By Lloyd Mackey

Today, I would like to explore allegations of honour killing in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan - and how that relates to Canada.

As regular OttawaWatch readers are aware, Edna and I recently spent several days in Jordan, visiting biblical sites and absorbing some of the nation's perspectives on peace, faith and international relations.

One of the questions put to our guide, a fairly devout Muslim with a deep appreciation for Jesus, was whether a Muslim man could marry a Christian woman. His reply was in the affirmative, with the added suggestion that, in Jordan, the man's imam (equivalent to a Christian pastor) would advise him to attend his wife's church, in order to better understand her faith.

When I recounted this outlook to some friends who were pretty aware of Middle East issues, one said that our Jordanian journalists' group should have asked one more question: "Can a Muslim woman marry a Christian man?"

So my eyes grew wide, this past Sunday (December 6), when I saw an Ottawa Citizen story by Richard Spencer, coming out of Amman, Jordan.

It was headlined: "Celebrity queen faces fight to end Jordan 'honour killings.' Politicians blocking tougher punishments for men who murder female relatives." It provides an oblique and indirect response to the question in the previous paragraph.

Queen Rania, the only wife of Jordan's King Abdullah, is described in the story as "an elegant symbol of progressive values for Arab women."

Rania is apparently on one side of the issue involving greater punishments for men guilty of honour killings. Opposite her are a number of the largely-Muslim country's "conservative social and religious leaders."

At stake, says Spencer, is "a political test case for reform in the Middle East, one that pits demands for greater democracy against the need to end the so-called honour killings of women."

I came away from Jordan with several assumptions about its governance which this story tends to bear out.

They include the fact that Jordan is neither a democracy nor a theocracy, but, basically, a benevolent monarchy.

That monarchy has been arguably proactive, in recent decades, in advancing progressive attitudes towards women. And, along with that, it has shown a willingness to encourage co-existence among the Abrahamic faiths of the Middle East.

Jordan has a parliament with an elected House and an appointed Senate. The elected House is not responsible to the people, as we understand it -- but a representative form of governance, such as Canada had before Confederation. It, in effect, provides advice to the monarchy.

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All of which provides an interesting wrinkle, with respect to the struggle between progressive royalty and the people's representatives.

The imams and other social leaders, although not a law to themselves or to the rest of the population as they would be in an Islamic theocracy, do carry considerable weight in advocating for religious values before the elected representatives.

Spencer's piece points out that, for Rania, "it is deeply offensive that the killing of women not only appears to be condoned, but also seems to be on the rise."

He points out that, in Jordan, the number of reported honour killings each year run between 20 and 25, and are apparently on the increase. And sentences remain as low as six months to three years in jail.

The particular test case involves the stabbing death of a 37-year-old mother of eight, at the hands of either two or three of her brothers, after a domestic dispute involving her husband.

Spencer notes: "[The woman's] crime was simple. Her husband complained that she had left the house in the middle of the night carrying her 16-month-old son . . . [Her killing made her] one of an estimated 5,000 women worldwide who will die this year in the name of honour -- with their killers likely to face little, if any, punishment."

While the case of a Montreal family, recent immigrants from Pakistan, has gained some attention in Canada, the Jordan story adds some context to the issue. The Canadian case developed when the immigrant man's first wife and three of his daughters were found dead in a submerged car, in the bottom of a canal lock near Kingston. The man, his second wife and a son have been charged with their murders.

Honour killings, with their potential cultural and religious implications, are likely to become more of a part of the Canadian scene. Hopefully, taking a look at the struggle in one particular Muslim nation might be helpful.

If Edna and I had not gone to Jordan, we might not have given this story a second thought. And, even though we missed hearing anything about it while we were there, we appreciated what we had learned about governance, the law and the culture in that 'peaceable kingdom.'

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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006), More Faithful Than We Think: Stories and Insights on Canadian Leaders Doing Politics Christianly (BayRidge Books, 2005) and Like Father, Like Son: Ernest Manning and Preston Manning (ECW Press, 1997). He can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.

December 9/2009