“Honour killings” story a hoax!

Not for the first time, the media in the west have been taken in by an anti-Muslim hoax perpetrated by a middle-eastern non-Muslim. First it was Jean Sasson, now it’s Norma Khoury, who put out a book on a supposed “honour killing” in Jordan. This piece in the Jordan Times points out a series of factual errors which demonstrate the author’s ignorance of Jordan, which is not surprising given that she left the country when she was three years old. She is an American citizen who also has a Greek passport.

There is a whole genre of horror stories about life, usually for women, in Muslim countries, and their authors receive the attention of both the liberal and the conservative media. Around 1992 the UK magazine of Amnesty International published an extract from Jean Sasson’s infamous Princess series, about the execution of a young girl who had been raped by three of her brother’s drug-addled friends. The mutawa’een had become involved after she was taken into hospital, and the usual sentence for zina is flogging, but the girl’s father had never been comfortable with daughters apparently, and had the sentence increased to stoning!

When you look at some of the other howlers in this book, you can safely conclude that the story is made up. For example, one of the sequels refers to someone circling the “black rock in the big mosque” – confusing the black stone with the Ka’ba, which is a room, not a rock. There are quite a few things in that book which no Muslim would say, and where no disapproval was expressed. But the stoning incident was clearly placed in the book before the assassination of Faisal b. Abdul-Aziz, which took place in 1975, and about the same time of the birth of the so-called narrator’s now adult daughter. Amnesty International failed to point out when this incident supposedly took place!