In Honor of Fadime
Unni Wikan
University of Chicago press
What drives a man to murder his child-for honor’s sake?
What makes a mother testify in favor of a man who has murdered their child-for honor’s sake?
You will come to understand, if I have managed to do what I endeavored: explain honor and honor killing. My motivating force was the murder of Fadime Sahindal in Uppsala, Sweden, on January 21, 2002. Fadime’s fate left me no peace. Of Kurdish origin, she had lived in Sweden from the age of seven until her death at age twenty-five. A luminous example of courage and integrity, she had done more than anyone to warn against the failure of Sweden’s integration policies in regard to persons like her parents. She had tried to make the nation understand that “honor”-as practiced in some communities-can be a deadly affair. She had warned that she might be killed for choosing her own love in life, Swedish-Iranian Patrik Lindesjö. But she was defeated when she least expected it-almost four years after the death threats against her had subsided.
.....
Unni Wikan is professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. She is the author of numerous books, including Behind the Veil in Arabia; Managing Turbulent Hearts; Tomorrow, God Willing; and Generous Betrayal—all published by the University of Chicago Press. In Honor of Fadime is a revised and extended, partly rewritten, version of her book For ærens skyld, which was first published in Norwegian in 2003.
INTRODUCTION
What drives a man to murder his child-for honor’s sake?
What makes a mother testify in favor of a man who has murdered their child-for honor’s sake?
You will come to understand, if I have managed to do what I endeavored: explain honor and honor killing. My motivating force was the murder of Fadime Sahindal in Uppsala, Sweden, on January 21, 2002. Fadime’s fate left me no peace. Of Kurdish origin, she had lived in Sweden from the age of seven until her death at age twenty-five. A luminous example of courage and integrity, she had done more than anyone to warn against the failure of Sweden’s integration policies in regard to persons like her parents. She had tried to make the nation understand that “honor”-as practiced in some communities-can be a deadly affair. She had warned that she might be killed for choosing her own love in life, Swedish-Iranian Patrik Lindesjö. But she was defeated when she least expected it-almost four years after the death threats against her had subsided.
Fadime’s death was a Swedish tragedy, a Swedish trauma. As I was watching her funeral service in the stately old cathedral in Uppsala, televised live on Swedish TV, I realized I had no choice: I must try to understand; I must do my utmost to comprehend what was at stake. Why was she not saved? What honor was there in murder? And what could be done in the future to avoid such tragedies?
I was no neophyte to the issue. I had worked for years in the Middle East and was accomplished within the field of research on “honor and shame,” as it was called. But the fate of Fadime Sahindal (pronounced Fah-‘dee-meh Shah-‘een-dahl), and the fates of others who had gone before her-like Sara and Pela, both Swedish residents-challenged my powers of comprehension. In all my research in the Middle East I had never come across actual instances of honor killing. Like many other scholars, I believed honor killing to belong to rural backward communities and to be on its way out. When it appeared in my own backyard, in Scandinavia, I was unsettled.
Fadime’s case haunted me. I had to understand why she was liquidated, and what people meant when they said, as some did, “Her father had no choice; it was the last resort.”
How can killing one’s own daughter be “the last resort”? “The final solution,” the father called it in court. “The problem is over now.”
I hope you will come to understand what lies behind such seemingly absurd and horrible statements. And that they do not come from a monster. A human being is speaking: a man in deep despair, who feels betrayed by society and by “this daughter, who is dead.” A person for whom Fadime felt real compassion. “Poor Daddy,” she said three times on the evening she was killed.
We will meet a man who is incapable of finding any way out of his shame, humiliation, disgrace-except by taking a life. A man who was made a laughing-stock for all the world to see, as he experienced it. “World opinion”-världsopinionen-is crucial to the story that follows.
Nowadays, shame and humiliation seem distant notions to men and women in the West. If we ever feel disgraced, we prefer trying to ignore it. Offense and humiliation are familiar enough to most of us, but to let on is to admit defeat. Everything centers on being in control of one’s life, or at least to seem to be in control.
But in many regions of the world you can find communities where insult, humiliation, and shame are central ideas and common actual experiences. In some places, shame is too weak a word. Dishonor is the demon, the ultimate disgrace, the point of no return-except if you act to avenge your honor. Fadime’s murder served such a purpose.
