be many months or, perhaps years, from being carried out, lawyers said, in part because a death sentence would have to be scrutinized by civilian appeals courts.
Federal officials have said in recent months that there is no death chamber at the detention camp at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that they knew of no specific plans for how a death sentence would be carried out.
The military justice system, which does not govern the Guantánamo cases, provides for execution by lethal injection in death sentence convictions. But the United States military has rarely executed a prisoner in recent times.
The last military execution was in 1961, when an Army private, John A. Bennett, was hanged after being convicted of rape and attempted murder. Currently, there are six service members appealing military death sentences, according to a recently published article by a lawyer who specializes in military capital cases, Dwight H. Sullivan, a former chief military defense lawyer at Guántanamo.
One official who had been briefed on the war-crimes case said the charges were expected to be lodged against six detainees held at Guantánamo, including Mr. Mohammed, who is said to have presented the idea of an airliner attack on the United States to Osama bin Laden in 1999 and then coordinated its planning.
The official identified the others to be charged as Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man officials have labeled the 20th hijacker; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, said to have been the main intermediary between the hijackers and leaders of Al Qaeda; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mr. Mohammed, who has been identified as Mr. Mohammed’s lieutenant for the 2001 operation; Mr. al-Baluchi’s assistant, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi; and Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who investigators say selected and trained some of the hijackers.
Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims have expressed differing views of potential death sentences, with some arguing that it would accomplish little other than martyring men for whom martyrdom may be viewed as a reward.
But on Sunday, Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles F. Burlingame III was the pilot of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that was crashed into the Pentagon, said she would approve of an effort by prosecutors to seek the execution of men she blames for killing her brother. Ms. Burlingame said such a case could help refocus the public’s attention on what she called the calculated brutality of the attacks, which she said has been largely forgotten.
“My opinion is,” she said, “if the death of 3,000 people isn’t sufficient for a death penalty in this country, then why do we even have the death penalty?”
Lawyers said a prosecution move to seek the death penalty in six cases that will draw worldwide attention was risky. They said it would increase the stakes at Guantánamo partly by amplifying the attention internationally to cases that would draw intense attention in any event.
The military commission system has been troubled almost from the start, when it was set up in an order by President Bush in November 2001. It has been beset by legal challenges and practical difficulties, including a 2006 decision by the Supreme Court striking down the administration’s first system at Guantánamo. Although officials have spoken of charging 80 or more detainees with war crimes, so far only one case has been completed, and that was through a plea bargain.
Eric M. Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor who has been a consultant to detainees’ lawyers, said a decision to seek the death penalty would magnify the attention on each of the many steps in a capital case. Intense scrutiny, he said, “would be drawn to the proceedings both legally and politically from around the world.”
Some countries have been critical of the United States’ use of the death penalty in civilian cases, and a request for execution in the military commission system would import much of that criticism to the already heated debates about the legitimacy of Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s legal approach there, some lawyers said.
Tom Fleener, an Army Reserve major who was until recently a military defense lawyer at Guantánamo, said that bringing death penalty cases in the military commission system would bog down the untested system. He noted that many legal questions remain unanswered at Guantánamo, including how much of the trials will be conducted in closed, secret proceedings; how the military judges will handle evidence obtained by interrogators’ coercive tactics; and whether the judges will require experienced death-penalty lawyers to take part in such cases.
“Neither the system is ready, nor are the defense attorneys ready to do a death penalty case in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” Major Fleener said.
Professor Glazier of Loyola said the military commission system was devised to avoid many of the hurdles that have slowed civilian capital cases. Still, he said, he expected intense scrutiny and criticism of such cases that could slow proceedings.
In any event, vigorous trial battles and appeals would probably mean that no execution would be imminent. “It certainly seems impossible to get this done by the end of the Bush administration,” Professor Glazier said.
Published: February 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/us/11gitmo.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday.
The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as Monday and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
A Defense Department official said prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because “if any case warrants it, it would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale.” The officials spoke anonymously because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case.
A decision to seek the death penalty would increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial.
“The system hasn’t been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been presented with to date,” said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
In addition to Mr. Mohammed, the other five to be charged include detainees officials say were coordinators and intermediaries in the plot, among them a man labeled the “20th hijacker,” who was denied entry to the United States in the month before the attacks.
Under the rules of the Guantánamo war-crimes system, the military prosecutors can designate charges as capital when they present them, and it is that first phase of the process that is expected this week. The military official who then reviews them, Susan J. Crawford, a former military appeals court judge, has the authority to accept or reject a death-penalty request.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on Sunday.
Some officials briefed on the case have said the prosecutors view their task in seeking convictions for the Sept. 11 attacks as a historic challenge. A special group of military and Justice Department lawyers has been working on the case for several years.
Even if the detainees are convicted on capital charges, any execution would be many months or, perhaps years, from being carried out, lawyers said, in part because a death sentence would have to be scrutinized by civilian appeals courts.
Federal officials have said in recent months that there is no death chamber at the detention camp at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that they knew of no specific plans for how a death sentence would be carried out.
The military justice system, which does not govern the Guantánamo cases, provides for execution by lethal injection in death sentence convictions. But the United States military has rarely executed a prisoner in recent times.
The last military execution was in 1961, when an Army private, John A. Bennett, was hanged after being convicted of rape and attempted murder. Currently, there are six service members appealing military death sentences, according to a recently published article by a lawyer who specializes in military capital cases, Dwight H. Sullivan, a former chief military defense lawyer at Guántanamo.
One official who had been briefed on the war-crimes case said the charges were expected to be lodged against six detainees held at Guantánamo, including Mr. Mohammed, who is said to have presented the idea of an airliner attack on the United States to Osama bin Laden in 1999 and then coordinated its planning.
The official identified the others to be charged as Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man officials have labeled the 20th hijacker; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, said to have been the main intermediary between the hijackers and leaders of Al Qaeda; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mr. Mohammed, who has been identified as Mr. Mohammed’s lieutenant for the 2001 operation; Mr. al-Baluchi’s assistant, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi; and Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who investigators say selected and trained some of the hijackers.
Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims have expressed differing views of potential death sentences, with some arguing that it would accomplish little other than martyring men for whom martyrdom may be viewed as a reward.
But on Sunday, Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles F. Burlingame III was the pilot of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that was crashed into the Pentagon, said she would approve of an effort by prosecutors to seek the execution of men she blames for killing her brother. Ms. Burlingame said such a case could help refocus the public’s attention on what she called the calculated brutality of the attacks, which she said has been largely forgotten.
“My opinion is,” she said, “if the death of 3,000 people isn’t sufficient for a death penalty in this country, then why do we even have the death penalty?”
Lawyers said a prosecution move to seek the death penalty in six cases that will draw worldwide attention was risky. They said it would increase the stakes at Guantánamo partly by amplifying the attention internationally to cases that would draw intense attention in any event.
The military commission system has been troubled almost from the start, when it was set up in an order by President Bush in November 2001. It has been beset by legal challenges and practical difficulties, including a 2006 decision by the Supreme Court striking down the administration’s first system at Guantánamo. Although officials have spoken of charging 80 or more detainees with war crimes, so far only one case has been completed, and that was through a plea bargain.
Eric M. Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor who has been a consultant to detainees’ lawyers, said a decision to seek the death penalty would magnify the attention on each of the many steps in a capital case. Intense scrutiny, he said, “would be drawn to the proceedings both legally and politically from around the world.”
Some countries have been critical of the United States’ use of the death penalty in civilian cases, and a request for execution in the military commission system would import much of that criticism to the already heated debates about the legitimacy of Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s legal approach there, some lawyers said.
Tom Fleener, an Army Reserve major who was until recently a military defense lawyer at Guantánamo, said that bringing death penalty cases in the military commission system would bog down the untested system. He noted that many legal questions remain unanswered at Guantánamo, including how much of the trials will be conducted in closed, secret proceedings; how the military judges will handle evidence obtained by interrogators’ coercive tactics; and whether the judges will require experienced death-penalty lawyers to take part in such cases.
