A capital offense against Muslim family honor: liking nice clothes and wanting to fit in and be normal

(Note: Be sure to see, below, a Muslim’s description of a Christian wedding procession in the Holy Land in the 12th century.)

There are have been many cases in which young Muslim women have been murdered by their male relatives for having out-of-wedlock sexual relationships or even for lawfully marrying a man not considered suitable by the family.

Here is something new. A sixteen-year-old girl in Toronto, Aqsa Parvez, has been murdered by her father for refusing to wear the hijab and for wearing Western clothes.

Friends said the root of her problems was a desire to blend in with friends at school, to wear the fashionable clothes she liked to buy on trips to Toronto’s garment district, where she went with friends just last month.

“She liked fashion,” said Mitchell. “We went to different stores; she was shopping; she bought lots of clothes.”

“She loved clothes, she loved shopping and she loved taking pictures of herself,” classmate Dominiquia Holmes-Thompson, 16, said outside the school as friends sobbed at the news.

“She just wanted to show her beauty. She just wanted freedom, freedom from her parents. She just wanted to dress like us, just like a normal person,” said Holmes-Thompson.

It is part of the essence of a woman to want to wear nice clothes, to be attractive. Islam treats this normal, female, human instinct as a capital crime. * * *

Islam is as different from the West as anti-matter is from matter. Yet the Muslims for the most part believe in their religion, and so, short of killing most of them, we cannot eliminate their religion. Therefore the only thing to do is to separate them permanently from ourselves, while making sure they never acquire the power to harm us.

- end of initial entry -

Andrew W. writes:

Your post on the Canadian “honor killing” put me in mind of a Muslim account of a Christian wedding procession taking place in one of the Crusader states around 1180:

An alluring worldly spectacle deserving of record was a nuptial procession which we witnessed one day near the port of Tyre. All the Christians, men and women, had assembled, and were formed in two lines at the bride’s door. Trumpets, flutes and all the musical instruments were played until she proudly emerged between two men who held her right and left as though they were her kindred. She was most elegantly garbed in a beautiful dress from which trailed, according to their traditional style, a long train of golden silk. On her head she wore a golden diadem covered by a net of woven gold, and on her breast was a like arrangement. Proud she was in her ornaments and dress, walking with little steps of half a span like a dove, or in the manner of a wisp of cloud. God protect us from the seductions of the sight.

Before her went Christian notables in their finest and most splendid clothing, their trains falling behind them. Behind her were her peers and equals of the Christian women, parading in the richest apparel and proud of bearing in their superb ornaments. Leading them all were the musical instruments. The Muslims and other Christian onlookers formed two ranks along the route, and gazed on them without reproof. So they passed along until they brought her to the house of the groom; and all that day they feasted. We thus were given the chance of seeing this alluring sight, from the seducement of which God preserve us.

From Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, quoted in the Chronicles of the Crusades, Elizabeth Hallam, editor.

Note that the women’s pride is as striking to the writer as the splendor of their clothing, and that twice he prays to Allah to preserve him “from the seductions of the sight.” It takes little imagination to predict how he’d react if one of his daughters went out dressed like that.

LA replies:

Fantastic. Thank you for sending this.

Leonard K. writes:

This man was not a true Muslim. He twisted Islam by a strict interpretation of the Koran.

Yes, I am parodying again. But the mainstream media get away with absurd arguments like this every day.

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Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 11, 2007 11:07 AM | Send