Bhutto’s Assassination Is a Political and Cultural Honor Killing

by Phyllis Chesler
Pajamas Media
December 28, 2007

http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/251/bhuttos-assassination-is-a-political-and-cultural

Excerpt:

In a sense, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a political and cultural version of an honor killing. Bhutto was the first woman Prime Minister of a Muslim nation and she symbolized an unacceptably Western form of female ambition and achievement. She had attended Harvard/Radcliffe and Oxford. She spoke English–perhaps more fluently than she spoke her native Sindi or Urdu. She once dressed as Western women do. Indeed, many Muslim women from wealthy families, including educators and feminists, have done so for a long time. They cannot do so now.

I am suggesting that, as a member of the Ummah (or larger Muslim collectivity), Islamist fanatics decided that Bhutto was unacceptably and publicly too-Western, and they sentenced her to death for this sin.

Pakistan is known for its many bloody honor murders and other atrocities.

In 1999, in Lahore, Pakistan, Samia Imran was shot dead in her feminist lawyer’s office by a man whom her parents had hired to kill her. Her crime? Daring to seek a divorce.

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Related Topics:  Honor Killings, Islamic Gender & Religious Apartheid receive the latest by email: subscribe to phyllis chesler's free mailing list