AFTER a Muslim couple in the UK began a 25-year jail sentence yesterday for the murder of their 17-year-old daughter, Mohammed Shafiq, Chief Executive of the Manchester-based Ramadhan Foundation said of the sentence handed down at Chester Crown Court:
A strong message goes out and should be very clear: If you engage in honour killings – if you engage in forced marriages – you will be caught and brought to justice.
Iftikhar Ahmed yesterday began a 25-year jail sentence. AP/Martin Rickett/PA
The report in which Shafiq was quoted makes for grim reading. Iftikhar Ahmed, 52, and his wife Farzana, 49, murdered their daughter Shafilea in September, 2003. During their trial that began in May, jurors heard evidence from Shafilea’s younger sister, Alesha, who said she witnessed the killing when she was 12.
After an argument about Shafilea’s mode of dress, her parents pushed her down on a couch, stuffed a thin white plastic bag into her mouth and held their hands over her mouth and nose until she died, Alesha testified.
As she was struggling, her mother said, “just finish it here,” according to Alesha.
The murdered girl’s mother. Press Association
Sentencing the couple – first cousins from the Pakistani village of Uttam – to a minimum of 25 years Justice Roderick Evans said of the victim:
She was being squeezed between two cultures – the culture and way of life that she saw around her and wanted to embrace, and the culture and way of life you wanted to impose on her.
The judge asked them:
What was it that brought you two, her parents, the people who had given her life, to the point of killing her? You chose to bring up your family in Warrington but, although you lived in Warrington, your social and cultural attitudes were those of rural Pakistan and it was those which you imposed upon your children.
Shafilea was a determined, able and ambitious girl who wanted to live a life which was normal in the country and in the town in which you had chosen to live and bring up your children. However, you could not tolerate the life that Shafilea wanted to live.
In Britain, more than 25 women have been killed in so-called “honour killings” in the past decade. Families have sometimes lashed out at their children on the belief that they have brought their household shame by becoming too Westernized or by refusing a marriage.
Shafilea was only ten when she began to rebel against her parents’ strict rules, according to prosecutor Andrew Edis.
The young girl would hide make-up, false nails and Western clothes at school, changing into conservative clothes before her parents picked her up. But it was the last year of her life that proved to be the most traumatic.
When Shafilea became a teenager, he interest turned to boys — and her parents reacted violently. School officials alerted social services in October 2002 after Shafilea came to school with injuries to her face. That same month, Shafilea told a social worker that she was to be married in Pakistan in February 2003.
Shafilea Ahmed
In January 2003, she ran away, telling friends her parents would not leave her alone. She eventually returned.
In February 2003, she ran away again and pleaded with the authorities to allow her to move out of her parents’ house because, she said, they were abusive and trying to force her into an arranged marriage.
Some of Shafilea’s own words also proved compelling to jurors. In an application form to move out, she said she had suffered from regular domestic violence from the age of 15.
One parent would hold me whilst the other hit me.
Her father snatched her off the streets in the same month as the application. He bundled her into a car and took her to Pakistan against her will, Alesha said.
In protest, Shafilea drank bleach and was brought back to Britain in May 2003. She spent eight weeks in the hospital trying to recover from damage done to her throat.
Even in her weakened and desperate state, Shafilea’s parents were relentless.
Alesha said that after he sister was killed, her father carried her body to the car wrapped in a blanket. She was reported missing shortly after, with her parents making a teary-eyed media appeal for information leading to their daughter.
But police were suspicious — so much so that they bugged the house. Shafilea’s decomposed remains were eventually discovered in the River Kent in Cumbria in February 2004, but it wasn’t until 2010 that Alesha provided the key testimony.
Last year, the British government’s Forced Marriage Unit investigated more than 1,400 cases of forced marriages, most of which occur in Muslim communities. Britain is home to more than 1.8 million Muslims, most from Pakistani roots.
Hat tip: BarrieJohn
Yay, “Religion of Peace”.
This is actually less about Islam and Muslim behaviour than about a specific cultural ethos in a particular nation. The fact that their national religion happens to be a particularly nastily brutal version of Islam is secondary.
