Rana Husseini

(November 2009)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Rana Husseini was a hungry young journalist in search of a cause when she was assigned a story in 1994 that would change her life.  A 26-year-old working the crime beat for The Jordan Times, Husseini covered the murder of a 16-year-old named Kifaya, fatally stabbed by her brother to cleanse her family’s honor.  Her sin?  Being raped by another brother, then divorcing an older man after a forced marriage.

Kifaya, sadly, was far from the only victim.  So-called honor killings were a largely accepted part of the way of life.  Husseini devoted herself to tirelessly covering the previously ignored cases, pushing for prosecution of the killers (who were often dismissed with the softest of sentences) and increased public awareness.  She was both reporter and activist, writing the facts of the tragic cases in The Jordan Times and pounding the pavement to further the message, putting pressure on government officials and leading grassroots efforts to march and sign petitions.  Her work resonated on the streets - and resonated afar, bringing a spotlight to Jordan and to the widespread existence of honor killings (which were some cases all but encouraged by law).  In 1998, she won the Reebok Human Rights Award for her work; numerous other accolades would follow as her mission continued.

In her new book, Murder in the Name of Honor, Husseini digs into the roots and reasons behind a particularly tragic form of violence against women – one that claims 5,000 lives a year.  The problem is not confined to a single country, region or religion, and European and American readers may be surprised by the chapters addressing their own countries.  Along with the analysis and reporting of the crimes, Husseini includes substantial detail of her own involvement in a grassroots campaign to raise awareness.

While on her Stateside book tour, Husseini spoke with The Red Alert about her ongoing campaign to raise awareness, the slow march of progress, and the role that America – and the average American – can play in protecting women around the globe.

Do you remember when it became clear that the work you were beginning was really reaching people and making a difference?

It wasn’t a specific time as much as it was just starting to take messages from readers expressing that they wanted the government to take some action regarding this issue.  A lot of researchers and journalists came and wanted to interview me to get to know this issue.  I would say that would be in the mid-90s when this happened.

How often did you fear for your safety?

I did go to some places where I wasn’t welcome, and I received some emails and so forth.  But I believe in fate and I believe that if something is going to happen, it will happen.  So I wasn’t fearing for my safety.  I was just determined to do what I wanted to do, just because it was right.  It doesn’t contradict any religion or human rights values – on the contrary.  I just took it from there.  I didn’t really think about it.  If you sit and fear things, you’ll never accomplish anything.

In the book, you describe yourself as being naïve when you first started reporting on so-called honor killings.  To what extent did you know about the issue beforehand?

I didn’t have any idea that I was going to move on this issue.  I was studying [in the States] and I knew that when I went back, I wanted to do a woman’s issue, but it never occurred to me that it was going to be that issue.  I never recounted a murder or crime happening within in my family or in my neighborhood, even, or with my friends.  Maybe it was something that I had in the back of my mind, but I never really [knew about] these crimes until I was faced with this very sad and shocking story.

Readers can be numbed by bad news over time, whether it’s continued stories of war abroad or even, here in L.A., stories of urban violence.  As you reported on case after case, what was your strategy for keeping readers from growing numb to the awful repetition of the cases?

Yeah, I didn’t want them to be numb – I wanted them to react.  And they did react.  My strategy was to just keep reporting every case I heard about it, with all its details of the crimes and the courts.  I wanted people to know that this was happening and that they had to do something about it.  So my strategy was to just continue to report each and every case; even if I missed a case, I would follow up later on.  This has been my strategy, in the hopes that people would get to know the problem, to raise people’s awareness, to motivate and mobilize people – and it did work in the end.

You have expressed sympathy for some of the killers, who are also victims in a sense sometimes.  The book introduces several of these men who feel trapped by their cultures or forced by their families.  Does that mean there’s room for leniency in sentencing, or would you prefer to see them treated as premeditated murderers operating without those external pressures?

