be with a boy. She had told me never to be with one. Never,” making her understand that being with a man before getting married would “disgrace our families” (111).70 These examples illustrate that in honor cultures girls are shown from an early age how to avoid bringing shame on their families. Partly, their mothers’ education makes these daughters victims of a patriarchal system promoting a gender-specific understanding of honor with its related restrictions.71 Daughters will appeal in vain to their mothers, as Nazik al-Mala’ika’s poem “Washing off ←50 | 51→disgrace” (1957) illustrates: “ ‘Mother!’/A last gasp through her teeth and tears” (Women 20). Rather than any mother, it is “the meadows and the roseate buds,” the “date palms,” that are listening and then disseminate the disgraced daughter’s cry, making it the despair of nature.
Ramziya Abbas al-Iryani in “Misfortune in the Alley,” which treats honor-related violence as a prominent issue, creates a setting of darkness owing to a power crash in “a long, narrow alley covered with dirt and scraps of paper, and littered with trash” (Cohen-Mor 73): readers are evidently invited to gather this spatial information into a cognitive map, attributing symbolic meaning to the location (see Ryan). The narrow alley brings the whole neighborhood together when Hajj Abdallah shouts that his daughter Samira has vanished. His wife Latifa (who is her aunt) provides material for gossip by telling everyone “I saw her myself yesterday talking to a cab driver. And the other day I saw her getting out of the same cab” (74), thus turning the girl into a sinner. The neighbor woman Safiyya shouts at her “what you say can ruin her reputation!”, while Nuriyya the baker defends the girl by portraying her as a victim: “Samira cannot be blamed if she ran away today. You beat her every day, so she became fed up with her life. The housework and the care of your children are upon her shoulders.” Fatima the henna painter seconds her: “[…] God will take care of her and ease her way. The blood that dripped from her nose and mouth yesterday is still visible on the stairs. Surely you haven’t forgotten that you pushed her down the rooftop stairway!”
Having been unable to find his daughter, Hajj Abdallah reappears looking “to the right and left in humiliation and dejection as tears silently rolled down his face” (75), the tears making him lose his masculinity. Latifa’s “malicious, vengeful voice” breaks the silence: “I tried to go after her. Death before dishonor.” But her husband hits back: “Your hypocrisy killed my daughter. I used to believe you and go to extremes in punishing her. You broke her spirit and destroyed her life.” He blames the assembled neighbors for not having protected the girl, which is a rather unexpected turn of events: “What have you done other than whisper and gossip about what goes on in my house?” (76). Finally, light symbolically bursts onto the alley scene, as a noise enables the father to find Samira hiding outside a neighbor’s house: “crouching among the spiky pieces of firewood, blood dripping from her hands and legs!” He shouts his relief: “Come out to show them that my honor is well protected, and that shame did not and will never enter my house!” Evidently Samira cannot believe that “she would escape punishment” – for once. The vividly narrated incident demonstrates the precarious nature of the father’s honor, and the aunt’s (replacing the perhaps deceased mother’s) extreme devaluing and belittling of her niece. Community gossip is the ←51 | 52→response to a girl’s suffering, while other narratives underline its significance in response to perceived transgressive conduct (as for instance Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns). Nonetheless, in this incident some community members turn against the oppressive aunt, vindicating the father’s honor. This may be one of the few examples in literature where a father defends his daughter and some community members back up the victim, which appears to be a rather unrealistic reaction. Here, fiction shows a way out where social reality often does not.
Another rare case of a man criticizing female obedience can be found in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Nuit Sacrée where the protagonist’s father says about his wife: “une femme sans caractère, sans joie, mais tellement obéissante, quel ennui! Être toujours prête à executer les ordres, jamais de révolte, ou peut-être se rebellait-elle dans la solitude et en silence” (24–25). It becomes clear that this behavior is the result of educational patterns: “Elle avait été éduquée dans la pure tradition de l’épouse au service de son homme” (24). In the following, we will examine various cases of disobedience that occur despite the daughters’ initially flawless upbringing by their mothers and that result in female honor loss, staining the whole family’s reputation.
1.1.1 Lost virginity before marriage
Since early times, several cultures have regarded a woman as a man’s property. Even though the term “honor” can have different meanings, in honor cultures this value is often associated with sexual and familial roles expected from women (according to the UN Commission, “in terms of women’s assigned sexual and familial roles as dictated by traditional family ideology”; see also Welchman and Hossain 5). It is due to these strictly defined sexual roles that a direct link between the purity of the female body and the value of honor can be observed in honor cultures. Consequently, a girl or woman who loses her virginity before marriage not only ruins her own but also her family’s reputation.
It seems that a woman can only compensate for her existence, which is sinful by nature, by ostensibly protecting the purity of her body, especially in public. Writing about “Honor as Property,” Johanna Bond draws attention to this point: “in the honor context, the ‘previously unowned or undiscovered territory’ is the virginal, female body. The value of honor property is correlated with the notion of the undiscovered female body” (236). Cihangir explains that “sexual purity of female family members is an important indicator of the status of family honor” (3). If, for whatever reason, virginity is lost before marriage, this means that “the female body has been ‘discovered’ ” and thus “[…] the familial honor ←52 | 53→is so devalued that it triggers an attempt to reclaim that value through violence directed at the female family member” (Bond 236). The so-called method of “virginity testing” is sometimes used in honor cultures (e.g., if the bride does not bleed during her wedding night) to make sure that the female body in question is indeed pure and the value of the girl or woman who is to become her husband’s property not diminished through premarital intercourse. When a girl runs away from home with a man, for instance, gossip about her lost virginity starts to spread. In such cases, it can be deemed necessary to use virginity testing as a method to clarify the situation and find out whether the girl can still be married off.
In one of the interviews carried out by Doğan, a male 20-year-old perpetrator narrates how the assumption of his sister’s lost virginity has stained his family’s reputation in general and his father’s patriarchal status in particular: “After my sister eloped, my father could not go out. He even could not go to his own brother’s house. If you are involved in something dishonorable, in my community people stare at you in anger” (“Dynamics” 12). Very rarely, virginity testing can turn into a way to prove the girl’s innocence and thus save her life, but mostly neighborhood gossip already serves as sufficient proof for her lost virginity. Ilkkaracan explains this issue of lost virginity as a potential source of honor loss in detail as follows: “Unmarried women are generally expected to remain virgins until their wedding night, and virginity is not only the symbol of a woman’s purity and chastity, but also an icon of her family’s honor. Sexual relations outside marriage on the part of a married woman, including rape, are generally understood primarily as assaults on men’s honor” (257). Sana Al-Khayyat also mentions that a “girl who loses her virginity is liable to be punished with physical or ‘moral’ death; the latter involves isolation and virtual house arrest. If, on the wedding day, she was found not to be a virgin she would be divorced. Such a divorce is, of course, accompanied by fadiha (scandal)” (34–35).
Amani Awwad convincingly observes that “[t];he social constructs of honor and shame are at the core of virginity control and gender based violence in Turkey,” which seems to be a valid observation for honor cultures in general. Case studies illustrate that “a powerful system of social control was created to protect the