Incidentally, I am lucky enough to share an office with a community of Indians, and can confirm that they hate that nation with a bile stronger than your most committed BNP or EDL member.
Matt: I have come across Asians who have the same attitude towards Filipinos!
This report seems to be backed up by what the BBC have stated:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2183453/Shafilea-Ahmed-father-He-loved-discos-sexy-clothes-white-girls-says-wife-Iftikhar-Ahmed.html?ITO=1490
I can’t see for the life of me how calling this a “cultural thing” lets anyone off the hook. These people are practising Muslims, and we are forever being lectured by the Mohammedans as to how superior their religion and culture are to anything that we have in “the west”!
Matt: “This is actually less about Islam and Muslim behaviour than about a specific cultural ethos in a particular nation.”
Forget about the idealised, perfect religion that would be wonderful if everyone just followed the god-given rules. Islam is as Islam does.
Why is this reffered to as “honour killing” it’s like the ultimate oxymoron. It’s murder, plain and simple.
How many more potential Shafileas are there in the UK? I dread to think. This murder is a direct result of a backward culture emboldened by the fascist ideology that is islam to control women but not men and boys.
Shafilea’s parents didn’t like her becoming “Westernised” so why live in the West, go live in a theocracy instead.
I agree wholeheartedly, ZombieHunter. There is no honour in this kind of thing, we need to come up with a better name for it.
Then maybe we can organise a protest outside the next trial with free Kinslayer t-shirts for participants.
How about a T-short with “Izzat? Wazzat?” on it?
T-shirt, you know what I mean …
The murder sickens. But what about the years of brutal abuse that preceded it? An attractive young girl, full of promise with a satisfying life ahead, refused to be forced into becoming the sexual slave of some unknown man at her parents’ behest. All she wanted was the normal life around her. Instead they choke her to death. They now have time to consider their actions.
I can’t help feeling that the real motivation behind this was that she was making them consider that they hadn’t needed to go through with their own arranged marriage either. They didn’t want to face that truth so they killed the messenger.
Barbaric local tribal customs, they tell us, nothing to do with religion.
Islam ‘submission’ – the faith requiring complete submission to the will of Allah and covering every aspect of life at every level of society.
Then all those nasty un-Islamic practices so prevalent in Muslim societies – why aren’t they just as rare as eating pork?
_____
Harry – You make an interesting point. Also, I think it is a mistake to simply be outraged at this behaviour. Awful as it is, we will combat it better if we understand it. The girl’s parents must have been at their wits’ end – and no joke about how short a distance that may have been. To kill your own child cannot be an easy thing to do. The alternative must have seemed worse. Nobody wins.
Religion poisons everything. Here is more evidence of this fact. Fanatical blind obedience to a primitive religion of violence, hatred and intolerance. This murder is the at the very heart of islam. The immams and mullahs will not stop wailing until sharia is forced on the West. We have to act now and face down this threat to peace, prosperity and civilisation. I want to hear the muslim “scholars” in the UK condemn this murderous pair. If there is no public declaration that islam forbids child murder the we have to draw the conclusion that islam is supportive of honour killing. Come on you imams and mullahs lets hear your views. Or are you unwilling to say what you really believe.
@Lazy Susan: But there were also the beatings that preceded the killing. What we seem to have here are the brutalities and excesses of a patriarchical society. What happened here is reminiscient of the atrocities of Victorian society (much admired by Margaret Thatcher) where a man could beat his wife as much as he wanted as long as the stick was not thicker than his thumb. That was a legal ruling. Both children and women were beaten savagely and regularly. Where couples split up the rules were severely biased against the women.
But there was a reason and it may also apply in this case. Society, as understood by judges and clergy, was thought to be in danger of falling into anarchy if the man was not the authoritarian ruler of the family. Better the man should beat his wife, take the children, steal her money than risk that. What these pernicious views meant, of course, was that the most selfish and brutal of men were free to wreak on defencless women whater misery and cruelty they chose. The Muslims are just 150 years behind us.
The dread consequences, for the woman in Victorian times, is well described and discussed in the excellent and factual “Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace.”
