Honor Killing!

Women in societies bound by blind religious norms are treated as objects, and many even consider their killing to be justified

In the Al‑Nahrawan area of Baghdad, Iraq, a 15‑year‑old girl named Kawthar Bashar Al‑Husaynzawi was forced by her family to marry a drug‑addicted cousin. When she refused, the male members of her family brutally murdered her and later went out into the streets celebrating the killing — an incident that became internationally known through a report published by The Guardian in early June 2026.

Such honor killings occur frequently in several Muslim‑majority countries. If a woman marries someone of her own choice against the family’s wishes, or refuses to marry the man chosen by the family, the family carries out such killings. They believe it is their right. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq — in several such countries these incidents happen regularly. These occur in societies where women’s personal choice, desire, opinion, and rights are not recognized.

Sadly, the influential religious tradition of Islam — as interpreted in many contexts — does not regard women as full individuals. According to the Qur’an and Hadith, a woman’s testimony is valued as half of a man’s, and in some cases women’s testimony is not accepted at all. Allah and Prophet Muhammad are recorded as saying that women’s intellect and judgment are less than men’s. Many other Qur’anic verses and Hadith can be cited where women are portrayed as inferior, dishonored, neglected, subordinate to men, or treated as men’s property. Women are depicted as spoils of war, objects for male enjoyment, compared to donkeys, horses, and black dogs, described as harmful for men, and told that their only duties are childbirth and serving their husbands, with no independent identity of their own.

Given this position of women in traditional Islamic societies, how can society be changed without reforming these religious norms?

According to modern medical science and genetic research, marriage between close relatives or cousins (consanguineous marriage) greatly increases the risk of hereditary diseases. When parents are blood relatives, their genetic similarity increases the likelihood that harmful recessive genetic disorders — such as thalassemia, cystic fibrosis, blindness, deafness, and severe intellectual disabilities — will appear in their children. Scientific statistics show that in Pakistan and Middle Eastern countries, where cousin marriage has been common for generations, the number of children born with congenital defects and rare genetic diseases is significantly higher than in other parts of the world.

Because of these health risks, many modern countries have legally banned or discouraged cousin marriage. For example, in nearly half of U.S. states, marriage between first cousins is completely prohibited, and in many societies it is considered a form of incest. In most modern and civil societies, to ensure family well‑being, social diversity, and the physical and mental safety of future generations, marrying outside one’s bloodline is recognized as the only acceptable and healthy practice.

Yet the Prophet of Islam himself married cousins, and cousin marriage is widely practiced in Islamic tradition. As a result, many girls are forced — often out of fear of honor killing or family violence — to marry cousins they grew up considering as brothers. In this way, Islam makes people’s lives, especially women’s lives, extremely difficult.