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Given massive Muslim immigration to the West, we have massive Muslim female resistance to being subordinated, buried alive—resistance which is punished by Muslim-on-Muslim honor killings in the West. I have written about this at length, most recently in my 2010 study in Middle East Quarterly.
Families of origin carefully plan these murders. Mothers often play a key role in luring their daughters back home, in strangling or stabbing them, and in helping their murderers escape. This was the case in the honor murders of Aqsa Parvez in Toronto (2007), Amina and Sarah Said in Texas (2008), and Noor Al-Maleki in Arizona (2009). If you want to understand how mothers can actually mistreat, persecute, and collaborate in the murders of their daughters, please read my book Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.
Just yesterday, Aset Magomadova, a Calgary-based mother who strangled her 14-year-old daughter, Aminat, with a headscarf in 2007, finally received a “suspended sentence” and three years probation. The mother is a Muslim refugee and widow from Chechnya; her other child, a teenage son, is suffering from muscular dystrophy, and she herself was wounded in the war—her foot was partly blown off. The girl was allegedly on drugs and suffered from serious behavior problems. Victim advocates are outraged at so light a sentence. The judge did not believe that Magomadova actually meant to kill her rebellious daughter. The judge sentenced the murderer to “counseling for grief, depression, and anger management.”
The question remains: Was everything possible done for a disturbed teenage Muslim girl? If not, why not? But, for whom is “everything done?”
If everyone understood that a Muslim girl is at special risk, especially if she is “wild” (even if she is just trying to fit in), if the media used the word “Muslim” where appropriate, perhaps services tailored to Muslim immigrants from war-torn regions might now exist.
This past week, the Canadian “federal government affirmed its zero-tolerance stance against “honour killing,” declaring such “barbaric cultural practices” as “heinous abuses” that have no place in Canadian society.” They are considering adding “honour killing” as a separate charge to the Criminal Code. Honor killings are referred to as “culturally driven” violence against girls and women. And it is true, such violence exists among Canadian immigrants from south Asia who are Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs.
Expect such tragic “culturally driven,” “South Asian immigrant” and “Muslim” problems to proliferate in the West. The questions are: Are we equipped to handle such problems? Are we morally bound to do so? How expensive will our intrinsic altruism and outreach to the “wretched of the earth” actually be?
