Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain

¶ … Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain (2005) who note that misogyny and violence transcend culture. Others, however, state that these crimes are particularly virulent in the backwardness and bigotry of non-Western Islamic civilization. On the one hand, it is certainly true, as Sohail Akbar Warraich observes (in Welchman & Hossain, 2005), that honor killing has been a condition that has characterized both enlightened colonized Pakistan as well as contemporary non-colonialism Pakistan. On the other hand, the fact that, as Welchman and Hossain (2005) note, countries, other than Islamic regions, such as Mexico and Latin America, demonstrate violence and misogyny too - extending and including honor killing- imply that violence may be somehow related to backwardness and certain sentiments towards women. And the more backwards the country, presumably the more intense the violence. This is the thesis of this essay.

A certain degree of bigotry, intolerance, social apathy is existent in all countries as we see from the treatment of the characters in Aslam's novel that Britain itself (where the immigrants lived) is a country that is characterized by a peculiar misogyny of its own and that the British misogyny loses the allure of the warmth and attractiveness of the Pakistani art and domestic communities that, for all their viciousness and violence, still retain a certain warmth and homeliness that Britain lacks.

On the other hand, there are degrees of misogyny and misanthropy as well as degrees of violence and chaos. True it may be that western societies as well as non-western societies all characterize these factors to certain degrees. However, as this essay argues, none of these societies legitimize, condone and practice them to the degree that Islamic society does. And the backwardness of some Islamic societies -- as Aslam shows in his novel - regresses into a particular kind of violence.

The characters in Aslam's novel, "Maps for Lost Lovers," are immigrants who live in a doleful, inhospitable British town which they aptly call Dasht-e-Tanhaii - the Desert of Loneliness. This title in fact of the town can be elaborated to everything that the characters experience throughout the novel and from thence to the tone and theme of the novel itself. Not only is the town inhospitable, but life itself is inhospitable and whether causative factors are purely confined to Islamic or Western elements may be debatable. Dasht-e-Tanhaii - the Desert of Loneliness. is an inhospitable place bogged by racism and isolation. In the words off one of the people "We should never have come to this deplorable country. [it is] a nest of devilry from where God has been exiled." (p.26).

The people of Pakistan came there as transplanted communities and tried to build their lives in a sense of togetherness isolated from the outside world. The problem is that just as the outside world gives them certain problems, their own insular way of life does too. Communities can be excellent. Unfortunately, they can also give a lot of trouble, and sometimes history and geography conspire to flagellate certain individuals with crimes not of their doing because they failed to conform to the norm and conventions of their particular society.

This was the case in Aslam's narrative. The transplanted Pakistani communities continued in their way of life that included arranging marriages and keeping their customs, religion, and language more or less intact. Ancestral conflict and gossip were the way of life, clerical mandates superseded those of the British legal system, and arranged marriages were the norm.

Returning to the title of the village, Dasht-e-Tanhaii: certainly the British have a reputation of shunning strangers, of bigotry, and of coldness even to their own folk, but one wonders too how much of this attitude was encouraged -- if not stimulated - by these immigrant Pakistanis themselves.

The author, seems to think so, at least in implication. He writes, for instance, of one character, Kaukab, who proudly proclaims that she has only met a "a white person" once in a year; and that when leaving her house she puts on her "outdoor clothes" in order to minimize contact with "a dirty country, an unsacred country full of people with disgusting habits and practices." It is no wonder that sentiments such as these arouse and reinforce suspicion, alienation, and animosity from "the other side." The way that the Muslim East portrayed and vilified the European west impacted the immigrant's appraisal of their host country, just as Western indoctrination about Muslim East influences its particular appraisal. But the inbuilt suspicion and ingrained Islamic hostility towards its neighbors may have certainly had an added impact.

Even within their own culture the inhabitants of this aptly named village Dasht-e-Tanhaii are intransigently estranged from one another. husbands are isolated from wives, parents attack their children. It is no wonder that arranged marriages with all their implication -- forced to marry and live with strangers; forced to love a stranger, are rampant in these settings, nor is there wonder that the ramifications of these surroundings eventuate in honor killings . Allah's dictate and the conventions of the past are the norms of the present resulting in bitter and backward behavior that replaces rules of a different country, anchored in the past, for the mandates of the British legal system.

Neighbors disparage one another and the whole portrayal of this community resembles that of a sociopath enclave that is forced to live with one another in disharmony and isolation and where bitterness and hatred of the other is the norm. The novel that comest closest to epitomizing the way of life of Dasht-e-Tanhaii is Golding's "Lord of the Flies." Golding's small compelled flinty enclave of people who have been forced by circumstance to live with one another share the same situation as do these Pakistani immigrants too forced by happenstance to share their lives with one another. In both cases there is cruelty, violence, and vindictiveness.

Some genralize this vindictiveness to the misogyny and misanthropy of the wider Muslim community. I think that may be too general a statement since there are many non-western, Muslim communities where misogyny, backwardness, and sociopath does not apply. It may be a combination of geography, topography, socio-cultural, economic, and historical conditions (and so forth) that cause these factors to exist in some whilst not to exist in others. Either way, societies that misogyny and misanthropy do exist in also lead to other problems that culminate in honor killing.

