Baroness (Syeeda) Warsi recently said in an interview with the Guardian that Muslim extremists such as Anjem Choudhary, who led the group which was threatening to outrage the public with a counter-demonstration on Remembrance Sunday until it was banned late last week, forfeited the right to call themselves Muslims. Her reasoning is pretty extraordinary: in a video interview with John Harris, she says:

From the Islam that I have been taught, and grown up with … and most people have been bought up with, it has to be rationed, reasoned, contextualised. Now if you detach reason from religion, then you are no longer a follower of that faith. If you are a follower of a religion that is so clear in its support of humanity [and you behave the way they do] then you are no longer part of that faith.

Asked specifically about Choudhary, she alleged that “nothing about the way they conduct themselves is in accordance with the teachings” and that “the minute they detach reason from religion, they’re not part of that faith any more”.

It is actually pretty dangerous for a Muslim to be issuing statements that clearly imply that someone who identifies as a Muslim in fact is not (known as takfir). There are pretty strict criteria for exclusion from Islam, such as expressing a belief which is contrary to what is well-known about Islam (whether in relation to law or doctrine) or showing clear contempt for Islam (such as by defiling a copy of the Qur’an or insulting any Prophet). There are certain sects which are held not to be Muslim despite their identifying as such and having a superficially Islamic culture or using Islamic language, because their beliefs are incompatible. The American-based group which calls itself the Nation of Islam is the best-known of these in the West.

Crucially, sins do not nullify one’s Islam, unless you deny that something well-known to be a sin is a sin. This does not include things on which there is any dispute about them being forbidden, even if only a small minority regards it as permitted. Making unusual or invalid excuses for a sin also does not constitute disbelief: one common example is justifying killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that all Israelis are soldiers, or justifying killing anyone associated with the army of any contemporary Muslim country on the grounds that they support a non-Islamic government. The early Muslims had to deal with a sect called the Kharijites, some of whom proclaimed anyone who disagreed with them on very minute matters to be an unbeliever and slaughtered them in their thousands. Yet, they did not call the Kharijites unbelievers.

When murder does not put someone outside of Islam, one can easily deduce that hurting people’s feelings by making a noise on Remembrance Sunday does not either. It is not even a sin as such, it is simply bad manners and politically naive, assuming that they were not actually intending to attract negative attention to the community as they did with their demonstration against the Royal Anglian regiment parade in Luton in 2009, which did immense damage by prompting the founding of the English Defence League. Some Muslims certainly suspect that they do their publicity stunts for ulterior motives and may in fact intend harm, but it is also possible that they intend to provoke a conflict in which Muslims will be forced to take sides and which they presume will lead to their victory and domination, or that of a group very much like them. A dishonourable intention, as most Muslims do not want to live under their rule, but not something which, on the face of it, stops them being Muslims.

Takfir is something that is by turn condemned and encouraged: a few years ago it was being presented as the root of the entire extremism problem in the Muslim world, and Muslims everywhere were encouraged to sign the “Amman message”, which declared that members of several named sects were, at least, Muslims and could not be called otherwise (some scholars refused to sign it, among them Mufti Taqi Uthmani). However, when the takfir is against the extremists themselves (and against those who cause embarrassment to the Muslim community), some people are only too keen to call them unbelievers. The fact remains that the criteria are extremely strict, and usually it is up to scholars, not ordinary Muslims, however famous or politically influential they are.

Image source: Wikipedia.

About three years ago, I wrote a response to a new “Islamic marriage contract” which had been issued by the so-called Muslim Parliament (now the Muslim Institute) and a couple of other secular-leaning “Islamic” organisations, and the three names listed as contacts regarding it were Cassandra Balchin, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui and Mufti Barkatullah. I contacted the last (whose mobile number was attached to a press release) to make sure that he really did endorse it, expecting him to say no, but it turned out that he in fact did. There are a whole host of reasons why the “contract”, which has been reissued as Tehmina Kazi’s article mentions above, is redundant: it is Islamically invalid, regardless of whether a lone scholar endorses it; it is not written in legal language and is full of irrelevant boilerplate as well as vague undertakings that have no place in a legally binding contract, and so would not stand up in a court of law in the UK; besides this, there are moral objections, such as that, as Dr Tawfique Chaudhury notes, “the contract lowers the status and position of the husband treating him constantly from an angle of mistrust”.