“Neither the system is ready, nor are the defense attorneys ready to do a death penalty case in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” Major Fleener said.
Professor Glazier of Loyola said the military commission system was devised to avoid many of the hurdles that have slowed civilian capital cases. Still, he said, he expected intense scrutiny and criticism of such cases that could slow proceedings.
In any event, vigorous trial battles and appeals would probably mean that no execution would be imminent. “It certainly seems impossible to get this done by the end of the Bush administration,” Professor Glazier said.
03 February 2008
Kabul's old city gets major renovation
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Last year the streets in parts of the old city dropped by nine feet.
The reason? A massive garbage haul. Just about every unemployed man in the Murad Khane neighborhood of Kabul was recruited to clean up years of litter and mud piled on top of the streets. By the time they were done, the streets and alleys were lower.
The garbage project is part of an effort to clean up and restore old Kabul, after six years of relative peace and with millions of dollars from foreign donors.
The Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which is dedicated to traditional Afghan arts and architecture, has spent $1 million on conservation and clean-up in Murad Khane since last year. The Kabul organization is financed by both Western and Middle East donors.
The lower street level at first left Abdul Salaam's door looking oddly out of place, perched three feet higher than the square in front of it. So Turquoise Mountain had to fix his door, too, with fresh mud scars showing where it used to be. The frayed edges of plastic bags still stick out of the wall.
"It looks much nicer," Salaam said about the cleaned-up neighborhood. "And it doesn't smell bad anymore."
Next door to Salaam's house, Turquoise Mountain has just completed its first full restoration, the 130-year-old Peacock House — so called because of the carved wooden peacocks at the corners of the wooden window screens.
Similar houses are tucked away in the narrow alleys of the old city in this war-torn capital. Walk through a wooden portal and a covered walkway, and a visitor emerges in an intimate courtyard, surrounded on all sides by carved screens — as if encased in a wooden jewelry box. The screens lift in warm weather, opening the house to the courtyard.
These intricate, 19th century homes barely survived bombardment in the 1990s, when Kabul became the front line of Afghanistan's bloody civil war, and earlier plans to raze them for apartments. But rocket shells and earthquakes have left most teetering in rickety ruin.
Now the mud and timber homes are being restored to their former splendor, instilling a newfound pride among the mostly working-class residents of the old city.
"It used to be so beautiful, but during the fighting, a couple of rockets landed on the house," said Aminullah, a 63-year-old carpenter whose family has lived in the same two-story wooden structure for nearly two centuries.
The roof has been repaired and the courtyard repaved with bricks.
"The houses in the old city are so old," said Aminullah, who uses only one name. "They were handed down to us from our forefathers. If someone asked me to exchange it (for a modern one), I would not trade it because I'm very attached to this house."
His home is one of 11 restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which has spent more than $8 million on historic conservation in Kabul since 2002, just after the U.S. invasion drove out the Taliban regime.
The Geneva-based organization, which does charitable work mainly in Muslim countries, has focused on the densely populated Asheqan wa Arefan neighborhood. With about 100 residents per acre, it is at least 10 times more cramped than New York, although still less so than Mumbai, India.
The Aga Khan Trust for Culture has also undertaken two large restorations in Kabul: the late 18th century brick-domed tomb of the ruler Timur Shah, next to the old city bazaar, and a 27-acre terraced garden laid out in the 16th century outside the old city.
But it is the smaller-scale projects — the homes, a public bathhouse, several shrines and smaller mosques — that have had the most impact on people.
The old city is a maze of narrow alleys, houses and shrines woven deep behind Kabul's main arteries. Some of the old homes are squalid, with mud piled high in the courtyard and chickens clucking around murky puddles left from hand washing clothes. Just next door, freshly restored wooden houses almost glow in contrast.
A 1979 master plan to raze Asheqan wa Arefan to make room for multistory, concrete apartment buildings was shelved in 2002.
"There were some businessmen who wanted to put up big buildings here, but this area has been passed on to us from our forefathers for many generations, and we have to respect it," said Sayed Hassan Parwisi, a community leader in the old city. "The mud of this area is like a shrine to us. We're proud of these mud and wood houses that we have because this is our history."
Streets that were once muddy puddles of open sewage have been paved with stones. Mothers told the Aga Khan Trust for Culture that the most important improvement is the drainage installed to keep the neighborhood — and their children — clean and healthy.
Rather than bringing in international experts, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture used local craftsmen to do the restoration work, honing their skills while keeping costs down.
"In a city of billion-dollar (development) programs, it's quite nice to be a bit more modest," said Jolyon Leslie, who manages the organization's program in Afghanistan.
It has not been easy to convince old city residents of the value of their wooden houses, as wealthier Afghans construct enormous cement houses adorned with mirrors and colorful cement flowers. But as residents see the improvements around them, they are chipping in manpower to help, said Parwisi, the old city community leader.
"We would all love to have cement houses, big buildings, beautiful houses, but if it does not have history, then it's useless," he said. "Our main interest in this area is its history. We want these houses because our forefathers have been living here for generations."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-01-20-kabul-restoration_N.htm
The reason? A massive garbage haul. Just about every unemployed man in the Murad Khane neighborhood of Kabul was recruited to clean up years of litter and mud piled on top of the streets. By the time they were done, the streets and alleys were lower.
The garbage project is part of an effort to clean up and restore old Kabul, after six years of relative peace and with millions of dollars from foreign donors.
The Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which is dedicated to traditional Afghan arts and architecture, has spent $1 million on conservation and clean-up in Murad Khane since last year. The Kabul organization is financed by both Western and Middle East donors.
The lower street level at first left Abdul Salaam's door looking oddly out of place, perched three feet higher than the square in front of it. So Turquoise Mountain had to fix his door, too, with fresh mud scars showing where it used to be. The frayed edges of plastic bags still stick out of the wall.
"It looks much nicer," Salaam said about the cleaned-up neighborhood. "And it doesn't smell bad anymore."
Next door to Salaam's house, Turquoise Mountain has just completed its first full restoration, the 130-year-old Peacock House — so called because of the carved wooden peacocks at the corners of the wooden window screens.
Similar houses are tucked away in the narrow alleys of the old city in this war-torn capital. Walk through a wooden portal and a covered walkway, and a visitor emerges in an intimate courtyard, surrounded on all sides by carved screens — as if encased in a wooden jewelry box. The screens lift in warm weather, opening the house to the courtyard.
These intricate, 19th century homes barely survived bombardment in the 1990s, when Kabul became the front line of Afghanistan's bloody civil war, and earlier plans to raze them for apartments. But rocket shells and earthquakes have left most teetering in rickety ruin.
Now the mud and timber homes are being restored to their former splendor, instilling a newfound pride among the mostly working-class residents of the old city.
"It used to be so beautiful, but during the fighting, a couple of rockets landed on the house," said Aminullah, a 63-year-old carpenter whose family has lived in the same two-story wooden structure for nearly two centuries.
The roof has been repaired and the courtyard repaved with bricks.
"The houses in the old city are so old," said Aminullah, who uses only one name. "They were handed down to us from our forefathers. If someone asked me to exchange it (for a modern one), I would not trade it because I'm very attached to this house."
His home is one of 11 restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which has spent more than $8 million on historic conservation in Kabul since 2002, just after the U.S. invasion drove out the Taliban regime.
The Geneva-based organization, which does charitable work mainly in Muslim countries, has focused on the densely populated Asheqan wa Arefan neighborhood. With about 100 residents per acre, it is at least 10 times more cramped than New York, although still less so than Mumbai, India.
The Aga Khan Trust for Culture has also undertaken two large restorations in Kabul: the late 18th century brick-domed tomb of the ruler Timur Shah, next to the old city bazaar, and a 27-acre terraced garden laid out in the 16th century outside the old city.
But it is the smaller-scale projects — the homes, a public bathhouse, several shrines and smaller mosques — that have had the most impact on people.