25 years is too light a sentence. They will come out alive, most likely. They should spend the rest of their miserable lives and die in jail.
May I add :
They should spend the rest of their miserable lives and die in jail EATING PORK.
While I agree with your post, Broga, this:
“… a man could beat his wife as much as he wanted as long as the stick was not thicker than his thumb.”
… has apparently been shown to be a fallacious interpretation of the “rule of thumb”, invented by some comedian who got taken seriously. To the best of my knowledge there was never an “approved size” of wife-beating stick, and if there was, one as thick as your thumb does not have to be swung all that hard to cause serious injury and indeed death. Even in such a patriarchally unjust and insensitive a culture as the Victorians would not have lasted long with brutality of that magnitude going on.
I though that this guy gave a thoughtful take on this case.
http://www.countingcats.com/?p=12769#respond
I will post this for what it’s worth, but I, also, do concur with Broga’s sentiments:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/rule-of-thumb.html
@Matt Westwood and barriejohn: Thanks to both of you. I stand (or should that be write?) corrected. Seems I was too harsh on Judge Buller. However, just to press the matter a little. I think there was a differerent treatment meted out to the upper classes who often had the means to offer some defence (like Mrs Robinson) and the lower classes where the abuse of women could be savage and with little chance of protection for them. Although even in the upper echelons the role of the wife was to submit to the husband, please him and pander to his whims. Some of the books offering guidance for women about to be married, or just married, make that clear.
The life of many Muslim women today, when they marry, is miserable as they are often the bullied servants of the man they marry and his mother. That’s before we mention FGM.
Thanks again to you both. Glad to have the correction.
PS. While I am on this subject, another wronged man was Captain Bligh of The Bounty Fame. His record of flogging sailors compared well with many other captains. He also achieved one of the all time great feats of naval navigation.
I also concur with the Mail for once. These women are to be applauded as much as, if not more than, any gold medal winners:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2183262/Olympics-2012-The-Muslim-women-overcame-odds-make-London.html
Broga – I am not trying to attenuate the awfulness of the crime, or to mitigate the punishment. But I don’t think it is ever a good idea to demonise the culprits. They are humans, and I would guess they did what they thought was best. (Just like Hitler, to save anyone the trouble of making the comparison.)
Stonyground – That counting cats blog looks like an interesting read. Thanks for the link!
@Lazy Susan: Tout comprenez, tout pardonner, I suppose. And I probably haven’t got the French right.
@Stoke humanist, Re: “If there is no public declaration that islam forbids child murder”
It doesn’t, on the contrary, it actually condones it. The shariah has been published and is available on-line “Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law Umdat Al-Salik”. In it is the confirmation that parents may kill children who behave contrary to the teachings of islam.
And before anyone says “but it says that in the bible too”, yes it does.
Difference is, these people take their religion straight, not diluted by the enlightenment.
Any immams or mullas condeming this practice would be apostates, and they themselves would be killed for ‘defiling islam’.
Well, I suppose one has to say well done the Ramadhan Foundation. I hope their message is heard loud and clear by those who think it’s perfectly all right to import murderous archaic religious customs into this country. Feck knows, we’ve got enough idiots of our own to deal with.
On which note, it’s interesting to see that Stephen ‘Birdshit’ Green is perfectly happy to support genocide in Syria as long as it means his own brand of superstition gets preferential treatment. What a lovely man. What a twat.
http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/?p=3832
http://youtu.be/idNNadulKjk
@AgentKormac
He doesn’t actually say that it’s wrong, though. Just that the infidels will punish people for it.
@Harry
Yes and no. He, apparently, was pressured into an arranged marriage in Pakistan by/to his cousin, who threatened to kill herself if he didn’t go through with it. He was already married at the time though, to a Danish woman who he didn’trouble to tell!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/murderer-iftikhar-ahmed-abandoned-son-and-danish-first-wife-to-follow-through-with-arranged-marriage-to-shafileas-mother-farzana-8005441.html
Brian Jordan: Mohammed Shafiq DOES condemn the murder, and calls the couple “gruesome and evil people”. However, although he states that forced marriages and honour killings are “totally forbidden” in Islam, there are obviously many who would disagree with him!
http://ramadhanfoundation.com/shafileaahmed03082012.htm
I did link to an account of Iftikhar Ahmed’s first marriage early in this thread.
