In the Name of Honor

"It’s by this amazing woman, though it’s an ‘as told to’ book written by a French journalist working through an interpreter. She talked to her about how she became known around the world because of this episode where she was raped, essentially at the order of a village council in Pakistan because one of the local big families said her brother, who I don’t think was even a teenager, had allegedly assaulted one of their daughters. In fact, he had only been talking to her. But it escalated and at the end of the day, because that was an assault on the honour of this family, they insisted on getting their own back. Well, it’s difficult, because there are these village councils which are not empowered to do this, but they do… They sort of grow out of a tradition where they were the government, though they’re not any more. Anyway, what’s amazing is that it was horrible, obviously, and she spent a week locked away in her house, but then, instead of what normally happens in these circumstances, which is that the woman just retreats in shame, the village mullah, rather than letting them get away with it, said in Friday mosque that this was a wrong. So then the police felt they had to do something about it and they actually interviewed her. While they tried to get her to cover it up, it very swiftly snowballed and she was at the centre of this international incident and the people who did it were prosecuted, which doesn’t happen very often. Then it was appealed, and now it’s a mess and still hasn’t been decided by the supreme court of Pakistan, but the key thing is that in doing this she drew attention to the possibility that instead of retreating in shame you should shame the people who did it. Because it drew international attention she got support from around the world and she got money and won prizes and started a centre which has two schools, a girls school and a boys school, though she herself is not literate. She is an amazing woman, who, instead of doing what she was expected to do, resisted, and as a result women contacted her from all over Pakistan and she tries to support them. She argues against these honour killings and assaults but also for the human rights and the dignity of women in Pakistan. She is one of my heroes and this is a book about how someone who grasps dignity, which is a form of honour based in our humanity, can resist the world of the negative side of honour, where women are punished because they are pawns in a game of honour between men."