The old city is a maze of narrow alleys, houses and shrines woven deep behind Kabul's main arteries. Some of the old homes are squalid, with mud piled high in the courtyard and chickens clucking around murky puddles left from hand washing clothes. Just next door, freshly restored wooden houses almost glow in contrast.
A 1979 master plan to raze Asheqan wa Arefan to make room for multistory, concrete apartment buildings was shelved in 2002.
"There were some businessmen who wanted to put up big buildings here, but this area has been passed on to us from our forefathers for many generations, and we have to respect it," said Sayed Hassan Parwisi, a community leader in the old city. "The mud of this area is like a shrine to us. We're proud of these mud and wood houses that we have because this is our history."
Streets that were once muddy puddles of open sewage have been paved with stones. Mothers told the Aga Khan Trust for Culture that the most important improvement is the drainage installed to keep the neighborhood — and their children — clean and healthy.
Rather than bringing in international experts, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture used local craftsmen to do the restoration work, honing their skills while keeping costs down.
"In a city of billion-dollar (development) programs, it's quite nice to be a bit more modest," said Jolyon Leslie, who manages the organization's program in Afghanistan.
It has not been easy to convince old city residents of the value of their wooden houses, as wealthier Afghans construct enormous cement houses adorned with mirrors and colorful cement flowers. But as residents see the improvements around them, they are chipping in manpower to help, said Parwisi, the old city community leader.
"We would all love to have cement houses, big buildings, beautiful houses, but if it does not have history, then it's useless," he said. "Our main interest in this area is its history. We want these houses because our forefathers have been living here for generations."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-01-20-kabul-restoration_N.htm
21 January 2008
A Cutting Tradition
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20circumcision-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
By SARA CORBETT
Published: January 20, 2008
When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. Sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, an Islamic educational and social-services organization, circumcisions take place in a prayer center or an emptied-out elementary-school classroom where desks are pushed together and covered with sheets and a pillow to serve as makeshift beds. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she’s given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14.
These photos were taken in April 2006, at the foundation’s annual mass circumcision, which is free and open to the public and
held during the lunar month marking the birth of the prophet Muhammad. The Assalaam Foundation runs several schools and a mosque in Bandung, Indonesia’s third-largest city and the capital of West Java. The photographer Stephanie Sinclair was taken to the circumcision event by a reproductive-health observer from Jakarta and allowed to spend several hours there. Over the course of that Sunday morning, more than 200 girls were circumcised, many of them appearing to be under the age of 5. Meanwhile, in a nearby building, more than 100 boys underwent a traditional circumcision as well.
According to Lukman Hakim, the foundation’s chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls.
“One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”
Female genital cutting — commonly identified among international human rights groups as female genital mutilation — has been outlawed in 15 African countries. Many industrialized countries also have similar laws. Both France and the U.S. have prosecuted immigrant residents for performing female circumcisions.
In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, a debate over whether to ban female circumcision is in its early stages. The Ministry of Health has issued a decree forbidding medical personnel to practice it, but the decree which has yet to be backed by legislation does not affect traditional circumcisers and birth attendants, who are thought to do most female circumcisions. Many agree that a full ban is unlikely without strong support from the country’s religious leaders. According to the Population Council study, many Indonesians view circumcision for boys and girls as a religious duty.
Female circumcision in Indonesia is reported to be less extreme than the kind practiced in other parts of the globe — Africa, particularly. Worldwide, female genital cutting affects up to 140 million women and girls in varying degrees of severity, according to estimates from the World Health Organization. The most common form of female genital cutting, representing about 80 percent of cases around the world, includes the excision of the clitoris and the labia minora. A more extreme version of the practice, known as Pharaonic circumcision or infibulation, accounts for 15 percent of cases globally and involves the removal of all external genitalia and a stitching up of the vaginal opening.
Studies have shown that in some parts of Indonesia, female circumcision is more ritualistic — a rite of passage meant to purify the genitals and bestow gender identity on a female child — with a practitioner rubbing turmeric on the genitals or pricking the clitoris once with a needle to draw a symbolic drop of blood. In other instances, the procedure is more invasive, involving what WHO classifies as “Type I” female genital mutilation, defined as excision of the clitoral hood, called the prepuce, with or without incision of the clitoris itself. The Population Council’s 2003 study said that 82 percent of Indonesian mothers who witnessed their daughters’ circumcision reported that it involved “cutting.” The women most often identified the clitoris as the affected body part. The amount of flesh removed, if any, was alternately described by circumcisers as being the size of a quarter-grain of rice, a guava seed, a bean, the tip of a leaf, the head of a needle.
At the Assalaam Foundation, traditional circumcisers say they learn the practice from other women during several years of apprenticing. Siti Rukasitta, who has been a circumciser at the foundation for 20 years, said through an interpreter that they use a small pair of sterilized scissors to cut a piece of the clitoral prepuce about the size of a nail clipping. Population Council observers who visited the event before the 2003 study, however, reported that they also witnessed some cases of circumcisers cutting the clitoris itself.
Any distinction between injuring the clitoris or the clitoral hood is irrelevant, says Laura Guarenti, an obstetrician and WHO’s medical officer for child and maternal health in Jakarta. “The fact is there is absolutely no medical value in circumcising girls,” she says. “It is 100 percent the wrong thing to be doing.” The circumcision of boys, she adds, has demonstrated health benefits, namely reduced risk of infection and some protection against H.I.V.
Nonetheless, as Western awareness of female genital cutting has grown, anthropologists, policy makers and health officials have warned against blindly judging those who practice it, saying that progress is best made by working with local leaders and opinion-makers to gradually shift the public discussion of female circumcision from what it’s believed to bestow upon a girl toward what it takes away. “These mothers believe they are doing something good for their children,” Guarenti, a native of Italy, told me. “For our culture that is not easily understandable. To judge them harshly is to isolate them. You cannot make change that way.”
By SARA CORBETT
Published: January 20, 2008
When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. Sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, an Islamic educational and social-services organization, circumcisions take place in a prayer center or an emptied-out elementary-school classroom where desks are pushed together and covered with sheets and a pillow to serve as makeshift beds. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she’s given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14.
These photos were taken in April 2006, at the foundation’s annual mass circumcision, which is free and open to the public and
held during the lunar month marking the birth of the prophet Muhammad. The Assalaam Foundation runs several schools and a mosque in Bandung, Indonesia’s third-largest city and the capital of West Java. The photographer Stephanie Sinclair was taken to the circumcision event by a reproductive-health observer from Jakarta and allowed to spend several hours there. Over the course of that Sunday morning, more than 200 girls were circumcised, many of them appearing to be under the age of 5. Meanwhile, in a nearby building, more than 100 boys underwent a traditional circumcision as well.
According to Lukman Hakim, the foundation’s chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls.
“One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”
Female genital cutting — commonly identified among international human rights groups as female genital mutilation — has been outlawed in 15 African countries. Many industrialized countries also have similar laws. Both France and the U.S. have prosecuted immigrant residents for performing female circumcisions.
In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, a debate over whether to ban female circumcision is in its early stages. The Ministry of Health has issued a decree forbidding medical personnel to practice it, but the decree which has yet to be backed by legislation does not affect traditional circumcisers and birth attendants, who are thought to do most female circumcisions. Many agree that a full ban is unlikely without strong support from the country’s religious leaders. According to the Population Council study, many Indonesians view circumcision for boys and girls as a religious duty.
Female circumcision in Indonesia is reported to be less extreme than the kind practiced in other parts of the globe — Africa, particularly. Worldwide, female genital cutting affects up to 140 million women and girls in varying degrees of severity, according to estimates from the World Health Organization. The most common form of female genital cutting, representing about 80 percent of cases around the world, includes the excision of the clitoris and the labia minora. A more extreme version of the practice, known as Pharaonic circumcision or infibulation, accounts for 15 percent of cases globally and involves the removal of all external genitalia and a stitching up of the vaginal opening.