At least the torture implement loving christians can offer a veneer of respectability for their religion in that its stone-age customs are not quite as horrible as the muzzie versions. If the muzzies don’t like it in “the west” perhaps they could relocate to some islamic paradise like Pakistan (no, left there..), Saudi Arabia (lots of oil, no lifestyle), or even the lovely Iran. That way they can bathe themselves in fundamental islamic nonsense and get the support they obviously crave.
Fascinating that millions and millions of Muslims have misunderstood their religion of peace in exactly the same way for century after century. It must be Islamophobia that drives them to it.
From the Indy we learn that Farzana is an evil manipulative bitch, and Iftikhar a weak spineless henpecked hedonist who did everything he was told. Nasty couple.
I heard on the World Service that 1 muslim girl is estimated to be murdered each month in the UK as the victim of a so called honour (more like dishonour) killing. I don’t make a note of these things, and I’m often half asleep anyway, but I think the interview was with a muslim victim of the practice who is now a member of the Lancashire Police Authority.
The more these outrages are exposed, the more that muslim groups condemn them, the less likely they will become.
I found this, Broga!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-19016484
Broga – from The Times, August 4, “We failed Shafilea Ahmed with our silence” by Sunny Hundal on p26:
It is estimated that, on average, one girl is murdered every month over “family honour” in modern Britain.
No source is given for this statistic. The rest of that article is, to my reading, confused. The byline is The Left didn’t speak out against forced marriage for fear of being racist. Now we must champion integration. A paragraph in the article says:
We need to encourage more cultural integration and be less tolerant of people living “parallel lives”. That cannot mean saying that if people want to be British, they have to integrate into our way of life — that only makes people defensive and leads nowhere. Instead we have to take a more inclusive approach: one that says we are equal, regardless of religion, ethnicity or background. It has to be a (sic) integration that appeals equally to white and non-white Britons.
So on the one hand we need more integration but on the other hand striving for integration leads nowhere. Perhaps the “if” in “if people want to be British” should be emphasized. The problem is that some people want to live in Britainistan.
Seems to me the law is already clear. Killing people is, generally, illegal. Ditto forced marriage and genital mutilation, for girls at least. No new laws are needed, just the will to enforce the existing ones.
@Lazy Susan: “No new laws are needed, just the will to enforce the existing ones.”
How very true, we have enough laws in place to deal with this type of crime, what is needed is the political will to encourage the police to enforce those laws and not to back away because of some fear that they will be called out as racists.
Excerpt from BarrieJohn’s link:
Saima Afzal, an independent member of Lancashire Police Authority, said there were plenty of anecdotes about the scope of the problem, but no statistics to back it up. “In the UK we talk about a yearly figure of 10,000 honour crimes but that is just a guess-timate – I think it is far deeper than that,” she said. “We don’t know how many women disappear either.”
She said a project set up in Blackburn a few years ago for women facing forced marriage pressure saw at least 500 women a year coming for help.
Saima Afzal says official figures about honour crime are just guesstimates “Last year, we had 132 forced marriages [in Lancashire] and honour-based incidents and this year it is 50 so far,” she said.
I don’t know what an “honour crime” is but it is presumably not limited to murder.
Population statistics (all from wikipedia):
Blackburn: c 105 k
Lancashire: c 1.4 M
England: c 53 M
Extrapolating 132 forced marriages per annum from Lancashire to the whole of England gives almost exactly 5000.
Extrapolating 500 women coming for help from Blackburn to the whole of England gives over a quarter of a million.
I did not extrapolate to the whole UK because I suspect the culture is too diverse. But I don’t know. It’s just a straw in the wind.
@barriejohn and Lazy Susan: Many thanks.
Justice prevailed in this case. I just cannot sympathize with these murderers. So, they are afraid of the children becoming westernized? Then why the fuck would you immigrate to a Western nation in the first place?! The governments of secular countries should come down even harder on the perpetrators of these barbaric practices, in order to send a clear message that shit like this will not be tolerated.
