Honor

"This is a very different kind of book. Frank Henderson Stewart is a very distinguished scholar, now retired, an expert on the ancient Near East, but he thought deeply about honour. He read ancient texts and legal documents because, as you know, honour is a legal concept in German law and you can seek to have your honour protected in various ways – it’s sort of what they have instead of libel. Analysing and thinking deeply about it, he tries to understand how honour developed, and it was he who led me to see the core thought, which is that honour is an entitlement to respect, and that what honour codes do is say how you get to be entitled to respect. I disagree with a lot of what he says – in particular that he wants to give up on honour because it has such negative connotations: I think it needs reform as a concept – but I think it’s a very lovely piece of scholarly analysis. Well, reform of honour… Because honour involves entitlement to respect created by codes, what reform you need depends on the code with which it’s associated. So, in terms of the honour-killing code, I think the obvious immediate reform is to get people to see that the honourable thing is to protect women in these circumstances and not to assault them and kill them, but to attach honour to protecting these women rather than to attach it to harming them. The reason why I think this can happen is because of the historical fact that over and over again it has happened. Nobody would have predicted in England in 1839 when the Duke of Wellington fought his duel that by 1850 that kind of thing would seem ridiculous. At the time, while the particular duel he engaged in was thought to be troublesome in various ways, it wasn’t ridiculous. He was fighting because someone else in the House of Lords had accused him of giving money to King’s College London in order to conceal the fact that he was sympathetic to Catholics. It was a scandalously irresponsible allegation but he felt his honour was at stake. But within a generation, if you challenged someone to a duel people mocked you and thought it was funny. Honour killings occurred in Italy well into the 20th century and they don’t occur there any more, so I do think it’s possible to reform these things because we have reformed them, and the honour-killing codes are in need of reform as fast as we can do it."