Studies have shown that in some parts of Indonesia, female circumcision is more ritualistic — a rite of passage meant to purify the genitals and bestow gender identity on a female child — with a practitioner rubbing turmeric on the genitals or pricking the clitoris once with a needle to draw a symbolic drop of blood. In other instances, the procedure is more invasive, involving what WHO classifies as “Type I” female genital mutilation, defined as excision of the clitoral hood, called the prepuce, with or without incision of the clitoris itself. The Population Council’s 2003 study said that 82 percent of Indonesian mothers who witnessed their daughters’ circumcision reported that it involved “cutting.” The women most often identified the clitoris as the affected body part. The amount of flesh removed, if any, was alternately described by circumcisers as being the size of a quarter-grain of rice, a guava seed, a bean, the tip of a leaf, the head of a needle.
At the Assalaam Foundation, traditional circumcisers say they learn the practice from other women during several years of apprenticing. Siti Rukasitta, who has been a circumciser at the foundation for 20 years, said through an interpreter that they use a small pair of sterilized scissors to cut a piece of the clitoral prepuce about the size of a nail clipping. Population Council observers who visited the event before the 2003 study, however, reported that they also witnessed some cases of circumcisers cutting the clitoris itself.
Any distinction between injuring the clitoris or the clitoral hood is irrelevant, says Laura Guarenti, an obstetrician and WHO’s medical officer for child and maternal health in Jakarta. “The fact is there is absolutely no medical value in circumcising girls,” she says. “It is 100 percent the wrong thing to be doing.” The circumcision of boys, she adds, has demonstrated health benefits, namely reduced risk of infection and some protection against H.I.V.
Nonetheless, as Western awareness of female genital cutting has grown, anthropologists, policy makers and health officials have warned against blindly judging those who practice it, saying that progress is best made by working with local leaders and opinion-makers to gradually shift the public discussion of female circumcision from what it’s believed to bestow upon a girl toward what it takes away. “These mothers believe they are doing something good for their children,” Guarenti, a native of Italy, told me. “For our culture that is not easily understandable. To judge them harshly is to isolate them. You cannot make change that way.”
02 January 2008
Gay Muslims Pack a Dance Floor of Their Own
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/world/europe/01berlin.htmlBy NICHOLAS KULISHPublished: January 1, 2008BERLIN — Six men whirled faster and faster in the center of the nightclub, arms slung over one another’s shoulders, performing a traditional circle dance popular in Turkey and the Middle East. Nothing unusual given the German capital’s large Muslim population.But most of the people filling the dance floor on Saturday at the club SO36 in the Kreuzberg neighborhood were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and of Turkish or Arab background. They were there for the monthly club night known as Gayhane, an all-too-rare opportunity to merge their immigrant cultures and their sexual identities.European Muslims, so often portrayed one-dimensionally as rioters, honor killers or terrorists, live diverse lives, most of them trying to get by and to have a good time. That is more difficult if one is both Muslim and gay.“When you’re here, it’s as if you’re putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun,” said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance, but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.“Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I’m a foreigner and in the other because I’m a queen,” said Fatma Souad, the event’s organizer and master of ceremonies. Ms. Souad, 43, a transgender performer born in Ankara as a boy named Ali, has put on the party for over a decade.Ms. Souad came to Berlin in 1983 after leaving home as a teenager. She studied to be a dressmaker and played in a punk band, but discovered Middle Eastern music through a friend and began teaching herself belly dancing. Ms. Souad started Salon Oriental, her first belly dancing theater, in 1988, and threw the first Gayhane party — hane means home in Turkish — in January 1997.The club was packed by midnight and still had a line out the front door. On stage, Ms. Souad mixed a white turban and white net gloves with a black tuxedo with tails and a silver cummerbund, her face made up with perfectly drawn eyeliner and mascara. Dancing, she was all fluid motion, light on her feet, expressively twisting her hands and swiveling her hips.Under flashing colored lights, guests, some with dreadlocks and others with carefully gelled coifs, moved to songs by the likes of the Egyptian Amr Diab and the Algerian Cheb Mami. Beats from traditional drums crossed with electronic ones, as melodies from flutes and ouds intertwined. When several circle dances — halay in Turkish — broke out at once, the floor began to shake from the stomping.One of the regular D.J.’s, Ipek Ipekcioglu, 35, said she got her start rather suddenly, when one of the founders of SO36 walked up to her and said: “You’re Turkish, right? You’re lesbian, right? Bring your cassettes and D.J.”Ms. Ipekcioglu spins everything from Turkish and Arabic music, to Greek, Balkan and Indian, a style she calls Eklektik BerlinIstan. She has been a full-time professional D.J. for six years and performs all over the world.The space is decorated with bright yellow wall hangings depicting elephants, camels and even a flying carpet, with an intentional degree of kitsch, Ms. Souad said, and an intentional distance from anything Islamic. “We take care that religion is not mixed in here, not in the music either.”Outside the boom of loud firecrackers can be heard, the first test rounds for the annual cacophony here that leaves New Year’s revelers ears’ ringing. Kreuzberg has been home for decades to large populations of Turks and Kurds, many of whom have very conservative religious values. Yet they have had to share the neighborhood that formerly abutted the Berlin Wall with many counterculture types, artists and anarchists and also gays and lesbians.According to the city’s Schwules Museum, partly devoted to the history of gay people in the city and the country, “a lively homosexual subculture had developed in Berlin by the second half of the 18th century or perhaps earlier.” It was known as an oasis for gay men and lesbians in the Weimar period immortalized by the writer Christopher Isherwood and in the period when West Berlin was surrounded by the wall. Today, the city has an openly gay and highly popular mayor, Klaus Wowereit.But gay men and lesbians from Muslim families say they face extraordinary discrimination at home. A survey of roughly 1,000 young men and women in Berlin, released in September and widely cited in the German press, found much higher levels of homophobia among Turkish youth.“These differences are there,” said Bernd Simon, who led the study and is a professor of social psychology at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel. “We can’t deny them. The question is how do we cope with them.”“The answer is not to replace homophobia with Islamophobia,” he added, pointing out that homophobia is also higher among Russian immigrants and in other, less urban parts of Germany.Kader Balcik, a 22-year-old Turk from Hamburg, said: “For us, for Muslims, it’s extremely difficult. When you’re gay, you’re immediately cut off from the family.”He had recently moved to Berlin not long after being cut off from his mother because he is bisexual. “A mother who wishes death for her son, what kind of mother is that?” he asked, his eyes momentarily filling with tears.Hasan, a 21-year-old Arab man, sitting at a table in the club’s quieter adjoining cafe, declined to give his last name, saying: “They would kill me. My brothers would kill me.” Asked if he meant this figuratively, he responded, “No, I mean they would kill me.”“I’m living one life here and the other one the way they wish me to be,” Hasan said, referring to his parents. He said he still planned to marry, but when he turned 30 rather than right away, as his parents wished. “I have to have children, to do what Islam wants me to do,” he said. “I would stop with everything in the homosexual life. I would stop it.”He stood up from the table and called to his two friends. “All right, boys, let’s go dance,” he said. “We’re here to have fun.” And they marched off to the dance floor, smiling.
27 December 2007
Benazir Bhutto, 54, Lived in Eye of Pakistan Storm
By JANE PERLEZ and VICTORIA BURNETT
Published: December 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/world/asia/28bhuttocnd.html?bl&ex=1198904400&en=75a1ed1a5079493a&ei=5087%0A
Charismatic, striking and a canny political operator, Benazir Bhutto, 54, was reared in the violent and turbulent world of Pakistani politics and became the country’s and the Muslim world’s first female prime leader.
A deeply polarizing figure, the “daughter of Pakistan” was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office in a swirl of corruption charges that propelled her into self-imposed exile in London for much of the past decade. She returned home this fall, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a tribune of democracy.
She was killed on Thursday in a combined shooting and bombing attack at a rally in Rawalpindi, one of a series of open events she attended in spite of a failed assassination attempt the day she returned to Pakistan in October and of repeated warnings.