Fadime’s story can help us to take a step along the road to understanding what shame and dishonor mean in specific communities- without stigmatizing. Fadime stepped into the breach when she tried to create understanding for people like her parents. This book is written in that spirit and with the same goal.
Fadime’s story carries my narrative. I want to cast light on her life-and death-and to honor her memory.
But I also have more far-reaching intentions: to contribute to our understanding of honor and honor killing and, among other things, try to clarify why there is no basis for linking honor killing to Islam, as some people did “after Fadime.” That she was murdered only four months after 9/11 did little to alleviate a seeming connection between Islam and honor killing.
But honor killing is an act based on a set of ideas that occurs across the whole spectrum of religious belief, as well as among nonbelievers. Honor killings have been reported to take place among Christians as well as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists, and Confucians, but only in specific local communities. It is custom and tradition, rather than religion, that is the driving force, although religion can be used, and is sometimes being used, to justify honor killings.
Honor killing is also not an easy way out, even in communities where it is deeply rooted. Many try to prevent it. Alternative ways to avert dishonor have been developed to avoid acts of violence or loss of life. I describe some such alternatives and also the grief and despair felt by many who are close to the victim when the “final solution” nonetheless takes place.
Honor killing is contested, even in communities where it is part of time-honored tradition. Many are actively at work, openly or in secret, to save human lives and secure humane values. So too in Fadime’s own community. Her death was tragic for her mother and sisters and many others-yes, even for her mother, who, in the end, chose to support Fadime’s father in court. I hope to cast some light on the fate of the mother.
Murdering one’s own daughter-or a close family member-for the sake of honor is not a tradition that was ever part of European codes of honor, according to the historical record. But it is so now. Honor killing, by which is meant murder of a family member for the sake of collective honor, has become a part of European reality. Fadime spent much of her life speaking out against such traditions and alerting the liberal-minded Swedes to the danger such codes pose to human rights and social justice. Her stature today in Sweden, and beyond, is testimony to her being ahead of her time. Honor-based violence and honor killings may have come to stay in the new multicultural Europe. But lives can be saved and needless suffering avoided if we come to understand better what “honor” is all about and how it can be given a new meaning and used to further humane values.
Fadime has become an icon in Sweden, a symbol of a liberty-loving person who sacrificed all-even her life-for what she held dear. But Fadime was more than that: she was a full-fledged human being, who felt forced into making an inhuman choice and became weighed down by the path she had chosen. It meant cutting herself off from her family as the price she had to pay for a life with the man she loved. When he died, a year later, she was utterly alone. Her friends became her new family. But they could not replace her mother and her little sister, whom Fadime had looked after like a mother. Fadime returned to be with them, and paid with her life.
Contrary to what became a widely held opinion-that Fadime was killed because she loved Patrik-my analysis suggests that other circumstances were decisive. We cannot escape the questions raised by the timing. Why was she allowed to live for almost four years after Patrik’s death in a traffic accident (1998)? She did not have a secret identity: she had never gone into hiding, and she lived openly. She was murdered only a week before she was due to leave for Kenya, where she planned to stay for six months. Why was she killed at that point? Why was her murder so long delayed?
Only the murderer, together with any accomplices he may have had, knows the answer. But my analysis-based on a painstaking examination of all the transcripts of the police interviews and records of the proceedings of two trials, my talks with individual family members, and my general ethnographic knowledge of shame and honor-shows that several circumstances played a role. Fadime had defied her family, and not only in her choice of love and her claim to independence. She also violated the ultimatum for life she had been given: exile or death. Exile is a long-established solution in some communities, including Turkish Kurdistan, which was Fadime’s family homeland. If your behavior has dishonored your family, you are forced into exile, and that “exempts” other members of the family from the obligation to kill you.
Fadime-Swedish by now-hardly understood the meaning of exile. Besides, she did not accept it, and soon returned to enemy territory. From her place of study, her “exile” in Östersund, she traveled to Uppsala to meet secretly with her mother and two sisters. In this way Fadime managed to have a share of family life during the last year of her life.
But she was playing with fire. Exiles may be shown mercy, but they cannot demand rights. Fadime threatened to split the system apart from inside. She was breaking every rule in the game, not only those concerned with sexual honor and choice of husband. She violated her exile too, and that after exposing the family to scorn and criticism in the media. Fadime had become a multiple offender, from a certain point of view. Fadime’s tragedy cannot be understood apart from that. This is not to make less of it, just to make it easier to comprehend.
