Fadime Sahindal was murdered by her father on the 21st of January, 2002, now known as Fadime Day. Her case is probably the most famous case of honour killing in Sweden, and Fadime is almost always mentioned in media coverage of the Sharaf Hjältar and Elektra projects, which were the subjects of a class discussion recently.
Sharaf Hjältar, which can and unfortunately is somewhat banally translated as "Honour Heroes", is a group led and founded by young people in Sweden, mostly from immigrant backgrounds, to try to prevent honour-related crimes. As the name suggests, the Sharaf heroes goal is to change people's perceptions, to break the link between family honour and oppression. Members of the group act as peer educators, visiting schools and colleges to talk to young people about how they can help to to prevent honour killings, forced arranged marriages, and violence against women in their area.
The group is linked to the
Elektra program, which was set up in 2001 to try to offer emergency help to girls and women who need help and who fear for their life from their family. Sharaf heroes was set up primarily to re-educate and change the attitudes of boys and young men, who the Sharaf heroes argue, can simultanously be both a part of the oppression and victims of it themselves.
The importance of efforts like these can't be under-estimated. Honour killing, and the twisted reasoning behind it, needs to be completely eradicated, and for this to happen, the causes of the crime need to be actually dealt with, and the main cause, one which is prevalent in quite a few cultures, is the equation of women with property, the perverted idea that girls 'belong' to the family and have no say in who they marry or when they marry or even if they want to marry at all. The only way this idea can be changed is with education.
This is why I think the Sharaf program is a brilliant idea and wholeheartedly support it. But its also why the umbrella programme Elektra dissappoints me. For all the faux-arabesque logo and designs - or perhaps because of them - their explanations of the issues lurch from naive to simplistic. It doesn't help that they are also sickeningly self-congratulatory. This is perhaps best illustrated in their frequent and interchangable use of "patriachal culture" and "immigrant culture" as though patriarchy was a foreign concept, entirely unheard of in Sweden before the hordes of
svartskalles invaded.
Elektra's page on the strange phenomenon they call "Honour Culture" features that most common ceature, the UWiN, or Unidentified Woman in Niqab. The woman may or may not be smiling, but that is obviously irrelevant. As in so many cases, the uncaptioned, uncontextualised picture speaks for itself: Save the Muslim Woman From The Hideous Black Cloth!
If that was not enough to provide the reader with an indication of Elektra's methods, their relevant links to articles with titles such as "freed from the headscarf, not from oppression" do a lot to help. The result, unfortunately, is that Elektra's rhetoric is sometimes dissappointingly and uncannily similar to the cheaply propogandizing way right-wing Islamophobes use tragic stories about Muslim women murdered by Muslim men.
Its such a confusing, morally messy message. Ultimately, the only sense one can make of it is that Muslim men don't murder. Ever. They honour kill. Even if there is not the slightest sign, hint, clue, that this is a honour killing, it is dubbed a honour killing. If it the killing occured in a non-religious family and a non-veiled wife was murdered by an alcoholic abusive husband, and there was a Koran gathering dust on some forgotten shelf, it must clearly have been the Koran that directed and choreographed the whole honour killing. And the only sense one can make of that is that murder by another name means the murdered victim is that much more murdered.