A woman of grand ambitions with a taste for complex political maneuvering, Ms. Bhutto was first elected prime minister in 1988 at the age of 35. The daughter of one of Pakistan’s most flamboyant and democratically inclined prime ministers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she inherited from him the mantle of the populist People’s Party, which she came to personify.
Even from exile, her leadership was virtually unchallenged. She staged a high-profile return to her home city of Karachi, drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters to an 11-hour rally and leading a series of political demonstrations in opposition to the country’s military leader, President Pervez Musharraf.
But in a foreshadowing of the attack that killed her, the triumphal return parade was bombed, killing at least 134 of her supporters and wounded more than 400. Ms. Bhutto herself narrowly escaped harm.
Her political plans were also sidetracked: she had been negotiating for months with Mr. Musharraf over a power-sharing arrangement, only to see the general declare emergency rule instead.
Her record in power, and the dance of veils she has deftly performed since her return — one moment standing up to President Musharraf, the next seeming to accommodate him — stirred hope and distrust among Pakistanis and Western officials who viewed her as a palatable alternative to the increasingly unpopular.
A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Ms. Bhutto brought the backing of Washington and London, where she impressed with her political lineage and her considerable charm. But during her two stints in that job — first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996 — she developed a reputation for acting imperiously and impulsively. She faced deep questions about her personal probity in public office, which led to corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan.
Ms. Bhutto often spoke of how her father encouraged her to study the lives of legendary female leaders ranging from Indira Gandhi to Joan of Arc and, as a young woman, closely observed his political maneuvering.
Despite casting herself as a savior of Pakistan’s millions of poor and disenfranchised, Ms. Bhutto grew up in the most rarefied atmosphere the country had to offer. One longtime friend and adviser, Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador to Croatia, said he and Ms. Bhutto believed they first met in 1962 when they were children: he the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, the American ambassador to India; she the daughter of the future Pakistani prime minister. Mr. Galbraith’s father was accompanying Jacqueline Kennedy to a horse show in Lahore.
They met again at Harvard, where Mr. Galbraith remembered Ms. Bhutto arriving as a prim, cake-baking 16-year-old fresh from a Karachi convent.
After her father’s death — he was hanged by another general who seized power, Zia ul-Haq — Ms. Bhutto stepped into the spotlight as his successor. Ms. Bhutto called herself chairperson for life of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a seemingly odd title in an organization based on democratic ideals and one she has acknowledged quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, in the early 1990s.
When Ms. Bhutto was re-elected to a second term as prime minister, her style of government combined both the traditional and the modern, said Zafar Rathore, a senior civil servant at the time.
But her view of the role of government differed little from the classic notion in Pakistan that the state was the preserve of the ruler who dished out favors to constituents and colleagues, he recalled.
As secretary of interior, responsible for the Pakistani police force, Mr. Rathore, who is now retired, said he tried to get an appointment with Ms. Bhutto to explain the need for accountability in the force. He was always rebuffed, he said.
Finally, when he was seated next to her in a small meeting, he said to her, “I’ve been waiting to see you,” he recounted.
“Instantaneously, she said: ‘I am very busy, what do you want? I’ll order it right now.’ ”
She could not understand that a civil servant might want to talk about policies, he said. Instead, he said, “she understood that when all civil servants have access to the sovereign, they want to ask for something.”
But until her death, Ms. Bhutto ruled the party with an iron hand, jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in absentia for nearly a decade.
Members of her party saluted her return to Pakistan, saying she was the best choice against General Musharraf. Chief among her attributes, they said, was her sheer determination.
Ms. Bhutto’s marriage to Asif Ali Zardari was arranged by her mother, a fact that Ms. Bhutto has often said was easily explained, even for a modern, highly educated Pakistani woman. To be acceptable to the Pakistani public as a politician she could not be a single woman, and what was the difference, she would ask, between such a marriage and computer dating?
Mr. Zardari, who is 51, is known for his love of polo and other perquisites of the good life like fine clothes, expensive restaurants, homes in Dubai and London, and an apartment in New York.
He was minister of investment in Ms. Bhutto’s second government. And it was from that perch that he made many of the deals that haunted Ms. Bhutto, and himself, in the courts.
There were accusations that the couple had illegally taken $1.5 billion from the state. It is a figure that Ms. Bhutto has vigorously contested.
Indeed, one of Ms. Bhutto’s main objectives in seeking to return to power was to restore the reputation of her husband, who was jailed for eight years in Pakistan, said Abdullah Riar, a former senator in the Pakistani Parliament and a former colleague of Ms. Bhutto’s.
“She told me, ‘Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan,’ ” Mr. Riar said.
Published: December 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/world/asia/28bhuttocnd.html?bl&ex=1198904400&en=75a1ed1a5079493a&ei=5087%0A
Charismatic, striking and a canny political operator, Benazir Bhutto, 54, was reared in the violent and turbulent world of Pakistani politics and became the country’s and the Muslim world’s first female prime leader.
A deeply polarizing figure, the “daughter of Pakistan” was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office in a swirl of corruption charges that propelled her into self-imposed exile in London for much of the past decade. She returned home this fall, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a tribune of democracy.
She was killed on Thursday in a combined shooting and bombing attack at a rally in Rawalpindi, one of a series of open events she attended in spite of a failed assassination attempt the day she returned to Pakistan in October and of repeated warnings.
A woman of grand ambitions with a taste for complex political maneuvering, Ms. Bhutto was first elected prime minister in 1988 at the age of 35. The daughter of one of Pakistan’s most flamboyant and democratically inclined prime ministers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she inherited from him the mantle of the populist People’s Party, which she came to personify.
Even from exile, her leadership was virtually unchallenged. She staged a high-profile return to her home city of Karachi, drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters to an 11-hour rally and leading a series of political demonstrations in opposition to the country’s military leader, President Pervez Musharraf.
But in a foreshadowing of the attack that killed her, the triumphal return parade was bombed, killing at least 134 of her supporters and wounded more than 400. Ms. Bhutto herself narrowly escaped harm.
Her political plans were also sidetracked: she had been negotiating for months with Mr. Musharraf over a power-sharing arrangement, only to see the general declare emergency rule instead.
Her record in power, and the dance of veils she has deftly performed since her return — one moment standing up to President Musharraf, the next seeming to accommodate him — stirred hope and distrust among Pakistanis and Western officials who viewed her as a palatable alternative to the increasingly unpopular.
A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Ms. Bhutto brought the backing of Washington and London, where she impressed with her political lineage and her considerable charm. But during her two stints in that job — first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996 — she developed a reputation for acting imperiously and impulsively. She faced deep questions about her personal probity in public office, which led to corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan.
Ms. Bhutto often spoke of how her father encouraged her to study the lives of legendary female leaders ranging from Indira Gandhi to Joan of Arc and, as a young woman, closely observed his political maneuvering.
Despite casting herself as a savior of Pakistan’s millions of poor and disenfranchised, Ms. Bhutto grew up in the most rarefied atmosphere the country had to offer. One longtime friend and adviser, Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador to Croatia, said he and Ms. Bhutto believed they first met in 1962 when they were children: he the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, the American ambassador to India; she the daughter of the future Pakistani prime minister. Mr. Galbraith’s father was accompanying Jacqueline Kennedy to a horse show in Lahore.
They met again at Harvard, where Mr. Galbraith remembered Ms. Bhutto arriving as a prim, cake-baking 16-year-old fresh from a Karachi convent.
After her father’s death — he was hanged by another general who seized power, Zia ul-Haq — Ms. Bhutto stepped into the spotlight as his successor. Ms. Bhutto called herself chairperson for life of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a seemingly odd title in an organization based on democratic ideals and one she has acknowledged quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, in the early 1990s.
When Ms. Bhutto was re-elected to a second term as prime minister, her style of government combined both the traditional and the modern, said Zafar Rathore, a senior civil servant at the time.
But her view of the role of government differed little from the classic notion in Pakistan that the state was the preserve of the ruler who dished out favors to constituents and colleagues, he recalled.