Any person who kills a woman should get a sentence just like killing any other person.  A woman’s life is worth more than three months or six months or one year in prison.  They do commit these murders under social pressure and family pressure and the way they were brought up and so forth, but this does not excuse them from a high sentence.  The reason I chose these people and to show that they are trapped was basically for other men to know that this is not the right way to do it.  You will never live in peace within yourself.  The way to solve a problem is not by ending someone’s life.  It’s not by turning a normal human being into a killer.  That doesn’t end it.  On the contrary, when you murder, new problems start, including problems with the defendants themselves.

How can the United States play a positive role with this issue abroad?  In the book, there are a few instances when it seems like the best thing the U.S. Embassy could have done would have been to have just kept its mouth shut and avoid furthering the perception that the grassroots effort against honor killings was being influenced or steered by the West.

I think that based on our experience and what we’ve seen with the resistance – not only with this topic, but with many other topics – is for any country, including the United States, that wants to tackle this issue to tackle it from a global perspective, because violence against women is an international phenomenon.  Killing a woman happens every day.  In the U.S., there are women being killed every day by their spouses and partners.  It’s a very high number.  Women get killed everywhere for these reasons:  for intimacy, for love, for jealousy, for revenge, for hatred, for honor, for many things.  My advice for any country that wants to address this issue is to do it from a global perspective and not to point a finger at any country or any religion or any class.  Talk about it from a global perspective.  There are many issues: so-called honor killings, forced marriages, trafficking, female genital mutilation.  For the past six or seven years, there have been many projects that were supported by the U.S. or Britain or NGOs or European countries.  And now they’re trying to play a low profile.  It’s not important to advertise your support of the project as much as what you do in the project and who benefits and how you treat people and how you train people.  I think things will change in the future with the U.S. because the U.S. has been trying to change its image for the longest time. 

Everything is politicized in America these days, including human rights and basic equality issues.  When you were assembling your movement, were you pulling from a wide cross-section or was there some sort of partisan divide?

True, and specifically women’s issues are always politicized everywhere – in the U.S. and Europe and our part of the world.  These issues are always used to bargain.  But I think if people continue to fight for a cause, they continue to raise awareness, eventually you are going to force your government to move and fight it.  That’s what we did in Jordan.  We kept talking about it.  We kept talking about the murders.  Recently, in October, the criminal court passed the harshest sentence ever against a man who killed his sister in the name of family honor.  They gave him 15 years.  This is the highest sentence a man in Jordan has received.  If we hadn’t done all the mobilization, we wouldn’t have expected anything from the government.  It has to come from the people.  You have to try to work on it from all aspects.  But women can never expect anyone to give them their rights.  They always have to fight for it.  Even in the U.S., women have fought for their rights.  This has been the case all over the world.

After the recent heartbreaking case in Arizona, there was actually a charge from some in the right-wing media here that the mainstream media avoided covering the story because they were skittish about dealing with Muslim culture and risking offense.  Do you think that’s been a fair charge?

To be honest, I’m not sure about that.  I’ve seen it on CNN.  It was on several media outlets.  If they are being more culturally sensitive, that would be good because, as you’ve said, there are things that are used in a political matter.

I think there is the risk that these stories can be used as a cultural weapon – that an incident like the one in Arizona can be twisted to support the notion that there’s a cultural war happening, or as proof that another culture is inferior to the reader’s own.

True.  The problem with the media here is that every time a Muslim man or Arab man commits a crime, he’s immediately identified by his race or religion.  Meanwhile, you don’t see this happening when it’s, let’s say, an “average” American man who kills his wife.  They don’t come and say “Oh, this American Christian…”  The way that Arabs and Muslims are portrayed in the media is not helping.

For a young American, for instance, who reads Murder in the Name of Honor and feels personally detached from the world that’s depicted in the book, what can they do with their outrage and shock?

When you’re talking about the younger generation, I think they have to tell their peers and discuss it.  Violence is also committed by the younger generation; it’s not only significant for the older generation.  I want people to get angry and I want it to be a warning sign for abused women who think they are alone.  It’s an eye-opener for everyone.  It’s very important to know about the problem in its proper context.