The contract is, from any perspective, full of holes. One would think it had been put out as some sort of discussion document; as a legally-binding contract, either in a Shari’ah court or a British court, it is terribly weak and for purported community leaders to endorse it and claim that it empowers women, or anyone, is totally irresponsible. The collaboration of Barkatullah with Siddiqui and Balchin, neither of whom represent traditional Islam and neither of whom are known for their scholarly credentials, is baffling. As I have said before, Siddiqui’s whole career seems to have been spent with the Muslim Parliament, an outfit which faded from view after siding with Khomeini in the Rushdie affair and having moved more recently to a modernist position, hence their reconciliation with Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, now trustees of the Institute, who excoriated the so-called Parliament as “the Mullah’s supporters’ club” in their book Distorted Imagination. He is a community leader without a community.

As for Barkatullah, one suspects that the secularists who wrote this thought that putting his name on it would stop any traditional Muslims from objecting to it, or worse, enable them to accuse us of going against Islam by attacking this “brilliant Mufti” or whatever, but what they fail to understand is that when a scholar puts his name to something that is plainly un-Islamic, it does not mean that we accept it. It means the scholar is out on a limb, and it may lead to his rejection by the community. It is not the first time Barkatullah has come out with outlandish statements; after Abu Hamza and his friends were driven out of Finsbury Park in 2003, he went on the radio to claim that the mosque would be closed to cleanse it of “physical and spiritual filth”, alleging that the Saudi royal family had been cursed from the minbar in that mosque after having funded its construction. Perhaps he might explain where he got the concept of “spiritual filth” from, or how long any mosque that had been used by the Fatimids to curse the Sahaba, let alone the Saudi royal family, was closed for purification after it came back into Sunni hands. In our conversation in 2008, he claimed that the Hanafi madhhab allows for conditions to be included in marriage contracts and used the hadeeth about “the most deserving of conditions”, when in fact, the only madhhab that makes all conditions binding is the Hanbali, not the Hanafi, and the Hanbali school has almost no followers in the UK. The other schools makes stipulations by the wife binding only if linked to a right to a divorce, or an automatic divorce. He also made out that the overwhelming majority of Muslims (I think he meant in the UK) followed the Hanafi madhhab, as if the minority that do not (which includes the Somalis, Moroccans, east and west Africans and most converts) are insignificant.

This does not mean we should not help women to avoid being exploited or abused, but there are other ways of doing this, such as by educating Muslim women and their families about their rights. If reaching practising, orthodox Muslims is the aim, then it cannot be done without respecting the Shari’ah, let alone linked to a barely-concealed attack on it. Perhaps the latter is in fact more important to some people than the former. This contract is incredibly weak, and anyone (especially any woman) adopting it so as to protect their interests in their marriage may find themselves without any protection.

I’ve heard some criticisms of this documentary to the effect that, although it shifts the focus away from female converts, it concentrates too heavily on one very extreme group which has a tiny number of followers. There were also a number of inaccurate statements, such as the reference to the stoning of women for adultery, which appears twice in the first ten minutes. In fact, the punishment applies to both sexes (according to most scholars, a pregnant woman can easily escape the charge by claiming she was raped, which would the dominant opinion in this day and age given its prevalence). Leech films during Ramadan, and witnesses Richard sleeping for large parts of the day, opining, “solution to fasting: sleep as much as you can”, as if this is what Muslims in general do. In fact, Muslims in general work, and cannot sleep most of the day.

We did not find out exactly how Richard had been attracted to the Muhajiroun, but we do find him doing his “da’wah” on the streets of east London, accosting a new convert from Latvia and trying to encourage him to get involved with them, but also getting into a fight with a man they believe to be drunk, after he flings one of their leaflets back at them (I could not smell his breath on TV, obviously, so I could not tell whether his slurred speech was due to that or to a disability). It gave a fairly good picture of what the group are like among themselves, which is to say, somewhat jocular and matter-of-fact with what many would consider harsh views. They talk with exaggerated disgust at all the munkar (evil) going on around them as they drive around London looking for somewhere to pray (as has been pointed out elsewhere, that is an easy task in east London). Several of these men, of course, were once part of that scene, in Salahuddeen’s case only a couple of years earlier.