As secretary of interior, responsible for the Pakistani police force, Mr. Rathore, who is now retired, said he tried to get an appointment with Ms. Bhutto to explain the need for accountability in the force. He was always rebuffed, he said.
Finally, when he was seated next to her in a small meeting, he said to her, “I’ve been waiting to see you,” he recounted.
“Instantaneously, she said: ‘I am very busy, what do you want? I’ll order it right now.’ ”
She could not understand that a civil servant might want to talk about policies, he said. Instead, he said, “she understood that when all civil servants have access to the sovereign, they want to ask for something.”
But until her death, Ms. Bhutto ruled the party with an iron hand, jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in absentia for nearly a decade.
Members of her party saluted her return to Pakistan, saying she was the best choice against General Musharraf. Chief among her attributes, they said, was her sheer determination.
Ms. Bhutto’s marriage to Asif Ali Zardari was arranged by her mother, a fact that Ms. Bhutto has often said was easily explained, even for a modern, highly educated Pakistani woman. To be acceptable to the Pakistani public as a politician she could not be a single woman, and what was the difference, she would ask, between such a marriage and computer dating?
Mr. Zardari, who is 51, is known for his love of polo and other perquisites of the good life like fine clothes, expensive restaurants, homes in Dubai and London, and an apartment in New York.
He was minister of investment in Ms. Bhutto’s second government. And it was from that perch that he made many of the deals that haunted Ms. Bhutto, and himself, in the courts.
There were accusations that the couple had illegally taken $1.5 billion from the state. It is a figure that Ms. Bhutto has vigorously contested.
Indeed, one of Ms. Bhutto’s main objectives in seeking to return to power was to restore the reputation of her husband, who was jailed for eight years in Pakistan, said Abdullah Riar, a former senator in the Pakistani Parliament and a former colleague of Ms. Bhutto’s.
“She told me, ‘Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan,’ ” Mr. Riar said.
03 December 2007
Sudanese President Pardons British Teacher
This is unfortunate, but understandable. It would be like the outrage of people in the Bible Belt if someone allowed an entire class to use Jesus for a teddy Bear's name.
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec. 3 — The British schoolteacher jailed in Sudan for allowing her 7-year-old pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad was pardoned today by Sudan’s president. She was released to British authorities and will be sent back to England later today.
Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, made the decision after a meeting this morning in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, with two Muslim peers from Britain’s House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain said he was "delighted and relieved" at the news and that "common sense had prevailed,” according to the BBC.
The schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, was sentenced to 15 days in jail last week for insulting Islam and was supposed to be released on Dec. 10. On Friday, hundreds of angry Sudanese in Khartoum protested what they considered to be a lenient punishment. Under Sudanese law, she could have been jailed for six months and received 40 lashes.
But meanwhile, British officials put heavy pressure on Sudan to release Ms. Gibbons, 54, saying that she had made an innocent mistake in allowing her students to give a class teddy bear the same name as Islam’s holy prophet. Muhammad also happens to be one of the most common names in the Muslim world.
In a way, Mr. Bashir was caught in the middle — or at least the Sudanese government tried to make it look that way. By letting Ms. Gibbons out early, he risks provoking Muslim hardliners in his country, who are among his key supporters.
But the case hit his desk at a time when United Nations officials and Western governments are increasingly complaining that Sudan is obstructing an expanded peacekeeping force for Darfur, the war-torn region of western Sudan.
Apparently, Mr. Bashir calculated that he didn’t need to isolate his government any further.
“This was all political,” said Kamal al-Gizouli, Ms. Gibbons’ defense attorney. “The government did this to show they are tolerant. They don’t need any more problems with the world and the international media.”
According to the BBC, Ms. Gibbons issued a statement today saying she was sorry for offending Muslims.
"I have been in Sudan for only four months but I have enjoyed myself immensely,” the statement said. "I have encountered nothing but kindness and generosity from the Sudanese people. I have great respect for the Islamic religion and would not knowingly offend anyone and I am sorry if I caused any distress.”
The teddy bear affair started in September when Ms. Gibbons, who taught at one of Sudan’s most exclusive private schools, began a project on animals and asked her class to suggest a name for a teddy bear. The class voted resoundingly for Muhammad.
As part of the exercise, Ms. Gibbons told her pupils to take the bear home, photograph it and write a diary entry about it. The entries were collected in a book, “My Name Is Muhammad.” Most of her students were Muslim and the children of wealthy Sudanese families.
The government said that when some parents saw the book, they complained to the authorities. Ms. Gibbons was arrested, and she went to trial last Thursday. After an all-day trial, the judge seemed to reach for a compromise by finding her guilty of insulting Islam but handing her a relatively light sentence.
That compromise seemed to please neither the Sudanese hardliners, nor the British. But Mr. al-Gizouli said he doesn’t expect further demonstrations.
“If the government doesn’t want people to go into the streets,” he said today, “they won’t go into the streets. That’s how it works here.”
After the pardon, Ms. Gibbons had been transferred to the British Embassy and was in its custody, before she was due to leave the country later today, Reuters reported.
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec. 3 — The British schoolteacher jailed in Sudan for allowing her 7-year-old pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad was pardoned today by Sudan’s president. She was released to British authorities and will be sent back to England later today.
Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, made the decision after a meeting this morning in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, with two Muslim peers from Britain’s House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain said he was "delighted and relieved" at the news and that "common sense had prevailed,” according to the BBC.
The schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, was sentenced to 15 days in jail last week for insulting Islam and was supposed to be released on Dec. 10. On Friday, hundreds of angry Sudanese in Khartoum protested what they considered to be a lenient punishment. Under Sudanese law, she could have been jailed for six months and received 40 lashes.
But meanwhile, British officials put heavy pressure on Sudan to release Ms. Gibbons, 54, saying that she had made an innocent mistake in allowing her students to give a class teddy bear the same name as Islam’s holy prophet. Muhammad also happens to be one of the most common names in the Muslim world.
In a way, Mr. Bashir was caught in the middle — or at least the Sudanese government tried to make it look that way. By letting Ms. Gibbons out early, he risks provoking Muslim hardliners in his country, who are among his key supporters.
But the case hit his desk at a time when United Nations officials and Western governments are increasingly complaining that Sudan is obstructing an expanded peacekeeping force for Darfur, the war-torn region of western Sudan.
Apparently, Mr. Bashir calculated that he didn’t need to isolate his government any further.
“This was all political,” said Kamal al-Gizouli, Ms. Gibbons’ defense attorney. “The government did this to show they are tolerant. They don’t need any more problems with the world and the international media.”
According to the BBC, Ms. Gibbons issued a statement today saying she was sorry for offending Muslims.
"I have been in Sudan for only four months but I have enjoyed myself immensely,” the statement said. "I have encountered nothing but kindness and generosity from the Sudanese people. I have great respect for the Islamic religion and would not knowingly offend anyone and I am sorry if I caused any distress.”
The teddy bear affair started in September when Ms. Gibbons, who taught at one of Sudan’s most exclusive private schools, began a project on animals and asked her class to suggest a name for a teddy bear. The class voted resoundingly for Muhammad.
As part of the exercise, Ms. Gibbons told her pupils to take the bear home, photograph it and write a diary entry about it. The entries were collected in a book, “My Name Is Muhammad.” Most of her students were Muslim and the children of wealthy Sudanese families.
The government said that when some parents saw the book, they complained to the authorities. Ms. Gibbons was arrested, and she went to trial last Thursday. After an all-day trial, the judge seemed to reach for a compromise by finding her guilty of insulting Islam but handing her a relatively light sentence.
That compromise seemed to please neither the Sudanese hardliners, nor the British. But Mr. al-Gizouli said he doesn’t expect further demonstrations.
“If the government doesn’t want people to go into the streets,” he said today, “they won’t go into the streets. That’s how it works here.”
After the pardon, Ms. Gibbons had been transferred to the British Embassy and was in its custody, before she was due to leave the country later today, Reuters reported.
26 October 2007
Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 25 — On a marshy peninsula 50 miles from this Red Sea port, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is staking $12.5 billion on a gargantuan bid to catch up with the West in science and technology.
Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion.
Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country’s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom’s cultural and religious limits.
This undertaking is directly at odds with the kingdom’s religious establishment, which severely limits women’s rights and rejects coeducation and robust liberal inquiry as unthinkable.
For the new institution, the king has cut his own education ministry out the loop, hiring the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to build the campus, create its curriculum and attract foreigners.
Supporters of what is to be called the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, wonder whether the king is simply building another gated island to be dominated by foreigners, like the compounds for oil industry workers that have existed here for decades, or creating an institution that will have a real impact on Saudi society and the rest of the Arab world.
“There are two Saudi Arabias,” said Jamal Khashoggi, the editor of Al Watan, a newspaper. “The question is which Saudi Arabia will take over.”
The king has broken taboos, declaring that the Arabs have fallen critically behind much of the modern world in intellectual achievement and that his country depends too much on oil and not enough on creating wealth through innovation.
“There is a deep knowledge gap separating the Arab and Islamic nations from the process and progress of contemporary global civilization,” said Abdallah S. Jumah, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco. “We are no longer keeping pace with the advances of our era.”
Traditional Saudi practice is on display at the biggest public universities, where the Islamic authorities vet the curriculum, medical researchers tread carefully around controversial subjects like evolution, and female and male students enter classrooms through separate doors and follow lectures while separated by partitions.
Old-fashioned values even seeped into the carefully staged groundbreaking ceremony on Sunday for King Abdullah’s new university, at which organizers distributed an issue of the magazine The Economist with a special advertisement for the university wrapped around the cover. State censors had physically torn from each copy an article about Saudi legal reform titled “Law of God Versus Law of Man,” leaving a jagged edge.
Despite the obstacles, the king intends to make the university a showcase for modernization. The festive groundbreaking and accompanying symposium about the future of the modern university were devised partly as a recruiting tool for international academics.
“Getting the faculty will be the biggest challenge,” said Ahmed F. Ghoniem, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulting for the new university. “That will make it or break it.” Professor Ghoniem has advised the new university to lure international academics with laboratory facilities and grants they cannot find at home, but he also believes that established professors will be reluctant to leave their universities for a small enclave in the desert.
“You have to create an environment where you can connect to the outside world,” said Professor Ghoniem, who is from Egypt. “You cannot work in isolation.”
He admitted that even though he admired the idea of the new university, he would be unlikely to abandon his post at M.I.T. to move to Saudi Arabia.
Festivities at the construction site on Sunday for 1,500 dignitaries included a laser light show and a mockup of the planned campus that filled an entire room. The king laid a crystal cornerstone into a stainless steel shaft on wheels.
Cranes tore out mangroves and pounded the swampland with 20-ton blocks into a surface firm enough to build the campus on. Inside a tent, the king, his honor guard wearing flowing robes and curved daggers, and an array of Aramco officials in suits took to a shiny stage lighted with green and blue neon tubing, like an MTV awards show. Mist from dry ice shrouded the stage, music blared in surround sound, and holographic projections served as a backdrop to some of the speeches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world/middleeast/26saudi.html?em&ex=1193544000&en=1a3b3c7393a9c040&ei=5087%0A
Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion.
Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country’s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom’s cultural and religious limits.
This undertaking is directly at odds with the kingdom’s religious establishment, which severely limits women’s rights and rejects coeducation and robust liberal inquiry as unthinkable.
For the new institution, the king has cut his own education ministry out the loop, hiring the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to build the campus, create its curriculum and attract foreigners.
Supporters of what is to be called the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, wonder whether the king is simply building another gated island to be dominated by foreigners, like the compounds for oil industry workers that have existed here for decades, or creating an institution that will have a real impact on Saudi society and the rest of the Arab world.
“There are two Saudi Arabias,” said Jamal Khashoggi, the editor of Al Watan, a newspaper. “The question is which Saudi Arabia will take over.”
The king has broken taboos, declaring that the Arabs have fallen critically behind much of the modern world in intellectual achievement and that his country depends too much on oil and not enough on creating wealth through innovation.
“There is a deep knowledge gap separating the Arab and Islamic nations from the process and progress of contemporary global civilization,” said Abdallah S. Jumah, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco. “We are no longer keeping pace with the advances of our era.”
Traditional Saudi practice is on display at the biggest public universities, where the Islamic authorities vet the curriculum, medical researchers tread carefully around controversial subjects like evolution, and female and male students enter classrooms through separate doors and follow lectures while separated by partitions.
Old-fashioned values even seeped into the carefully staged groundbreaking ceremony on Sunday for King Abdullah’s new university, at which organizers distributed an issue of the magazine The Economist with a special advertisement for the university wrapped around the cover. State censors had physically torn from each copy an article about Saudi legal reform titled “Law of God Versus Law of Man,” leaving a jagged edge.
Despite the obstacles, the king intends to make the university a showcase for modernization. The festive groundbreaking and accompanying symposium about the future of the modern university were devised partly as a recruiting tool for international academics.
“Getting the faculty will be the biggest challenge,” said Ahmed F. Ghoniem, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulting for the new university. “That will make it or break it.” Professor Ghoniem has advised the new university to lure international academics with laboratory facilities and grants they cannot find at home, but he also believes that established professors will be reluctant to leave their universities for a small enclave in the desert.
“You have to create an environment where you can connect to the outside world,” said Professor Ghoniem, who is from Egypt. “You cannot work in isolation.”
He admitted that even though he admired the idea of the new university, he would be unlikely to abandon his post at M.I.T. to move to Saudi Arabia.
Festivities at the construction site on Sunday for 1,500 dignitaries included a laser light show and a mockup of the planned campus that filled an entire room. The king laid a crystal cornerstone into a stainless steel shaft on wheels.
Cranes tore out mangroves and pounded the swampland with 20-ton blocks into a surface firm enough to build the campus on. Inside a tent, the king, his honor guard wearing flowing robes and curved daggers, and an array of Aramco officials in suits took to a shiny stage lighted with green and blue neon tubing, like an MTV awards show. Mist from dry ice shrouded the stage, music blared in surround sound, and holographic projections served as a backdrop to some of the speeches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world/middleeast/26saudi.html?em&ex=1193544000&en=1a3b3c7393a9c040&ei=5087%0A
11 October 2007
The Crime of Honor - Chapter 1
PART I – ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH
1 – The Crime of Honor
1 – The Crime of Honor
AMMAN — The criminal prosecutor on Monday charged a 68-year-old father
with the premeditated murder of his daughter for reasons the suspect claimed were
related to family honour, official sources said. The 26-year-old victim was shot six
times in the head and neck, reportedly by her father, at their family’s home on Monday
morning, one official source said. “When the police and criminal prosecutor arrived at
the scene, the father fired several rounds in the air, saying he was celebrating the killing
of his daughter,” the official source told The Jordan Times. “I have cleared the family’s
name and cleansed my honour. Let everyone in my town know that I killed my daughter
for this reason,” the official source quoted the suspect as saying. The victim was allegedly
involved in an affair with a married man, who sought her hand in marriage six months prior
to the incident, according to the source. The victim’s family refused because the man was
married, the source said, adding that almost two weeks ago, they discovered she was pregnant.
“The family took their daughter to a different city and arranged for her to undergo an abortion
and an operation to restore her virginity,” the source said. For the past two weeks, the
victim’s family locked her up in the house and on Monday they decided to kill her, the
source added. Pathologist Awad Tarawneh, who performed an autopsy on the victim,
removed four bullets from her skull and indicated that two other bullets penetrated and
exited her lungs, the source said. “Tarawneh also established that the victim underwent an
abortion and hymen- restoration surgery recently,” the source said. Coroners extracted bullets
from the floor and walls of the victim’s room, where the reported murder occurred. “It seems
the victim was run from one place to the other in an attempt to avoid the bullets, because coroners
found several bullets on the floor and other locations in her room,” the source said. There
was evidence that some rounds were fired while she was lying injured on the floor, the source
added. The victim became the seventh person reportedly murdered in a so-called honour crime
in the country since the beginning of the year, according to judicial and medical sources (Jordan Times 04/10/2007).