@Frank Li: The whole religion is a fascistic death cult whose stated aim is to take over the world by force. They have no compunction about killing *anybody they feel like* if their whims are defied *in any way at all*. They emigrate to a country *specifically in order* to export their filth there. (And when they find that they are actually unable to defend that filth *even inside their own families*, they casually exterminate.)
The good news is that they spend a lot of their energies fighting among themselves. Think what it would be like if they were to present a united front against the world.
Matt: I watched a documentary some time ago about Muslim terrorists in North Africa. Evidently, the groups keep splitting up into ever more extreme and “pure” factions who then spend their time blowing up the people they were once allied to, Life of Brian style. It would, indeed, be funny if it weren’t so tragic!
barriejohn – Do you have a link to that documentary?
It’s ironic that the way religions develop parallels the process of speciation as described by Darwin. When a species develops into a range of varieties, the varieties are mostly in conflict with each other, because they are very similar and are competing for the same resources. The varieties in the middle of the range get exterminated because they are hit from all sides. The extremities survive at the expense of the middle, and the species diverges.
With religions, disagreements arise that cannot be resolved because there is no higher authority than one’s own conscience and belief. (Specifically there is no actual god.) Religions compete for believers and their material resources. The natural enemies are the other side of the most recent schism.
Over the last few thousand years, religions have evolved just as Darwin described, and the current ones are well able to survive in the present environment. When a religion has no more believers, it becomes dormant – not quite extinct, thanks to the permanence of the written word, unfortunately.
“Ironic” doesn’t do it justice.
@Lazy Susan: Very interesting. The subject was Morocco, I believe, but there appears to be no trace of it now. I don’t even remember which channel it was on, though I would guess BBC2 or Channel 4. Interestingly, I was a member of the Plymouth Brethren for years, and, in one town where I lived for three years the “assemblies” were divided into two groups over some matter which went back several years when a group walked out of one of the meetings, and if you had dared to have fellowship, however inocently, with an assembly of the other group you would have been shown the door immediately! In America the Open Brethren are hopelessly divided into Gospel Hall Brethren and Chapel Brethren, who have nothing to do with one another, and worldwide the Exclusive Brethren are split into so many groups, all over minutiae of doctrine or practice, that you wouldn’t believe it: Kellyites, Derbyites, Glantonites, and so on, mostly named after their leaders – one of the evils which the Brethren movement was established to avoid!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_Hall_Brethren
In case there is still anybody left in the world who has not read the entire Discworld canon of Terry Pratchett, I recommend his “Small Gods” for a fictional expression of this very phenomenon. And also “Lean Times In Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber (of whom of course TP was an aficionado) for a more sideways take on the subject.
@Frank Li: However hard I try to “understand” the fact is that in my heart, or my guts or where ever the deepest feelings lie, I agree with you. After reading about that pitiful young girl I was left with a visceral detestation of her parents. How many more are like them and still getting away with their abuse?
PS – There is yet another biological parallel to religion – that of parasitism. When a parasite infects its host, it changes the host’s behaviour to benefit the parasite instead of the host. Often this is achieved by suppressing the hosts’s reproductive efforts, so that energy that would have gone into reproducing the host is spent reproducing the parasite.
I think this is seen clearly in the RC’s edicts on sex, reproduction, celibacy and so on. It is an attempt, not entirely unconscious, by the church to hijack its members’ sexual energy for its own benefit.
The idea of religion as a parasite is not new. (I don’t use the word “meme” because it seems to me that it is not a scientific concept – memes explain every possible experimental outcome and so they cannot be tested.) But if you think of these murderous parents as having been infected with a mind-altering parasite that caused them to kill their own offspring in its own favour, then it makes some kind of sense.
How do you combat such a thing? Well, religion spreads principally by being passed from parents to their children. At the very least, we could make that more expensive for parents to do by not using taxes to support religious schools or religious indoctrination. And RE in schools should be about religions, not promoting any particular one. Fight state-sponsored religious privilege. Join the National Secular Society!
Another one!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184288/Lawyer-shoots-dead-sister-honour-killing-middle-Pakistan-courtroom.html