Salahuddeen and Ben/Ahsan both come from Weymouth, which Leech describes as an “ordinary seaside town”. There is no such thing as an ordinary seaside town; there are big and small seaside towns, some are prosperous and youthful, like Brighton; some are faded and run-down, like Hastings, while others are popular with retirees and commuters. I haven’t been to Weymouth since I was a child, but I do know someone who lives there now. One of the group’s stunts was to bring some men down from London, including Salahuddeen and Ahsan, on a “da’wah” trip, which leads to some locals having to be dragged away by the police while others call their message “bollocks” or something similar. All quite likely to make the situation for the few Muslims in Weymouth more difficult.

Towards the end, Robb confronts his brother on his way to Mecca, and asks him some questions about the derogatory way in which the latter spoke to him, such as by claiming that Muslims were supposed to shake hands with non-Muslims with their left hands, as it’s their “dirty” hand (something no Muslim I asked had ever heard of, and nobody else in the group seemed to have done either). Salahuddeen also seemed rather more reasonable and conciliatory when on “enemy territory” in Weymouth, telling people they were entitled to their opinion etc., but was full of bluster when surrounded by his friends in London. Leech is also heartened that Ben/Ahsan seems not to have swallowed everything he was being told in London to quite the extent that Salahuddeen had.

This isn’t a particularly comprehensive documentary on al-Muhajiroun (I’ve heard the book Radical Islam Rising by Quintan Wiktorowicz recommended for that), nor is it representative of the convert experience generally. It does, however, give a fair indication of what sort of people the Muhajiroun are and what they make of people who convert and join them. They did not have to use hidden cameras as were used in other recent documentaries, because this group will clearly do anything for publicity, much as we saw with the Tottenham Ayatollah documentary in the 1990s. Most converts live pretty ordinary lives, and will not want to live with cameras pointing at them (and these were all men, none of them apparently married). None of this is new, of course, for people who have known the Muslim scene in London for the last 20 years or so; the only concern is that converts in general, particularly in provincial areas like Weymouth, will be judged on these men’s example.

Full details at the Deen Intensive website.

This could, however, be said about this man’s victim; he is obviously very angry about having been paralysed, hence his desire for retaliation in kind. This type of punishment (called qisaas in Arabic) is standard for deliberate bodily injuries in Islamic law, as long as the injury can be replicated, which is not the case with internal injuries, particularly spinal cord injuries in which an injury at the same level in two people can produce different results, and there are some places in the spinal cord where this is more true than others, as I mentioned in my original post. The cause of the controversy was that the demand had been made and the judge had investigated, and found that at least one hospital was unwilling to perform the surgery, not that the operation had been done or had been decided on.

Kim mentioned that her quality of life had been better since her injury, but that is a very unusual situation and in many ways specific to her (such as the cerebral palsy it largely relieved her of). I would suppose that most people who have sustained spinal cord injuries were not extremely bitter but certainly would not say that it has improved their quality of life. People’s attitude may well depend on how the injury happened, and if it was caused by an assault, or by an accident involving a drunken or otherwise negligent driver, they are likely to be more negative about their situation than if it was a pure accident or an illness (as in Kim’s case) that caused it. There is also the question of what consequences the injury had, besides the usual changes a SCI brings: if someone cannot live with their family or in their own home and is forced into an institution, they are likely to feel more negatively about their injury than if they could live independently or with their family.

Ultimately, people do not welcome injury of any sort, and people whose faculties are intact want them to stay that way, and that is why we have punishments for injuring people. People react to injuries, or assaults, in different ways, and it shouldn’t have any bearing on how we deal with those who inflict them; I remember reading an interview with an elderly rape victim in the early 1990s who said that her attack had not caused her to feel shame or terrible trauma, but this is far from being the case for most rape victims and should not have lessened the rapist’s sentence had he been caught (he was in fact responsible for several rapes and murders but was identified as such after he committed suicide).

People are different, and much as some people like different foods or clothes to others, some people will adjust to radical changes in their circumstances, whether it be disability or poverty, differently from others. Of course, there are some with SCI who talk of their life being a living hell or being imprisoned in their own bodies, and loudly claim that not enough research is being done even though a lot of money is being spent on such research, it has had prominent celebrity support (Christopher Reeve, for example), and they are certainly not prisoners (unlike someone with severe ME, who may be a young girl shut in a dark room for years and suffering intense pain and other distressing symptoms, and there is a definite dearth of research into that illness). But it’s no use for someone who has adjusted fairly easily to a spinal cord injury saying of someone who doesn’t, “why can’t he/she feel like me?”, because most people who sustain such injuries just don’t.

