Honor Killing: A Professional's Guide to Sexual Relations and Ghayra Violence from the Islamic Sources by Daniel Akbari & Paul Tetreault

Author:Daniel Akbari & Paul Tetreault [Akbari, Daniel & Tetreault, Paul]
Language: dan
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781496957474
Publisher: Authorhouse
Published: 2015-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Non-Ghayra Amr Bil Ma’ruf

The Anglo-American philosophy of law and government recognizes the power to enforce moral rules is given initially to individuals. This means that in a state of nature - where no government exists - the individual has the power to enforce moral rules like don’t murder, commit adultery, steal, or lie. The individual has the right to use the amount of force reasonably necessary to prevent the violation, up to and including deadly force. For example, if a knife-wielding attacker attempts to rob you, you have the right to pull out a gun and shoot him dead. The only powers a government can justly exercise are those it receives by delegation from the citizens it serves. Thus, while a government might justly obtain a limited monopoly on the right to use force, it cannot legitimately bar citizens from using force to protect themselves when government cannot fulfill its obligation. There is a popular phrase used to emphasize the importance of citizens bearing arms, “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”

Islam has a similar notion that preserves an even larger scope of action for individual citizens. Under sharia, the government does not receive even a limited monopoly on the right to use force. Rather, the citizens’ right to enforce sharia by doing amr bil ma’ruf continues in parallel at all times with the Islamic government’s obligation to enforce sharia. The right - and duty - to enjoin good and forbid evil is part of Islam, so the Islamic government may not legitimately take it away from Muslim citizens.

This means individuals may employ the procedures for amr bil ma’ruf for any violation of sharia, not just to enforce sharia’s sexually-related rules for the women in a Muslim man’s namoos. Amr bil ma’ruf extends far beyond just the context of satisfying ghayra. For example, in July of 2014, twenty women alleged to be prostitutes in Baghdad were slaughtered in an attack carried out by Muslim men.232 The men scrawled “this is the fate of any prostitution” on a door in one of the apartments where the women were killed. Nine men in the apartments were also murdered by the attackers. If this attack was carried out to punish prostitutes then it exceeded sharia, because four male witnesses to the act of penetration are required to prove adultery before an Islamic court. If the attack was carried out to prevent the women from engaging in non-Islamic acts - like not being covered or wearing makeup in the presence of men who are not unmarriageable kin - it would still exceed sharia. To use deadly force legitimately, the men who carried out the attack would have had to satisfy two requirements. First, the men would have to have used a less severe method of correction first, deadly force cannot be the first step taken to do amr bil ma’ruf. Second, the men would have to have found the women in public. An amer is not allowed to enter the home of unrelated Muslims to do amr bil ma’ruf.

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