Simple explanations of human fates make for strong dramatic effects, for easily understandable characters. Here the drama is about the perpetrator and his victim-the beauty and the beast. The media presentation of Fadime’s story imposed a dramatic structure on it. This is how we will come to remember her, and it is how we should remember her: as a beautiful young woman fighting a heroic battle, putting her own life on the line.
We do not think less of what she did because we realize that, in the heat of the battle, she caused severe pain to people she cared for. Fadime’s story is also the story of a family that saw itself as under siege and actually was besieged by the media’s use of Fadime, and hers of them.
Fadime went for the limelight because she hoped it would save her life. She also hoped that by speaking out and giving the problem a human face, she could help other girls in her situation. My analysis suggests that her strategy weakened her chances of survival. In many ethnic communities the ultimate disgrace is to see the internal councils of the family exposed. Shame does not damage the family honor until it has become public knowledge. Dishonor is not a fact that has to be dealt with until “everybody knows”-and in Fadime’s case, her family felt that their dishonor was even trumpeted in front of Parliament. Fadime gave a talk in the Old Parliament Building on November 20, 2001. Two months later she was dead.
The complex reasons for the murder do not make it more forgivable, only more understandable. The road to insight into why people are driven to take a life for the sake of honor must take into account a worldview in which the privacy and peace of family life are alpha and omega and public exposure is the most extreme kind of shame. Fadime’s tragedy forces us to realize that our multicultural society now includes people with ideas about what is “private” which dictate that publicity should be avoided, whatever the cost. Shame can be coped with as long as it stays hidden. Humiliation can be endured, but only in privacy. Family conflicts can be resolved, but only behind closed doors and through mediation. It did not work in Fadime’s case; no one stepped forward to take on the responsibility. But afterward many commentators, including members of the Kurdish community, pointed out that the situation could have been handled in this way.
Swedish jurisprudence is very special in one respect: the records of police interviews are available to the public. I had access to all the witness statements in Fadime’s case, including those made by individuals who later withdrew from testifying in court or who were not summoned. These documents, some three hundred pages of text, have allowed me to see the case from many different points of view and have proved an invaluable source of insight.
There have been times when I faltered because I came to feel too much sympathy for people I didn’t want to sympathize with. I wanted to be fully and wholly on Fadime’s side, and never expected to find it difficult. I am still wholeheartedly on Fadime’s side-but with much better understanding of the situations of some of her nearest friends and foes. In that sense I have moved a great step forward in my understanding of honor and honor killings.
I had set out convinced that honor killing-when it comes to taking the life of your own child-cannot be understood unless you belong to a community where such a tradition prevails. I believed this despite being an anthropologist with thirty years of experience in cross-cultural understanding and many years of fieldwork in the Middle East and Asia. I thought then, and I still do, that there are limits to understanding when it comes to grasping something emotionally and not just intellectually. However, through my work on this book, I am now able to comprehend honor killing. I hope to share my insights with you, the reader, but must go about the process gradually. To match my own struggles with the material and my slow progress toward understanding, I will take you with me step by step. Sometimes it may seem that we are going round in a circle, sometimes even contradicting ourselves. But there will be a resolution, and, when all is said and done, my hope is that you will agree with me: yes, it was worthwhile to follow this route!
I started to write in the middle of February 2002, and the first draft was finished barely four months later. During that time I had been sitting through two trials of Fadime’s father. The first one, at Uppsala District Court, took place between March 12 and 15, and the second, after an appeal, was at the High Court in Stockholm between May 22 and 25. It was all very efficient, but efficiency was of no advantage to the researcher: I had hardly digested the trial in the lower court before the appeal court hearings made much of my understanding collapse. One set of explanations flatly contradicted another. The murderer backtracked, and so did his wife.
I choose to record this as it happened, letting the reader follow the collapse and the turnaround of my ideas. It is part of the story and all about strategy-ways and means of getting the better of the legal system. The code of honor stands against the rule of law.
Some might find my account too crude, too naked. Should I not have explained more, guided the reader throughout? Possibly. But the danger was that reaching the goal would become so easy that valuable insights to be gained by stepwise progress might be lost. If readers draw conclusions different from my own, nothing is lost. On the contrary, it is important that the material should speak for itself, without my didactic voice-over. The facts are still there, held within the shape and structure of the book, and impossible to avoid.
