The girls (pictured, as kids) were Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13. They and their parents, Mohammed Shafia and Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and brother Hamid Mohammed Shafia, lived in Montréal and were originally from Kabul, Afghanistan. The woman found in the car was Rona Amir Mohammed, who Mr. Shafia initially claimed with his cousin. However, an e-mail from her sister Diba Masoomi, who lives in France, said she is actually his first wife. Masoomi also suggested that the deaths of the girls and Mohammed were an honor killing.

The girls' parents described Zainab Shafia as rebellious, and said she and her sisters used to take the car out without asking. Police, however, say this is untrue. Mohammed Shafia said he first noticed the car was missing when the family stopped at a hotel following a trip to Niagara Falls. However, the position of the car makes it unlikely that it was driven into the canal accidentally. It appears to have gone in backwards, and would have had to get past several obstacles to reach its final destination. "You'd really have to do some manoeuvering to get out to this spot," said a constable. "It's a very difficult place to drive into, and there would be no need to do so."

On the question of whether the victims died in an honor killing, police chief Stephen Tanner says,

Some of us have different core beliefs, different family values, different sets of rules; certainly these individuals, in particular the three teenagers, were Canadian teenagers who have all the freedom and rights of expression of all Canadians. Whether that was a part of the motive within the family - based on one of the girls' or more of the girls' behaviour - is open to a little bit of speculation, but combined with other investigative issues as well.

Christie Blatchford of Canada's Globe and Mail is less subtle, using the deaths as an opportunity for some pretty stereotypical social analysis. She says:

Young Muslim men behaving badly may not be encouraged, but even in the most backward parts of the Islamic world, they aren't killed for dating a blonde or drinking a beer. Girls and women are punished for even more minor offences (disobeying, not marrying the old bag of bones daddy chose, appearing in public unveiled, etc.), often with death.

In these parts of the planet, women don't matter; they are less than men; they don't really count: Thus, as a man, you can do with them as you like.

It's true that Montreal's child protection agency had been to the Shafia home three times a few months ago, after Zainab complained about her brother. Police say he was "harsh and authoritarian" with the girls. However, a relative says the family were not strict Muslims. University of Toronto law professor Anver Emon supports judicial use of the term "honor killing" when appropriate, but cautions that it should not be overused. He says,

From a social perspective, you don't want to criminalize a community by associating them with a particular, heinous act of violence.

If the Shafias did kill their daughters, we still don't know if it was religiously motivated — if the girls' exercise of "the freedom and rights of expression of all Canadians" was really what caused their deaths. Though Masoomi's e-mail message may turn out to be accurate, it's still premature to assume that, just because the family came from Afghanistan, their tragedy must be the result of culture clash.

Image via CBC News.

Father, Mother, Brother Face Murder, Conspiracy Charges [The Star]
Canal Victims Killed By Family: Police [CBC News]
Four Bodies Found In Submerged Car [Globe And Mail]
Family Members Charged With Murder In Submerged Car Case [Globe And Mail]
Were Deaths Of 4 Women A Matter Of 'Honour'? [The Star]
It's No Accident That Victims Were All Female [Globe And Mail]

Researchers are studying how to keep mouth bacteria that are harmless to adults from traveling through a pregnant woman's placenta and causing premature birth or miscarriage. • Today in Godless America news: the new House spending bill could fund abortions and help legalize marijuana in DC. • A Canadian study found that boys with "deviant friends" committed more crimes, and that "help provided by the juvenile justice system" predisposed them toward criminal acts in adulthood. • Syria has imposed a minimum sentence for honor killings, but that minimum is only two years. • The Mall of America will display a 100-pound cupcake on Saturday — somehow, this is a tribute to Sponge Bob Square Pants. When the display is over, the cupcake will be eaten by hogs. • But an even bigger cupcake — this one more than 330 pounds — was eaten by humans Thursday in Covent Garden. • Time to kill? Check out these six inconsistencies from the show Roseanne. • "Experts" are trying to get Cesar Chavez, Thurgood Marshall, and Anne Hutchinson left out of Texas social studies textbooks, saying they are "given too much attention." •

Take this absurd, insulting (they're laughing????) interview on last Friday's season premiere of Real Time with Bill Maher with Lebanese-American activist Brigitte Gabriel.


