Honor Killing: Saving Banaz Mahmod

Banaz Mahmod

On April 28, 2006, 20 year-old Banaz Mahmod Bakabir Agha’s body was found hacked to pieces and packed in a suitcase in a suburb of London. Her crime was leaving an abusive arranged marriage and wishing to marry a man of her own choice. Finally, on June 12 of this year, her killers were brought to justice when a British court convicted her father Mahmod Mahmod and her uncle Ari Mahmod of her murder.

Banaz’s case illustrates how a host of factors can come together to allow such grotesque honour crimes to occur. Archaic and misogynistic cultural beliefs, on the one hand, reduce women to objects of ownership and control, whose family members have no qualms in obliterating them for imagined sins against tradition. On the other is a host foreign culture suspicious of a ghettoised and economically disenfranchised Muslim minority, and hence slow to provide protection. Banaz had repeatedly asked the police to provide her with protection and even given them a list of three people whom she believed would try to kill her, to no avail.

Finally, also blameworthy is the persistent silence of the Muslim Council of Britain, and other Muslim groups who jump to organise protests when Muslim women are denied the right to wear niqabs but choose to ignore their plight when they fall prey to the brutality of their own families.

The collusion of all of these factors, the low priority given to Muslim women’s freedom by their own cultural tradition, their host nation and ultimately their religious community are all to blame in the Banaz case.

The saga began in late July 2005 when twenty year old Banaz left the marriage that her Iraqi Kurdish family had arranged for her at age seventeen, and returned to her family home. According to police reports, Banaz complained of being repeatedly abused and raped by her husband. In one incident, he punched her in the face and knocked out one of her front teeth because she had dared to call him by his first name in public. Despite her family’s opposition to her divorce, Banaz chose to stay on in her family’s home. In late 2005, Banaz met and fell in love with Rahmat Suleimani, a Kurdish man from a different tribe.

The love affair ignited even more of her family’s ire. Already shamed at the fact that Banaz’s sister Bekhal had left the home at age 15 to escape family violence, Banaz’s uncle, Ari Mahmod, convened a family council in which the elders decided to kill Banaz to reclaim their family honour. Banaz was told of this plan by her mother and went to the police to report the death threat. Terrified at the course of events and still believing that her mother would protect her, Banaz refused to enter a shelter, but the threats against her life continued.

A chilling episode in the story took place on New Year’s Eve 2006. Banaz was lured into her grandmother’s house in nearby Wimbledon to meet with her father and uncle to sort out her divorce. While there, she became terrified when her father first made her drink brandy to sedate her (something she as a Muslim had never done before) and then proceeded to put on gloves. Hysterical and drugged, Banaz ran out of the house by smashing a window with her bare hands and found help in a nearby caf�. However, when she went to the local police they refused to believe her story.

In a video made at this time, one can see an obviously disorientated Banaz lying on a hospital bed and detailing her father’s suspicious actions. On January 21, 2006, Banaz’s family attempted to kidnap her boyfriend, Rahmat. In the days following the attempt Banaz again went to the local police station and filed a report saying she would co-operate fully in any investigation against her family. Four days later, while in her family home, Banaz was killed. Her body was found on April 28, 2006, with the bootlace used to strangle her still around her neck.

There is nothing that can mitigate the horror of an innocent life taken at the behest of the very people that were responsible for bringing it into the world. At the most primary level, a crime which involves a father killing his own daughter, whose only mistake was to choose her own mate, should evoke the deepest disgust in every human heart. But the Banaz case is also an indictment against the religio-cultural confusion becoming increasingly symbolic of West-European society in the twenty-first century.

Muslim immigrant communities like the Iraqi Kurds are geographically and economically ghettoized, with little incentive and few logistical reasons to assimilate into the mainstream. Segregated thus, these communities recast adherence to traditional customs as a form of resistance to a foreign culture they perceive as hostile and unwelcoming. Exerting draconian control over women becomes a convenient means of acting out the frustration of feeling helpless in a foreign land.

At the same time, host cultures use the issue to substantiate their own delusions regarding the ‘other’ people living in their homeland. The ‘xenophobic’ Britons treat the occurrence of such crimes as proof of the barbarism and backwardness of immigrants. The ‘cultural relativist’ Britons, used to exoticising the ‘other’, simply look elsewhere, unsure of how to judge such a saga of unabated cruelty.

In either case, girls like Banaz are denied the help they need.

Finally, religious groups such as the powerful Muslim Council of Britain find delving into such matters generally useless to their political and mobilisation aims. By disposing of the issue of honour killings in a convenient web disclaimer about the “pre-islamic” nature of the custom, they expose their own dubious commitment to Muslim women like Banaz, who are left to fend for themselves when it comes to fighting against repression in their own communities.

Rafia Zakaria is associate editor of altmuslim.com and an attorney and member of the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Women.  She teaches courses on constitutional law and political philosophy. This article previously appeared in Daily Times (Pakistan).