Another possible objection is that I have exploited people who made highly personal, often emotional statements to the police. They may not have given a thought to-or even been aware of-the possibility that the records of what they said would become publicly available and therefore open to the kind of use I have made of them. This objection is definitely important, but all the same, I have chosen to make use of my right to access and work on these documents. Part of my reason is that they are unique: they give insights into the inherent problems of honor and honor killings that cannot be found anywhere in literature on the subject. One example of this is the testimony of Fadime’s little sister. It is, in character and content, unlike anything I have seen reported and carries a message about the fate of a child who is hurt when an honor killing breaks a family apart. A child who is desperately trying to grasp that her father is a murderer, her mother swayed by a storm of emotions, her brother a possible accomplice to murder-could he be?-and her much-loved big sister damned for causing Father so much grief that his despair drove him to kill her.
Women must not be present at honor killings, my colleague Veena Das says. Das, a highly regarded Indian anthropologist, expresses amazement at the fact that Fadime was killed in the presence of her mother and sisters. In Das’s experience in India and parts of Pakistan, this is unheard of.
Fadime’s thirteen-year-old sister is also surprised that her father could act as he did in front of her, but she comforts herself with the belief that he did not know she was there. She grapples with the thought that she could have prevented the killing. Like most children, she takes adults’ problems very seriously and feels responsible. And she is overwhelmed by fear of being left all alone. After Fadime is shot and her mother runs out to get help, the girl panics: is Mummy going to kill herself now?
The teenager tells it all to the police, clearly and precisely-a testimony in the crude language of a thirteen-year-old. She is angry about the media exploitation of Fadime and Fadime’s exploitation of the media, and she is angry with the police as well. She doesn’t believe that they are taking her seriously: “I know it! I know it. It isn’t just something I think! I know!” she insists, and protests wildly against the way her family is presented in the media. She wants to know why no one has contacted her. Why has nobody let her speak out?
Fadime has become an idea, an icon. But she is much more than that, precisely because of her humanity and her compassion. Fadime came to understand how much pain she had caused her family by using the media in the way she did in 1998, even though it was out of pure survival instinct. Later she reined herself in. There is evidence that she regretted the way she had been going all out. This is one aspect of “Fadime’s case.” It claimed many victims, also persons who saw themselves as having been degraded, directly or indirectly, by the way they had been represented in the media.
Inescapably, every statement derives meaning from its context, and so the narratives we tell, about ourselves and others, start with our situation in life. Words Fadime spoke to the media at a time when her entire family, including her mother, had abandoned her, and her father and brother threatened to kill her, later became hard to bear. Her regret came too late. The media are merciless to that extent: what is said is said. Fadime’s mother will have to live with the public’s knowing that she told her children that all Swedish girls are whores. Fadime’s little sister has seen her telephone gossip as an eight- and nine-year-old circulated in the press. The young girl’s protests deserve to be heard. That is why she has been given a lot of space in this book.
Fadime is great enough for us to make use of her story to think through and reflect on what it means to see one’s family portrayed as “monstrous,” how this portrayal hurts the innocent, and what can be done to spotlight oppression of and violence against individuals without branding a whole community. As we do this, we act in Fadime’s spirit. She wanted inclusiveness and rejected segregation. She wanted integration, not marginalization. She wished to resist anti humanitarian and totalitarian powers without condemning those who themselves were victims-even when, in their turn, some of them were complicit.
To the last, she longed to be reunited with her family-even her father and brother who had threatened to take her life.
Unni Wikan
In Honor of Fadime
munder and shame
University of Chicago press
University of Chicago press
In Honor of Fadime
munder and shame
Unni Wikan
Translated by Anna Paterson
The university of chicago press Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2008 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2008
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5
Originally published as For ærens skyld: Fadime til ettertanke
© Universitetsforlaget 2003.
This translation has been published with the financial support of Norla.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wikan, Unni, 1944–
[For ærens skyld. English.]
In honor of Fadime : murder and shame / Unni Wikan ;
translated by Anna Paterson. - Revised and extended,
partly rewritten version.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-89686-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-89686-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Sahindal, Fadime. 2. Honor killings-Sweden. 3. Family
Violence-Sweden. 4. Kurds-Sweden. I. Title.
HV6197.S8W5513 2003
306.87-dc22
2007033557
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for
Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-89686-1 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-89686-2 (cloth)
