Honour Killings

Samina Yasmeen is director of the Centre for Muslim States and Societies and lectures in Political Science and International Relations in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, the University of Western Australia. This specialist in “political Islam” and “citizenship among immigrant Muslim women”, apparently believes that male-perpetrated domestic violence in the Australian Muslim community is not entirely the perpetrators’ fault.

Instead, in an article entitled ‘Australian Muslim Women and Islamophobia’ this Muslim academic contends that such a violence is associated with the ‘Islamophobic’ attitudes of the Australian people and resulting ‘negativity towards Islam and Muslims … [that] limits the capacity [of Muslim men] to be gainfully employed’.[3] I do not wish to be accused of distorting her words, so it is better for me to quote her directly:

Australian Muslim women experience both indirect and direct consequences of this creeping Islamophobia … But the negativity towards Islam and Muslims limits their capacity to be gainfully employed … [and] the inability to get a job or to secure a job … causes depression among men with an adverse impact on women as well … In extreme cases, it also increases the incidence of male-perpetrated domestic violence. In less extreme cases, the sense of powerlessness linked to employment difficulties prompts men to assume a more authoritarian and restrictive approach vis-à-vis women in their families who are put under pressure not to engage with the wider community.[4]

Please correct me if I am mistaken to assume that this amounts to an excuse of male-perpetrated domestic violence in Muslim families. Such a negativity towards Islam in Australia, she says, provokes ‘depression among [Muslim] men’ to such a level that it ‘increases the incidence of male-perpetrated domestic violence’. HT : BCF