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When the British gained control of India, they got rid of suttee, the Hindu custom of burning a widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. This was done to express grief, and also so that the husband’s family would not have to share the inheritance with the widow. The British commander-in-chief in India, General Sir Charles Napier (1782-1853), was informed that suttee was an ancient and accepted custom with a religious basis, and that suppressing it would cause resentment. (Sound familiar?) Unimpressed, Napier replied: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a...

The bullnecked president of Chechnya emerged from afternoon prayers at the mosque and with chilling composure explained why seven young women who had been shot in the head deserved to die. Ramzan Kadyrov said the women, whose bodies were found dumped by the roadside, had "loose morals" and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings. "If a woman runs around and if a man runs around with her, both of them are killed," Kadyrov told journalists in the capital of this Russian republic...

Gruesome killing poses another test for US Muslims ERIC GORSKI, AP Religion Writer February 21, 2009 The crime was so brutal, shocking and rife with the worst possible stereotypes about their faith that some U.S. Muslims thought the initial reports were a hoax. The harsh reality of what happened in an affluent suburb of Buffalo, N.Y. — the beheading of 37-year-old Aasiya Hassan and arrest of her estranged husband in the killing — is another crucible for American Muslims. Here was a couple that appeared to be the picture of assimilation and tolerance, co-founders of a television network that aspired...

It is hard to understand this deal,” said Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy. And, if the special envoy of the so-called smartest and most impressive administration in living memory can’t understand it, what chance do the rest of us have? Nevertheless, let’s try. In the Swat Valley, where a young Winston Churchill once served with the Malakand Field Force battling Muslim insurgents, his successors have concluded the game isn’t worth the candle. In return for a temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of sharia across the...

An upstate TV exec who set up a channel promoting Muslims as peace-loving people was stressed about his failing business in the days before he allegedly chopped off his estranged wife's head, a friend of the couple said today. ..... Hassan, who founded Bridges TV in 2004 to counter anti-Islam stereotypes following 9/11, turned himself in to cops Thursday in the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park. Police later found his beheaded wife in the TV studios.

Just asking, but are beheadings common in western New York? I used to spend a lot of time in that neck of the woods and I don't remember decapitation as a routine form of murder. Yet the killing of Aasiya Hassan seems to have elicited a very muted response. When poor Mrs Hassan's husband launched his TV network to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims, he had no difficulty generating column inches, as far afield as The Columbus Dispatch, The Detroit Free Press, The San Jose Mercury News, Variety, NBC News, the Voice of America and the Canadian Press. The Rochester...

The subject of “honor killings” is gradually becoming a matter of public controversy these days. The incidence of these crimes appears to be rising although the response to them is ambiguous and vacillating. There is little doubt that something alarming is happening—and has been happening for a long while—and that what we are really witnessing is a form of culture-specific violent behavior. But the general tendency among Muslim spokespeople and social activists is to average out these tragic events as part of a garden variety social phenomenon that is statistically inevitable. When 16 year-old Aqsa Parvez of Mississauga, Ontario was...

* Baloch senator Israrullah Zehri says members should not politicise issue ISLAMABAD: The killing of women for honour is a demand of the tribal traditions, Balochistan Senator Israrullah Zehri informed the Senate on Friday. Zehri was responding to Senator Yasmeen Shah’s statement in which she had drawn the House’s attention towards reports that five women had been buried alive in Balochistan in the name of honour. She called it a sheer violation of human rights. Zehri asked the members not to politicise the issue, as it was a matter of safeguarding the tribal traditions. Leader of the Opposition in Senate...

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.” Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will. The barbaric incident took place in a remote village of Jafarabad district and a PPP minister and some...

Quite a feat: CNN has pulled off the MSM equivalent of describing a spiral staircase without using one's hands. It has managed to produce a segment on "honor killings" and related violence in the UK . . . without using the word "Muslim" or "Islam." CNN Newsroom anchor Don Lemon introduced the segment this afternoon at 1:37 PM EDT. DON LEMON: Women forced into marriages, or killed for having the wrong boyfriend. So-called "honor crimes" are often committed by fathers or brothers when daughters do something that supposedly brings shame on the family. It's on the rise in Britain, and...