I’ve written about the Doncaster tweet before. In both cases, it’s arguable that the content did not justify the authors being arrested, since terrorist attacks on airports (let alone aeroplanes) do not generally come from dissatisfied customers but from politically-motivated terrorists, and a single person cannot stone someone to death: it takes a crowd to do that. Still, if a dissatisfied customer threatened to burn a restaurant down, that would be taken every bit as seriously as this, if not more so. It is only to be expected that threats to bomb airports are taken extremely seriously, because there have been attacks, and attempted attacks, on planes in the very recent past, and unlike in a train or car accident, if one blows up in mid-air, you have no chance. People are just that much more nervous about threats to air safety.

This is only the latest in a long line of incidents in which there is outrage at a law which, supposedly, should be getting used to keep “others”, be they Muslims, young Black men or “chavs”, in line being applied to middle-class white people. A few years ago, a commenter noted on the blog Samizdata that there was a tendency for well-to-do white women to run to the media with tales of outrage because they were arrested and put in a cell overnight for knowingly breaking the law, as if the law only applied to lesser mortals. The same was true of the outrage about the white British man who could not bring his 19-year-old white Canadian wife into this country, a law clamoured for by the anti-immigration lobby as a way of eliminating the Asian practice of bringing in young wives from “the village back home”; if the bride had come from a poorer country and had not been white, there would have been no such outrage even if she and the husband were well-educated.

A similar attitude can be found in some of the protests against intrusive airport security, such as the “naked body scanners”. I recently saw an article on the right-wing news website WorldNet Daily complaining about the scans in the USA, and two of those who complained mentioned that they were white or “as American looking as apple-pie”, as if that should excuse them from the same level of security as everyone else. What isn’t said is that it’s quite OK for this kind of harassment to take place when those travelling are Muslims, or have names that look like Muslim names (because of terrorism), or Hispanic or Black (because of drugs etc.), but perish the thought that someone who looks like an American goes through the same thing. Of course, Timothy McVeigh did not look or sound like a Muslim, nor did the Unabomber.

The article does mention that staff operating scanners in Nigeria had been reported as using them for what is essentially sexual harassment of passengers (who are mostly black, obviously), but the article clearly is not objecting to the sexual harassment of passengers in general, only when it’s white people, because white people are obviously not criminals or terrorists, an assumption that history does not bear out. They should accept that the law applies to everyone and exists to protect everyone and assumes nothing about what the threat looks like or where it comes from (that’s the theory, anyway), and if they do not like it, they should campaign to make it fair for everyone, not just exempt themselves by saying that it should apply only to everyone but them.

This isn’t the only insult to the poppy appeal to be made publically this week — a bunch of idiotic Muslims held a demo in London on Armistice Day (last Thursday) in which a giant poppy was burned and banners reading “British soldiers, burn in Hell” and “Afghanistan, graveyard of empires” were held up, and the two-minute silence was deliberately broken. Of course, this was the one that got media coverage even though it was the usual handful of idiots (no doubt known to those who shouted slogans as Roshonara Choudhary was sentenced last week, if they’re not the same people).

The finger is, once again, being pointed at “Shaikh” Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American preacher currently living in Yemen, whose videos were found on Choudhary’s home computer. They didn’t say what the “hate videos” consisted of, but it’s widely known that he has begun to openly advocate violence since his imprisonment in Yemen a few years ago. Before that, he was best known for his Sirah tapes, which many young Muslims listened to keenly. His recent turn means that anyone who ever shared a platform with him or sells his old CD’s is presumed in some places to be a fellow traveller with him now.

However, we can’t blame him for anything anyone who has watched his videos, even the recent ones, has done. This woman acted on her own judgement and was not told to do anything by him. Her actions should be blamed on her alone, and can’t be used to point the finger at anyone else in any way associated with him.

There’s a letter in today’s Guardian advocating that Google should use its multilingual technology to censor content based on the use of certain words, and subject material with certain triggers to human moderation. This would require them to hire a huge number of staff, when in reality, anyone can “flag” a video containing inappropriate or illegal material, but in any case, American law distinguishes between advocating and inciting, which is to direct someone to commit a crime, and only the latter is illegal. We should not expect the state, or some company, to protect us from ideas, as we are adults, after all (and as for those who aren’t, there are people called “parents” whose duty that is).

