Fighting Honor Crimes

Abstract

During 1999, a group of young Jordanians formed the Campaign to Eliminate So-called Crimes of Honor as a grass-roots signature-collecting effort intent on repealing the law that grants reduced penalties for crimes. Their efforts were ultimately defeated by a Parliament vote and quiet co-optation by the government. The Campaign's experience shows both the possibilities for civil society in the Arab world and the difficulties in raising an autonomous voice for democratic protest under conditions of limited political liberalization. The academic interest in civil society and its relationship to democratic governance springs from the wave of democratic change in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The trend slowly reached the study of Middle East politics, the delay largely reflecting the stability of authoritarian governments and practices in much of the region. For some, the Arab Middle East appears to be the glaring exception to the democratizing trend.1 The explanations for this exceptionalism vary from the structural to the cultural. Either the tradition of Oriental despotism represses Arab people, who are only too happy to applaud their oppressors,2 or the structure of Islam and its puritan enthusiasm prevent a Reformation like that of Europe.3 For others, Islamist movements, the strongest groups in civil society in the Arab world, challenge their governments in a distinctly un-civil manner, thus inviting repression from insecure security states. The 1999 Freedom House survey of Freedom in the World, although an imperfect measure of the complex concept freedom, sums it up neatly: while the year saw some evidence of modest democratic reforms in several Arab states, there remain no electoral democracies in the Arab world.4 Challenging these views, the lone voice of optimism in this discussion belongs to those touting the possibilities for the emergence of civil society in the Arab Middle East.5 Although few see immediate potential in the Arab world for the massive changes that have occurred elsewhere, these voices claim that an emerging, vibrant civil society much greater ground for optimism about democratic prospects in the Arab world.6 Citizens are becoming more active and are pressing their governments to be more responsive. Although associational life has always been rich in the Middle East, political liberalization, though limited in scope and to only a few countries, may provide these associations just enough range for action to open more space for political freedom. This article seeks to add another optimistic voice to this discussion, although one of guarded optimism. During the course of 1999, a unique civil society phenomenon emerged in the Arab, Muslim Middle East, specifically in Jordan: The Campaign to Eliminate Socalled Crimes of Honor. A group of young Jordanians formed this Campaign with the purpose, as the name suggests, of combating honor crimes in which women who are suspected of sexual deviance are killed by a male family member to protect the family's honor. The activists of the Campaign gathered the signatures of Jordanian citizens in an attempt to repeal the law that grants reduced penalties to men convicted of committing honor crimes: Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code. They argued that Article 340 provides legal cover for the murder of innocent women and has no place in civilized society. As of November 1999, they had collected over 15,000 signatures and created a storm of debate about a previously taboo subject. The state's response to the Campaign, however, shows that powerful obstacles remain to the emergence of an autonomous civil society in Jordan. The Campaign's activities have currently been slowed down by intervention from the palace, exposing the general limits of political liberalization from above and its specific limits in the case of Jordan. The actions and statements of the palace and the government reveal the manner in which the regime confronts societal challenges and ultimately co-opts independent action to preserve its status as ultimate arbiter of Jordanian politics. …