Sectarian Order in Bahrain by Strobl Staci;

Author:Strobl, Staci;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Concern about Honor Killings and Other Violence Against Women

As early as 1906, colonial administrators expressed concern over Bahraini treatment of women by Sunni tribal communities. This type of concern is a common theme across colonial societies, “[C]olonial rulers found themselves scandalized, shocked or outraged by local customs,” and exerted their moral superiority through criminalizing and punishing the behaviors.[33] Famous examples include the British colonial criminalization of suttee in India,[34] a custom by which a widow fatally throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, or of concubinage in Hong Kong.[35] In analyses of pictorial and literary artifacts produced by Westerners about Muslim women, scholars have labeled the Western gaze “gendered Orientalism” with women portrayed as passive victims or hyper-sexualized in depictions of harems.[36] Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod cautions that although cultural accounts of crimes against women hold water, reducing the cause of such crimes to “tradition” alone inappropriately blames a society for relatively rare phenomena, which also involves family dynamics, individual decision-making, and many other factors. This reductionist thinking acts to stigmatize a culture rather than the act of violence and is often used to justify other projects of power and control by the state.[37]

Here, I take a cultural approach to crimes about gender and honor as a particular manifestation of patriarchal gender relations which when viewed from the colonial, Western perspective takes on a reductionist gloss propelled by a divergent culture-based sense of moral outrage. In doing so, I recognize that colonists invented these crimes as a category of criminality, taking them from the private sphere into the realm of the criminal investigation and adjudication by the state. At the same time I do so recognizing that femicide is a serious crime that should not be taken lightly. In any case, there is no evidence from the colonial record that local leaders demanded action by the state on these incidents (often they criticized the state for involving itself in these private matters); however, as we shall see below, victims themselves sometimes exhibited individual agency and approached colonists for assistance in managing honor-based violence in their family lives.

Both Shi`a and Sunni communities share a general Islamic foundation in that these types of crimes can be categorized as often involving improper sexual relations, such as zina (adultery), a hudd punishment in shari’a law. There are hadiths (recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammed) that support the killing of adulterers if four witnesses can come forth to corroborate the charge. Further, tribal customs around women’s honor (‘urd in Arabic, erz in Farsi) share similar worries about the socially damaging effect that improprieties have on family, tribe, or clan reputation.[38] Because Sunni qadis were often hierarchically below tribal sheikhs, tribal custom had as much to do with Sunni responses as jurisprudence. According to H. R. P. Dickson, ‘urd is directly connected to the reputation of the family and if sullied “nothing short of killing the errant woman will restore it.”[39] Although this is likely an ethnographic exaggeration and frames errant women as falling into a taboo

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