Honor killings, though frequently thrust before the public as a supposed feature of Islamic teaching, are in reality a phenomenon foreign to the Shariah and to the guidance of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. A striking illustration of this comes from 1947 in colonial Nigeria, where a local Shariah court had sentenced a man to death for murdering his wife's lover. It was the British superior court, not the Shariah court, that overturned the ruling, deeming it a mere "crime of passion" unworthy of capital punishment. The Shariah court had rejected precisely the excuse that has so often been invoked to justify honor killings, while the Western court accepted it. This history overturns the assumptions promoted by Islamophobic efforts such as the Clarion Fund's documentary Honor Diaries, which insists that Islam supports honor killings and that such violence is endemic to Muslim societies.
The truth is that violence against women, of which honor killing is only one part, is a global affliction far too widespread and enduring to be blamed on any single religion or culture. It touches all societies, and patriarchal cultures the world over sometimes excuse such violence as the fruit of rage in "crimes of passion," while other forms involve premeditation and even the participation of female relatives. The larger category is femicide, the killing of a woman for reasons tied to her gender, and its forms differ from region to region. In the Mediterranean, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, the perceived affront is to the honor of the woman or her family. The United Nations Population Fund conservatively estimates that at least 5,000 women a year are killed globally in honor killings, and in India and Pakistan such crimes occur among Hindus and Muslims alike, often over a daughter marrying without approval. A 2012 UN report further documents hundreds of women killed each year across parts of southern Africa and South and Southeast Asia over accusations of witchcraft, their killers receiving lighter sentences with troubling regularity.
Despite the disproportionate media focus, honor killings are not the deadliest form of femicide. Dowry killings among India's Hindu population far exceed them in number. The same 2012 UN report recorded 8,383 known dowry murders in India in 2009, up from 4,836 in 1990, even though the Indian government outlawed dowry-giving decades ago. These deaths are rarely investigated, often dismissed by police as kitchen accidents. Indeed, the country ranked worst in the UN's femicide rankings is not a Muslim nation at all but the majority-Catholic, non-Shariah-applying El Salvador. Violence against women, then, is mankind's problem, as much a part of the past and present of the West as of anywhere else.
Where Islamophobic organizations are correct is in noting that the laws of certain Muslim-majority countries treat honor killings leniently, and this is a genuine problem. In Egyptian law, a man who kills his wife or her lover after catching them in the act faces only prison rather than the death penalty. The laws of Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, and Jordan extend drastically reduced penalties for the killing of a female relative caught in such a situation, though the UAE and a 2001 amendment to Jordan's law extend the same excuse to a wife who finds her husband with another woman. Yet none of these laws derive from the Shariah. They were imported from the West. The criminal law of the Middle East was largely shaped by the Ottoman Criminal Code of 1858, which was little more than a translation of the French Criminal Code of 1832, copying its lax treatment of honor crimes word for word. The laws of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and to a lesser extent Morocco still read like literal translations from the French, and Egypt's law drew on the same sources. Pakistan's case is parallel: its criminal law rests on the 1860 code the British imported to colonial India, which granted leniency to a husband who killed his wife due to "grave and sudden provocation." When Pakistan reformed this law in 1990 to bring it closer to the Shariah, its Federal Shariat Court declared that "according to the teachings of Islam, provocation, no matter how grave and sudden it is, does not lessen the intensity of crime of murder." Sadly, some Pakistani judges still reduce punishments by citing the very "grave and sudden provocation" wording inherited from the British.
The Shariah's position on the matter is clear and rests directly upon the rulings of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ: a husband who kills his wife or her lover, even if he catches them in the act, has committed homicide like any other murderer. When the Prophet ﷺ was asked what a husband should do upon finding his wife with another man, he responded that the husband could not kill him, and that no one could be punished unless the husband produced four witnesses who had seen the act. The Qur'an set down the procedure for spouses who suspected infidelity but lacked witnesses: the couple appear before a judge, the accuser swears to God five times that the accusation is true, and if the accused swears five times to their innocence, neither is punished but the couple is divorced (Qur'an 24:6-7).
Muslim scholars have long been alert to the dangers of violence against women. The nineteenth-century Yemeni scholar al-Shawkānī (d. 1834 CE) held that one reason men who murder women are liable to execution is precisely this phenomenon of male violence over supposed slights of honor, warning that "there is no doubt that laxity on this matter is one of the greatest means leading to women's lives being destroyed, especially in the Bedouin regions." So foreign is honor killing to the Shariah that scholars have been in substantial agreement for centuries. When confronted with a report that the Caliph ʿUmar had ruled that a man who killed a wife caught in adultery would not be punished, scholars could only conclude that he meant such a man would escape punishment from God in the Afterlife, for in this life the Shariah plainly deemed him a murderer. In the modern era, prominent scholars across sects, including the Sunnis Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī and ʿAbdallāh al-Ghumārī (d. 1993) and the late Shiite scholar Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlāllāh (d. 2010), have declared honor killing totally impermissible, as have a group of Canadian imams, the Muslim Council of Britain, and the American imam Zaid Shakir.
There is one glaring exception within the Shariah tradition. Ottoman law carved out space for the practice through a strange inversion of the Prophet's ﷺ ruling. The requirement of four witnesses to adultery, which was meant as a nearly impossible condition, was instead used by some Ottoman jurists to admit leniency, though even then it only exonerated men who killed a wife or daughter to prevent an act in progress. This contradicts the understanding voiced by Saʿd b. ʿUbāda, who, though initially resistant out of pride, said he would not touch such a man until he had brought four witnesses, and would not bring them "until that man had finished." This unusual Ottoman permissiveness helps explain why the Empire adopted the French law in 1858. Islam and the Shariah, rather than being the cause of these crimes, should be mobilized as arguments against them.