More than once experts[1] stressed that it was impossible to make generalizations in relation to honor crimes, but I found there were statements that came up time and again throughout the interview process. "These things happen in certain areas, among certain people. Usually the poor overcrowded places where word of mouth travels quickly; usually its uneducated people, unemployed mostly." Nonetheless, there are those who commit honor crimes where people can't believe they would. In one case a woman had decided to divorce her husband, so she sought the advice of an NGO. The social worker told her to give her husband a deadline of June 21st and if he didn’t agree to her demands, then to divorce him. The woman went home and repeated what she had been told to her husband. On the night of the 20th he bludgeoned her to death with a hammer. "He's a nice man. No criminal records and never in a fight on the street, so dealing with domestic violence is difficult."[2]
More than once experts[1] stressed that it was impossible to make generalizations in relation to honor crimes, but I found there were statements that came up time and again throughout the interview process. "These things happen in certain areas, among certain people. Usually the poor overcrowded places where word of mouth travels quickly; usually its uneducated people, unemployed mostly." Nonetheless, there are those who commit honor crimes where people can't believe they would. In one case a woman had decided to divorce her husband, so she sought the advice of an NGO. The social worker told her to give her husband a deadline of June 21st and if he didn’t agree to her demands, then to divorce him. The woman went home and repeated what she had been told to her husband. On the night of the 20th he bludgeoned her to death with a hammer. "He's a nice man. No criminal records and never in a fight on the street, so dealing with domestic violence is difficult."[2]
Nadia Shamrukh, executive director of the Jordanian Women's Union, expressed the opinion that these girls came from a family where there was "usually a history of violence." Girls whose families murder them are also in her view girls with a "bad reputation," and it may be a family’s last resort after less severe disciplinary actions to cleanse the family honor.[3]While this may be true of some cases there are many others where the woman will be killed for unsubstantiated rumors. "If they want to kill her they won't wait for the forensics report, they will kill her regardless," says Dr. Jahshan of the National Center for Forensic Medicine. In one case a teenage girl was sitting too closely to a male relative visiting from the city when her father came into the room. Seeing the situation he flew into a rage and beat her with a stick. When her suicide was later investigated and in addition to the bullet wound in her right fontal lobe they found bruising on her buttocks and legs her father confessed to beating her, but claimed he had not killed her. It was only after the forensic pathologist told the father that it was next to impossible for a teenage girl to shoot herself on the right side of the head with her left hand that the father confessed. He had been a police officer for a number of years, so he knew she needed residue from the gun on her hand to make it look like a suicide.[4]
There are a growing number of researchers who have begun to question the legitimacy of so-called female suicides. In response Dr. Jahshan stated emphatically "some researchers think we classify honor crimes as suicides, because we don't find it, but I take it as a personal offense to me, because it is my job as forensic pathologist to discover if it is suicide. I can't guarantee that occasional cases don't happen, but I can record them very easily. It's not a significant number." There was a case where the family claimed their daughter was having heart trouble and they could not get her to the hospital before she died. Their neighbor noticed a huge refrigerator truck running all night – They had put her in the truck, and then buried her the next morning. It was not until after the burial that the information got to the authorities, so they exhumed her body and discovered that she had been poisoned.
An estimated 95% of honor crime perpetrators receive the lowest sentencing available, which is between 6 months and 3 years. In the case that the judge is seeking to press for a harder sentence, 15 years to life imprisonment, 99% of the families will drop charges, so that the sentence will be reduced and they can have their sons, fathers, and husbands return home[5]. There has only been one recent case where the defendant received a harsher penalty; a man saw his sister who had run away from home 25 years previously. He went home and told his 20 year old son what she had done to the family and that he should go kill her for the family's honor. The young man got 10 years imprisonment for committing manslaughter[6].
Jweideh Women's Prison holds 30 to 40 women in protective custody who are seen to be at possible risk of an honor crime, in addition to convicted criminals. It is currently the only service in Jordan available to protect victims, but most advocates do not believe there is any legal ground for these forced detainments and a coalition has been formed to find a solution. Eva Abu Halaweh sees it as just being "easier to put victims in prison [when they should] try to put the father or brother in [prison]."[7] Others see this as impossible since they are threatened by the entire family so the 1953 Preventative Law, which is only used through an administrative decision, is the best protection available[8].
"This is a terrible issue. You know I'm a practitioner, so I examined a case
at 1am and a very nice woman police officer was talking with me. I ask after
my examination where are you taking her – she started crying- Not the woman,
the police officer! 'I don't know.' So if you don't have a choice, I'm not giving it
a reason, but at the same time we need to be realistic. I know if she stays with
her father and family she is at risk of being killed. So this is the only choice they
have, so they use it […] It is completely wrong to detain them, but if you don't
have a choice and you are in the middle of a problem a decision need to be taken."[9]
In another case a young girl had been raped when she was 14 by three men. A case was filed against them and they were sentenced to life imprisonment. When she was 17 she fell in love with her neighbor who was in his early twenties and he asked to marry her in the traditional way. His family visited her family and got the marriage contract signed and the wedding ceremony would be a few weeks later. Her new husband knew she was not a virgin, but after his family found out they wanted him to divorce her. He decided he would not and they ran away together. Legally they were married, but culturally they were not. After 3 weeks the police found her and she was examined for having sex with her husband. The governor decided to place her in Jweideh for her protection and for three weeks her family tried to get her out. Finally two uncles convinced the governor's office, they signed the papers and she was released. When she got out her father was waiting for her in the car and they all went to the family home for a celebration lunch. Afterwards he took her to the park and shot her.[10]
In another case a young girl had been raped when she was 14 by three men. A case was filed against them and they were sentenced to life imprisonment. When she was 17 she fell in love with her neighbor who was in his early twenties and he asked to marry her in the traditional way. His family visited her family and got the marriage contract signed and the wedding ceremony would be a few weeks later. Her new husband knew she was not a virgin, but after his family found out they wanted him to divorce her. He decided he would not and they ran away together. Legally they were married, but culturally they were not. After 3 weeks the police found her and she was examined for having sex with her husband. The governor decided to place her in Jweideh for her protection and for three weeks her family tried to get her out. Finally two uncles convinced the governor's office, they signed the papers and she was released. When she got out her father was waiting for her in the car and they all went to the family home for a celebration lunch. Afterwards he took her to the park and shot her.[10]
It is because of cases like these that the state continues to hold victims in detention. 90% of parents who bail their daughters out of Jewaideh do so with the intention of killing them.[11] Advocates are desperately pressing for the completion of a shelter to house these women, so that they do not have to suffer the indignity of being in prison and they also have the right to stay for as long as they feel they need the protection, regardless of their family's wishes. In the Sharia, if a woman needs to stay in a shelter (traditionally the tribal chief's house) her husband has no law over her and she is free to come and go at her will. In much more conservative countries like Saudi Arabia and Iraq there are numerous shelters for women who are in need[12].
[1] During my ethnographic period fourteen individuals were interviewed in addition to attending the kick-off for the 16 Day Campaign against Gender Based Violence, a short play performed by the Noor Al-Hussein Foundation, Performing Arts Center on domestic violence, and a tour of Dar Al-Wefaq Al-Usaree, the state’s pending women’s shelter.
[2] Dr. Hani Jahshan Interview, 12/03
[3] Nadia Shamrukh Interview, 11/29
[4] Dr. Hani Jahshan Interview, 12/03
[5] Rana Husseini Interview, 12/01
[6] Dr. Hani Jahshan Interview, 12/03
[7] Eva Abu Halaweh Interview, 11/29
[8] Enaam Asha Interview, 12/01
[9] Dr. Hani Jahshan Interview, 12/03
[10] Dr. Hani Jahshan Interview, 12/03
[11] Rana Husseini Interview, 12/01
[12] Dr. Hani Jahshan Interview
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