Murder in the Family: Honor Killings in America When she was just 19, Sandeela Kanwal traveled from America to Pakistan for an arranged marriage to a cousin twice her age. Less than six years later, she was dead — strangled — and her father, Chaudhry Rashid, was arrested by police as the suspect for what some have called an "honor killing." After their marriage, Kanwal had lived in the United States apart from her husband, who remained in Pakistan. She was reunited with him in April at her family home in Atlanta, but he moved to Chicago days later, leaving...

honor killings has so far shown that little if any social stigma is attached to the act. 100 percent say they do not regret their actions, Professor Bağlı notes. In some cases, the victim’s relatives even praised the perpetrator... cheating is an unforgivable act in the Southeast, even for a woman who “cheats” after divorcing her husband by remarrying. “The ultimate punishment in such a situation is death. Both the groom’s and the bride’s families agree on this. Murder becomes inevitable when honor is at stake and turning to murder in such a situation is seen as a respectable act...

Afghanistan is once again in the news with the horrific bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Violence has remained a motif in a country trying hard to build a peaceful civil society. Everyone pays for this continuing violence — men, women and children — not just with their lives but also through the abysmal quality of their lives if and when they do survive. Although some things have improved in Afghanistan since the Taliban regime was removed, much remains difficult to tackle, not least the problems women face. Hamid Karzai’s government has set up a Ministry of Women’s Affairs...

German red tape and a lack of will on the part of officialdom is putting some Muslim women in a very dangerous position. Instead of protecting them from the threat of honor killings, some of the bureaucracy actually increases the risk. The little girl with the pigtails stands at the window staring into the green courtyard. She wants to go outside with her mother to play. "No," the young woman says, "it just rained." In truth, the sun was shining on the major western German city last Wednesday. But the mother is trying to shield her four-year-old daughter from the...

By Victoria Ward April 28, 2008 An Iraqi who murdered his teenage daughter for falling in love with a British soldier will not face charges. Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, had grown close to a blond infantryman known only as Paul in Basra. When her father Ali Abdel-Qader found out, he went berserk, beating her and stamping on her throat in an "honour killing". But astonishingly Ali - who has Basra government and police links - was released after being held for two hours. Sgt Ali Jabbar said: "Not much can be done when we have an honour killing. You are in...

Two weeks ago, The Observer revealed how 17-year-old student Rand Abdel-Qader was beaten to death by her father after becoming infatuated with a British soldier in Basra. In this remarkable interview, Abdel-Qader Ali explains why he is unrepentant - and how police backed his actions. Afif Sarhan in Basra and Caroline Davies report * Afif Sarhan in Basra and Caroline Davies * The Observer, * Sunday May 11 2008 For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. 'If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her...

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city's Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death. Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. 'They are men and know what honour is,' he said. Rand, who was studying...

In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe? The deaths have sparked momentary outrage, but will they change the grim reality for Muslim women? The shots came from nowhere and within minutes the young Turkish mother standing at the Berlin bus stop was dead. A telephone call from a relative...

Efforts to toughen sentences meet opposition from Islamists. The country’s powerful Islamic parties and leaders are resisting reform of a law that sanctions lenient punishments for those found guilty of so-called honour killings. Article 111 of the Iraqi penal code - passed in 1969 - allows a lesser punishment for the killing of women if the male defendants are found to have had “honourable motives”. Under the law, a man can receive a maximum of three years in prison if he immediately kills or disables his wife or girlfriend after witnessing her engaging in a sexual act with another man....

Is the U.S. Failing in Afghanistan? It was malice in wonderland at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday as Bush Administration envoys insisted things are getting better in Afghanistan, while angry lawmakers from both parties cited facts and figures showing just the opposite. Even the senior Republican on the panel, Senator Richard Lugar, found the Administration's claims wanting. "I'm not sure that we have a plan for Afghanistan," he said. Long seen as the "forgotten war" eclipsed by Iraq in U.S. priorities, Afghanistan is in the Washington spotlight this week with the release of three independent reports concluding...