Amman and a Woman
SAVODNIK, IRWIN
Amman and a Woman A memoir of misogyny in the Middle East. by IRWIN SAVODNIK Imagine that you are an accountant, residing in your family home in Amman, Jordan, the father of four handsome sons...
...As Khouri puts it, "someone charged with neglecting to wear a seat belt while driving faces stiffer penalties than the perpetrator of an honor crime...
...Under Jordanian law, a son enjoys all the rights of a person, while a daughter is property...
...So, early one morning, you take a knife and stab her twelve times...
...closest friend...
...The chasm between the two civilizations appears in this simple act of touching—and reveals, along the way, the deep Arab fear and hatred of female sexuality...
...But once that murder has been determined to be merely the result of an "honor killing," no further criminal investigation by the police ensues...
...The daughter's name was Dalia, and the nonfiction tale of her life and death is told by Norma Khouri in Honor Lost...
...For a long time, we have been told that we need to develop a deeper understanding of Arab culture, contemplate its predicament, and not be so inclined to condemn a whole civilization...
...A poet and short story writer who composed this book secretly in an Internet cafe, and now a reluctant emi-gree from Amman, Khouri was Dalia's Irwin Savodnik is a psychiatrist who teaches at UCLA...
...Khouri's account makes graphically clear the moral gap separating the West from the Arab world...
...You wait ten minutes to be sure she is dead...
...But you are troubled by news that your daughter has been seeing a Christian man...
...Khouri performs a valuable service to the West by presenting in moment-to-moment detail the tragedy of her friend Dalia's murder...
...From the beauty salon they founded together, they ran headlong into the deadly rage that underlies the misogynistic culture of Arab men...
...Where anyone found publicly criticizing the king automatically faces three years in prison, a man performing an honor killing spends less than three hours in front of the Sharia's courts...
...To be sure, even in Amman, the murder of a daughter requires some consideration by the police...
...No Western system of ethics—not Kantianism, utilitarianism, Thomism, or any of the rest—is going to countenance the slaying of one's child because she was holding someone's hand...
...Rather than funnel the idea of a sexual woman into an artistic medium, for instance, Arab culture simply denies it—and kills it in the name of honor when it encounters a sign of it as small as the intertwining fingers of two people...
...Then you call an ambulance...
...Khouri does not appear to have meant to raise this question in Hon^^ Lost, but by the end of this short, powerful book, the reader cannot escape it...
...Norma Khouri's Honor Lost won't incline the reader towards greater forbearance...
...She makes it clear that whether we understand it or not, the moral organization of the Arab world raises the question of whether or not the West can ever reach an accommodation with it...
...by IRWIN SAVODNIK Imagine that you are an accountant, residing in your family home in Amman, Jordan, the father of four handsome sons and a twenty-five-year-old daughter...
...She can be sold to a suitor, abandoned, or put to death...
...The provenance of such conflict, the argument goes, resides in American ignorance of Arab history and culture...
...This is not a matter of mere cultural difference, but of the core beliefs that define the boundaries of possible thought...
...The antiglobalists, multiculturalists, and postmodernists have argued that tensions between the West and the Middle East are attributable entirely to the United States...
...Were a Jordanian man to murder his son, he would face severe penalties...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 39