For starters, domestic violence is perpetrated by people — men and women — in this country and abroad of all nationalities, religions, cultures, economic classes, ages and skin colors. From Rihanna to Charlotte Hilton Andersen to Leslie Morgan Steiner to Nicole Brown Simpson, victims of domestic violence don't conform to a stereotype any more than their abusers do. Studies show that 1 in 4 American women and about 1 in 13 American men will be the victim of some sort of relationship violence in their lives. Twenty percent of all nonfatal violent crime experienced by women will come at the hands of their intimate partners in this country, and about one-third of female murder victims in a given year will die at the hands of an intimate partner. For far too many people in this country, domestic violence — as either a victim or a perpetrator — is a part of their lives. Period.

But, as Katy noted last week, there has been quite a rush to place the Hassan murder in the context of the Hassans' faith and/or culture. It has been called an "honor killing" despite scant public evidence that Mr. Hassan characterized it as such. Sobia, Krista and Fatemeh over at Muslimah Media Watch point out that the language used by most news outlets does not describe the murder as a "decapitation" but rather as a beheading, which underscores the popular sentiment that it was meted out as punishment (i.e., again with the "honor killing" meme) and has connotations of a judicial sentence. And all of this comes despite the fact that — as Kari Ansari in the Chicago Tribune and the women of Muslimah Media Watch both point out — decapitations aren't part of honor killings which aren't sanctioned in the Qur'an or under Shari'ah. Ansari says:

Islamic law does not allow a man to kill his wife, for any reason. There is nothing in the teachings of the faith that says a man should protect the honor of his stature in the community by committing violence against a woman.

While the problem of honor killings does still certainly exist in the Muslim and Hindu worlds, and in other patriarchal societies, we are addressing this problem on a worldwide basis, working to eradicate this cultural practice. [emphasis mine]

Much like female genital mutilation, Ansari is saying that honor killings, when they do occur, might be blamed on Islamic traditions but are in fact older, patriarchal cultural traditions onto which Islam has been superimposed. MMW's Krista adds:

Again, nothing that has been published in any of the news reports has given any indication that this was some kind of religiously-imposed punishment, or that Ms. Hassan had been said to violate any Islamic law. Even the most extreme and violent (mis)interpretations of Shari'ah don't allow for beheading a woman who divorces her husband. The way that Shari'ah gets talked about in relation to this case – usually without a direct link; the word just gets thrown in there to imply a connection – is really worrying, and puts the blame on Islam for something that would be clearly condemned within an Islamic legal framework.

What none of them mention, but I will, is that "honor killings" are far from universal in the Islamic world — which stretches around the globe and, like Christianity, is practiced by a variety of people in different countries and cultures, usually shaping it in individual ways to fit cultural needs and practices.

Nonetheless, the irony that this woman's murderer was also a man committed to a business venture which attempted to teach Americans and Canadians that Islam isn't so foreign or so scary or so decidedly alien has seemingly given too many people a pass to traffic in the very stereotypes the Hassans were trying to combat. And, let us be frank about why: it is a way of denying rhetorically that domestic violence and heinous crimes against women happen in our communities, in our neighborhoods, to our friends and our family. It is an easy way to explain away the horror of the crime, to minimize its significance to our shared society, to say-without-saying that it's just one of those things that happens to those people. Yet statistics tell us if you're in a room with 3 other women, one of you has been (or will be) the victim of domestic violence. One of every three women murdered in this country is murdered by an intimate partner. One in every five non-fatal assaults on a woman is committed by an intimate partner. That is the reality. It might not be that Muzzammil Hassan's religion left him insufficiently assimilated to our culture to let go of some supposed cultural tradition of wife-beating and wife-killing; rather, it is entirely possible that his religion was insufficient to keep him from assimilating the American tradition of doing just that.

MMW Roundtable on the Murder of Aasiya Hassan [Muslimah Media Watch]
Restraining Order Against Ignorance [Chicago Tribune]
Commission on Domestic Violence: Key Statistics [American Bar Association]

Related: The Shadow of Shame [Newsweek]

Earlier: Murder Of Muslim-American Woman Sparks Media Frenzy
Rihanna's Guide To The Criminal "Justice" System

• A new study shows that most female child molesters were victims of sexual abuse themselves. • Jordan has charged a man who allegedly killed his sister for having an extramarital affair. • Stephanie Pearl-McPhee calls herself the "yarn harlot" and keeps an eponymous blog about knitting. • Some conservative British politicians want to bar lesbians from receiving IVF treatment unless the potential child would have a "male role model" involved. • In the U.S., paid maternity leave is a luxury, not a right. "The United States provides the fewest maternity leave benefits in both length of leave and paid time off," when compared to nineteen equally rich countries, according to Time. • Overheard at the gay rodeo: "This is an all-American sport, and we are all-American people." • Queen Elizabeth tops the list of Live Science's 10 Most Powerful Modern Women Leaders. Also included: Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Angela Merkel, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.