Furthermore, it’s noticeable that sentences are getting harsher, with Choudhary receiving a sentence for attempted murder that exceeds what many people convicted of actual murder receive, or what people receive for deliberate cruelty, including against disabled people. The judge informed her that, had she succeeded in killing Timms, she would have received a whole-life sentence, so one should ask whether the murder of a politician for supporting an illegal war is really a more heinous offence than some of the senseless murders in London which commonly receive life sentences with set tariffs. Anyone familiar with the Northern Ireland peace process will be aware that some terrorists known to have participated in bombings and massacres — of ordinary people, not soldiers or politicians — ended up serving less time than Choudhary will. It begs the question of why an MP’s life is somehow worth more than that of a disabled child, or an equally innocent ordinary person in south London or Northern Ireland.

They call this an independent inquiry; they need to contact the independent organisations that have expertise in Islamic radicalisation and in the history of Islamism, people such as the Quilliam Foundation and I would have hoped to have Student Rights consulted as well; the Centre for Social Cohesion; they’re all people with great background and great knowledge of radicalisation on campus.

Student Rights seems a bizarre name for a group which has as its main aim “tackling extremism” (as they see it) rather than, say, campaigning for better funding for student welfare and lower (or no) tuition fees, which is what student rights meant when I was a student in the mid-1990s. A look at who’s on their advisory panel reveals that they are anything but independent:

• Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow, who has held consultancy roles for the Conservative Friends of Israel
• Daniel Johnson, editor of Standpoint magazine which is published by the Social Affairs Unit, a right-wing think tank, and is noted for hostile reporting on matters related to Muslims
• Dr Alan Mendoza, executive director of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society
• Shiraz Maher, best-known for boasting of having joined Hizb-ut-Tahrir after 9/11 and left them, to become a media-friendly HT-basher, after the London bombings in 2005.

Their recommended books include Infidel and Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Celsius 7/7 by Michael Gove and Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. The groups they recommend, similarly, are not independent: the Centre for Social Cohesion is based out of the same offices as Policy Exchange, a known Tory-aligned think tank, and is known for its spying antics around various mosques in London and producing inaccurate reports as a result. The Quilliam Foundation may not be linked to one political party or other, but it is also a group which attempts, like all the others mentioned, to police the ideologies espoused by Muslims, to denounce anyone who does not fit their agenda as an extremist or a radical. In the recent past, such ideological policing on left-wing ideologies would be called McCarthyism.

It’s dishonest to play on non-Muslims’ fears of extremism and terrorism to suppress ideologies you dislike for your own reasons, particularly when you do not have the evidence to prove a real connection. Islamic societies have guest speakers once in a while, and even if they promote a particular view of Islamic history or politics or convey anti-gay or anti-feminist or anti-Zionist views, half an hour of that is hardly likely to lead to someone going and bombing an aeroplane. To talk about someone “being radicalised”, in any case, takes the blame away from the person who committed a terrorist act and assigns it to someone else who may not even have the same views as he does and may have never spoken a word to him in person; the terrorist may have made his own mind up by reading various websites or by speaking to people he knew, at college or outside, or even well before he got there. He can have access to these people and website all the time, rather than for half an hour every few weeks at an ISoc event; he could easily have been biding his time and keeping his views and intentions a secret for at least some of the time he was at UCL.

Besides, Umar Farouk spent nearly 18 months in the Middle East after leaving UCL, much of it in Yemen, and there are plenty of people there who could have persuaded him towards more radical attitudes than any he could have encountered in London. Also, as I believe I have said here before, university Islamic societies may change their positions substantially from one year to the next as a new committee is elected with a totally different stance to the old one, in some cases emptying out the prayer room book collection and completely replacing it with books of the new committee’s liking. Ordinary Muslim students may pay little attention to what goes on, just as long as they get the Friday prayers and the Ramadan and Eid refreshments organised properly. There may be a case for reforming the ISoc scene, but a tenuous and unproven connection between UCL and its Islamic society and a terrorist is not part of it.