The central and pivotal scene in this novel of unhappiness and human misery is the honor killing of Kaukab's brother-in-law, Jugnu, and his lover, Chanda, who have been murdered by Chanda's brother for "living together in sin." The brothers are apprehended and the people carry on with their lives whilst awaiting the trail.

Their lives, in the meantime, evidence other incidents that are equally as brutal. There is, for instance, the Muslim family that separates the girl form her lover by exorcising her and ending in her death. There is the case of the 12-year-old girl who cannot see a gynecologist lest her hymen be damaged. And there is the case of the mother-in-law who advises the newly married son-in-law to do the following to her daughter "Rape her tonight." These incidents may be indicative of the backwardness and misogamy of the Muslim way of living. They may be also peculiar to this particular society, since other Muslim enclaves, such as some in USA are less so. The author himself does not have this character. It may rather be the quintessential characteristics of a particular village that comes form a particular place that existed during a particular time. Islam was not always so backwards nor so misogynistic. Rather, e vents that happened to it made it so and impacted some parts of Islam more than others. Nonetheless, for whatever the reason, it is undoubtedly the case that the backwards and misogyny of many Muslim non-western societies are largely correlated with the violence that they produce.

It may be a mistake however to trace the violence to religion. Aslam has one of the characters remark, in relation to some particularly nefarious action, that "Allah's law is Allah's law, and cannot be questioned." Islam is not Islamicism as many call the Islamic political fundamentalism of nowadays. Islam varies from country to country and has varied from age to age. It was not always as backwards as in this particular age, nor, even in this particular age is unilaterally backwards amongst all countries. Nonetheless, in those countries where Islam as society and religion is shaped by misogyny and misanthropy, violence and discord -- all the features of Golding's "Lord of the Flies." inevitably follows.

The fact that honor killings are peculiar to less westernized, less culture countries can be seen not only in their history but in the trouble that westernized countries have had in adequately slipping them into their vocabulary and in understanding them. Britain, for instance, has for long erred in equivocating 'honor killings' with 'arranged marriage' until activist groups have protested showing the immense difference between the two (Siddiqui, p.263-266) .

Siddiqui (p.264) defines an 'honor crime' as consisting of:

a range of violent or abusive acts committed in the name of honor, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and other controlling and coercive behaviors such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation which can end, in some extreme cases, in suicide or murder. (13)

These felonies, it is true, can happened, and do happen, in any civilized country but they are legalized, accepted (sometimes even condoned) and happen to an unimaginable extent in societies that are marked by their Islamic way of living.

The Southall Black Sisters, for instance, have consistently argued that men from minority cultures have often used religion and culture to justify the range of violence and humiliation that they impose upon women. We do find many cultures that have extreme views perpetuating misogyny. This includes cultures such as Mormonism, fundamentalists Judaism, fundamentalist Christianity, and other fundamentalists faiths as well as various cultures. Therefore, it is not always minority cultures that perpetuate misogyny. Misogyny in fact seems to be a factor that transcends culture. The degree of violence, misanthropy, and chaos as well as woman-hatred seems to be, however, peculiar to Islamic culture. In these cultures, women's reputation is closely guarded and their behavior required to be chaste without a scintilla of criticisms or suspicion. Men too have certain dictates of 'honor', such as homosexuality, but in many cultures (not just Islamic), it is the behavior of the woman that is most closely observed, discussed, and controlled.

It is interesting that the British qualification of 'honor' differs so markedly from that of the Muslim one. To the British, honor implies images of a duel fought to protect the woman. Ironically, the image -- and purpose of the honor act - is counter polar to that of the Islamic image of honor. In the one, the woman is defended; in the other she is killed. May it be because the one of defense originated from a tortuously won history of open mindedness and will to understand others and to establish as much as possible a Utopian state? Britain was not always this way. In its middle ages, for instance, it detested the woman as much as Islamic society does today. Ironically enough, when Islam defended the woman and sought to establish peace-loving cultured communities, Britain, in the middle of their smog and morass of primeval times assaulted the female. It was when Britain turned to human rights in general and to female rights in particular with its becoming more of a philosophical and humanistic enlightened country, that women began to be respected as people and that violence became censored as a crime. Islam, on the other hand, regressed into centuries of backwardness and neglect, and in these regions women became assaulted for the very crime of being female and violence became a norm.

Not all observers, however, agree that misogyny is peculiar to Islam. Although Aslam certainly seems to make this point (at least imply it) in his book "Maps for Lost Lovers ," other critiques on honor killing such as those authored by Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain in their edited collection entitled "Honour': Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women" argue that misogynism is transcendental to all continents and countries. One of the essays, for instance, shows that honor killings occurs also in Brazil, Mexico and across Latin America with the intent of dispelling the myth that honor killings are peculiar to Islamic society.

'Honor crimes' it self is seen as having a multiplicity of meanings as Sohail Akbar Warraich observes about 'honour crimes' in Pakistan, "...local understandings of this term vary depending on who kills whom and the perceived transgression of social norms.." (p78)

On the whole, however, honor crimes can be defined as an act / behavior that is more generic to women than to men. As Radhika Coomaraswamy says in the Preface:

"Honour is generally seen as residing in the bodies of women"

Coomaraswamy proceeds to elaborate by noting that: "in many societies the ideal of masculinity is underpinned by a notion of 'honour' -- of an individual man, or a family or a community -- and is fundamentally connected to policing female behaviour and sexuality."