Growing Up with Tribal Rules

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a brilliant campaign speech before the U.S. Congress for elections in his home country two weeks away, trying to improve on his eroding election tallies in recent times and doing his best to prevent any agreement on nuclear development between the Western world and Iran, somewhere on the other side of the world, in the primitive reaches of Islamic fundamentalism, there is a microcosm of cruel tribalism that reminds us of the wide divide between our civilizations.

In too many Islamic nations, from Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan to ISIS-conquered lands, tribalism has seeped into the practice of Islam such that it often is perceived as something that is inherently a religiously-based mandate of the Muslim faith itself. Indeed, tribalism has often embraced Islam, and tribal leaders and their clerics have frequently taken it upon themselves to interpret the faith to include their own personalized tribal dictates. Islam was born of the desert, one of the most unforgiving environments on earth. The rough and rugged terrain of Afghanistan and the Pakistani Tribal Districts offer equally harsh environments.

Living in these environments has generated strict rules, effectively powerful dictates that control emotional and sexual mores to minimize conflict and control tribal unity. Women, seen as chattel in mediaeval times, are still viewed as the source of potential erosion for the cohesion of the family unit. And in harsh climes, the family unit has been viewed as the cornerstone of desert survival. Life in many of these backward nations hasn’t changed that much over the centuries. The weapons have become more sophisticated, and social media and telecommunications have had their impact as well, to be sure, but the emotional view of the world often remains as it was hundreds of years ago.

As punishing drought has decimated too many farms in places like Syria and Iraq, as the rest of the world seems to have abandoned those starving mouths, severe extremism, drawing on the most extreme view of desert Islam, has resurrected the harshest values imaginable. Many isolated and severe tribal units haven’t remotely embraced the humanism that defines how we in the West look at the world. Human rights are deeply subordinated to the survival of the family in an environment that few in the West have ever experienced.

Unfortunately, the sacrificial lambs under this harsh tribal philosophy are all-too-often women. There is no historical or environmental explanation that justifies such harsh treatment of women to virtually any believer in human rights on earth. Yet we see naïve girls, born and raised in Muslim families in Europe, willing to submit themselves blindly to this harsh and marginalizing culture. They seem honor-bound to make this inane journey into an ISIS world they simply cannot contemplate.

We also see legal systems attempting to impose modern humanizing laws on tribes that equally cannot contemplate why those statutes have any right to alter ancient established rules that have preserved their families for centuries. Nothing brings his dichotomy home more than the notion of imposing total control of women, their individual rights and their choice of marital partners… at the risk to women who stray from their family’s dictates (which brings extreme shame to the family) of being murdered.

They’re called “honor killings,” a notion that is really hard to understand from a Western perspective, and while illegal in most of these underdeveloped nations, enforcement is at best spotty. Those in these primitive families believe that they are mandated to effect such killings against daughters, sisters and wives who have violated tribal/family dictates regardless of the legal consequences to the perpetrators.

Western charities have established shelters in many of these primitive societies to shelter women who have escaped their families, often to pursue romantic choices against their family’s clear choices to the contrary, from becoming victims of such honor killings. The best examples can be seen in Afghanistan: “These shelters, almost entirely funded by Western donors, are one of the most successful — and provocative — legacies of the Western presence in Afghanistan, demonstrating that women need protection from their families and can make their own choices. And allowing women to decide for themselves raises the prospect that men might not control the order of things, as they have for centuries. This is a revolutionary idea in Afghanistan — every bit as alien as Western democracy and far more transgressive.

“As the shelters have grown, so has the opposition of powerful conservative men who see them as Western assaults on Afghan culture. ‘Here, if someone tries to leave the family, she is breaking the order of the family and it’s against the Islamic laws and it’s considered a disgrace,’ said Habibullah Hasham, the imam of the Nabi mosque in western Kabul and a member of a group of influential senior clerics. ‘What she has done is rebelling.’

“The opposition comes not only from conservative imams, but also from within the Afghan government itself. Lawmakers came very close in 2011 to barring the shelters altogether and in 2013 nearly gutted a law barring violence against women. They yielded only after last-minute pressure from the European Union and the United States.

“Now, as the Western presence in Afghanistan dwindles, this clash between Western and Afghan ideas of the place of women means many of the gains women made after the 2001 invasion are at risk… Although the Taliban’s harsh restrictions on women alienated many Afghans and helped rally foreign support for the war, the idea that women must submit to men remains widely held.” New York Times, March 2^nd.

We aren’t going to like the backlash, and there is little that we can do but wait for education and modernity to work their lethargic transitions over a period of time that will drag out into the distant future. We can expect attacks against these shelters and horror-stories continue to unfold. But can make sure that these practices are clearly presented to the court of world opinion until the shame is not on families for not killing female family members… but for believing that honor killings are remotely honorable. Religion itself must condemn such murders.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the world is harsh, harsher still if we do not shine a bright light on the horrible, the intolerable and the unthinkable.