The fact that UCL commissioned this report at all demonstrates that they bent to media pressure, given that in our time when any disaster happens, we ask “who is to blame?” (even if the answer is obvious, as in this case) and “how can we stop it happening again?” rather than “is there any reasonable way of stopping this happening again?”, “reasonable” meaning without sacrificing everybody’s freedom in the process, much as we do when one child in a class of 30 acts up on a school trip. He passed through UCL and ran its Islamic society for a while … so it had to be the fault of one or both that he ended up as a bomber. Uh, no it doesn’t. And the observation that “the risk of radicalisation cannot be ‘eliminated’ without altering UCL’s educational mission and character”, which seems to have been taken on in some quarters as meaning that UCL (and presumably every other educational facility) should do precisely that, seems actually to mean that they cannot reasonably be expected to totally remove the risk, and given that it’s not at all established that radicalisation at UCL is what happened here, they should not be expected to.

The article alleges that, although Islamic organisations will tell you that honour killings have nothing to do with Islam, “Islamic orthodoxy generally condones the practice, whilst not explicitly recommending it per se”. He cites as the “most egregious case” the book Umdat al-Salik, which he translates as “Reliance of the Sojourner” even though it is translated into English as “Reliance of the Traveller”, which he calls “a manual on Shari’a (Islamic law) certified by Al-Azhar University, the most prominent and authoritative institute of Islamic jurisprudence in the world, as a reliable guide to orthodox Sunni Islam”. Al-Azhar is, of course, an important centre of Islamic scholarship, but it is not “the most authoritative”, particularly in this day and age although many individual scholars at al-Azhar are well-regarded. The book also has endorsements from scholars in Syria and Jordan.

He claims:

The manual states (01.1-2) that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right,” except when “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers)” kills his or her “offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” Hence, according to this view a parent, who murders his or her son/daughter for the sake of “honor,” whether owing to issues of chastity, apostasy and the like, incurs no penalty under Shari’a. This ruling is derived from a hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 19, Number 4457) where it is affirmed that one should not kill a child unless one could know “what Khadir had known about the child he killed.” Khadir is a figure featured in the Qur’an who accompanies Moses on a journey and kills a son of believing parents for fear that he would rebel against the will of God (18:74 and 18:80-81).

The statement about retaliation not being obligatory when the killer is an ancestor is accurate, but what this means is that the victim’s immediate family have no automatic right to demand the death penalty. There are other categories of penalty in Islamic law, including the fixed penalties called hudood (hadd is the singular) and discretionary penalties or ta’zeer. The last is what is appropriate in such cases: it is down to the judge to set the appropriate punishment, and whether he can impose the death penalty is something you will have to ask a scholar about, but it is inconceivable that anyone should be able to get away with killing a child unjustly.

As for the hadeeth basis for the ruling, I have seen an explicit hadeeth which opposes submitting someone to retaliation for killing one of their children. As far as the story of Khidr (the “Khadir” in that article) is concerned, it is explained in more detail elsewhere by the Reliance’s translator, Nuh Ha Mim Keller, because it is commonly used to justify unlawful acts by so-called saints or mystics as Khidr (peace be upon him) clearly does things that would be unlawful if done by anyone else. In fact, he had the knowledge referred to here precisely because he was a Prophet, a rank nobody has today, or for that matter, had in the time the Reliance was written. So, the hadeeth makes it clear that killing a child is forbidden, full stop.

Al-Tamimi (if that is his real name) claims:

Therefore, it is incumbent on human rights organizations working in the Muslim world to put pressure on Islamic religious authorities to denounce unequivocally the practice of honor killings, discuss openly and honestly the religious basis that condones the custom, and work to formulate a reformed interpretation of core Islamic texts that teaches why honor killings are wrong from a religious viewpoint, all of which will end impediments to introducing stricter legal punishments for honor killings in Muslim countries.

However, Islamic law already condemns such killings, and the reason there is resistance to changing the law has much to do with the force of tradition and nothing at all to do with the killings being in any way religiously justified. There are already human rights groups working to protect women from honour killings in some of these countries, and there are shelters for women (although a lot of women at risk from such killing end up in prison for their own protection) and lawyers who help them prosecute violent relatives. The fact that these people face a difficult job because of corruption and entrenched local tradition does not mean that what they are doing is not part of Islam; as Robert Fisk points out, a substantial proportion of honour killings in these places is the work of non-Muslims, and there are large parts of the Muslim world where honour killings aren’t at all common, so clearly it has much to do with local tradition and nothing to do with Islam.