Globe & Mail Article: Should The Canadian Government Ban South Asian & Muslim Families That Believe In Honour Killings From Immigrating To Canada?
The immigration debate we don’t want to have
The Parvez family leaves court: extremely troubling questions about integration The Canadian Press
Aqsa’s murder raises some extremely troubling questions about integration
After the sensational 2007 murder of Aqsa Parvez, the 16-year-old girl who disobeyed her traditional family, many Muslim girls in Canada discussed the story on Facebook. “That’s my story too,” some of them wrote.
This week, Aqsa’s father and brother pleaded guilty to strangling her in the basement of their Mississauga home. Although such crimes are rare in Canada, the culture and belief system of the Parvez family are not. That is why this tragedy raises some extremely troubling questions. What happens when large groups of immigrants cling to values and beliefs that diverge so sharply from the mainstream? And can we still rely on the passage of time to smooth the differences away?
The Parvez family history is not uncommon. Aqsa’s father and her oldest brother arrived in Canada in 1999 as refugees from Pakistan. In those days, it was easy to buy a ticket to Canada, claim refugee status at the airport and be accepted. The Parvez males came from a backward rural town with strict Islamic values and a culture of domestic violence. They brought these values with them. They also set off a wave of chain migration that continues to this day.
In 2001, Aqsa’s father, Muhammad, brought over his wife, Anwar Jan, and their seven other children. Aqsa was the youngest. All the older children were eventually married off to first cousins back in Pakistan, in unions arranged by their father. All the spouses have emigrated to Canada. Thirteen people lived in Aqsa’s house, including three sisters-in-law. Her father’s rule was absolute. The women wore traditional dress. None went past high school and none worked outside the home. They were completely dependent on their husbands.
Aqsa didn’t want to live like them. She wanted to wear Western clothes, go to the mall with her Western friends and get a part-time job. She left home many times, and had left again when she was intercepted by her brother, taken home and killed.
In rural Pakistan, and many other Muslim parts of the world, defiance of male power is as serious as defiance of Allah. Aqsa’s father and brother both told people they were justified in killing Aqsa simply because she was embarrassing the family in front of the neighbours. “This is my insult,” Muhammad told his wife. “My community will say you have not been able to control your daughter. She is making me naked.” As Aqsa’s mother explained to the police: “This is the way it’s done in Pakistani culture. Either they kill the girl or turn her out of the house.” Aqsa’s older sister, Shasma, told police that Aqsa had disrespected both her father and her religion, and that whoever did this to her sister should not go to jail.
Aqsa’s entire family was dedicated to resisting Western values, not adopting them. They were determined to cling to the ways of rural Pakistan. They believed that their community in Mississauga would understand what had been done. And they were right. At the local mosque, where kids of Aqsa’s age attend Islamic class, the kids agreed that she’d largely brought it on herself. The imam did not disagree with them.
Decades ago, illiterate Italians also immigrated to Canada, bringing with them a harsh, patriarchal culture where religion dominated all. But they didn’t marry cousins imported fresh from the old country. And so they began to raise their children differently.
In her new book, Nomad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave critic of Islam, has a lot to say about families like Aqsa’s. “Muslim women have to contend with much greater family control of their sexuality than women from other religious communities,” she writes. “This, in my view, is the single biggest obstacle to the path of successful citizenship – not just for women, but also for the sons they rear and the men those sons become.”
The “problem family,” she warns, will become more and more common unless Western democracies understand better how to integrate the newcomers into our societies – and how to turn them into citizens
National Post Article: Honour Killings May Continue To Rise In Canada.
Canada should expect rise in honour killings, expert says
Adrian Humphreys, National Post, with files from Canwest News Service · Thursday, Jun. 17, 2010
Aqsa Parvez is the latest of about 12 young women in Canada to have fallen victim to an honour killing since 2002, according to a professor who says the crime is on the rise here in accordance with patterns of immigration.
“We cannot say there’s a huge number of cases, but now the cases are increasing, and very soon we’ll have a problem in Canada,” said Amin Muhammad, a professor of psychiatry at Memorial University of Newfoundland who specializes in transcultural psychiatry.
Dr. Muhammad has studied honour killings in Canada for the Department of Justice for a forthcoming position paper. Early evidence from recent crimes suggests other names may one day be remembered alongside 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez of Mississauga.
Aqsa died at the hands of her father and brother after rejecting the cultural traditions and religious strictures of their Pakistan homeland.
On Wednesday, the pair were sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 18 years.
Earlier this week in Quebec, an Afghan mother was charged with attempted murder and assault after her 19-year-old daughter was stabbed after returning to her family home from a night out. Prosecutors are treating it as an honour crime.
In Ontario, police in Kingston suspect honour killing as a motive in the drowning deaths of three teenage sisters and an adult relative found inside a car submerged in the Rideau Canal last year. The girls’ mother and father and brother are charged with murder.
“Honour killing is a premeditated murder based on a cultural mindset that people bring with them. It is a wrong notion of perceived notion of dishonour to the family,” Dr. Muhammad said.
“They restore the honour of the family by eliminating the wayward person. That has been going on through the ages in many countries and now in the United States and the United Kingdom. And in Canada.
“There are a number of organizations which don’t accept the idea of honour killing; they say it’s a Western-propagated myth by the media, but it’s not true,” he said. “Honour killing is there, and we should acknowledge it, and Canada should take it seriously.”
While many recent cases in Western society involve Muslims, Dr. Muhammad said honour killings have also been committed in the name of Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity.
Dr. Muhammad said more careful background checks on would-be immigrants to Canada, looking particularly at incidents of past familial violence, would help alleviate the problem here, adding: “often this type of crime runs in the family.”
The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women and girls are slain in honour killings each year, most at the hands of family.
“Honour is a magic word, which can be used to cloak the most heinous of crimes,” says a 2002 UN report.
“The concept of honour is especially powerful because it exists beyond reason and beyond analysis. But what masquerades as ‘honour’ is really men’s need to control women’s sexuality and their freedom. These murders are not based on religious beliefs but, rather, deeply rooted cultural ones.”
But just as most Canadians shudder in disbelief at these stories, so too do the majority of Muslims.
Imam Zijad Delic of the Canadian Islamic Congress said there is “nothing Islamic” in taking a human life.
He calls it a personal issue more than a cultural one and suggested perpetrators are not unlike the white, Canadianborn mother who suddenly kills her children in that both are ultimately unable to deal with the challenges of domestic life.
While new Muslim immigrants struggling to integrate into Canadian society are often reluctant to talk openly about the problems they may be experiencing at home with their children, he said, the issues are being addressed in mosques and community centres.
“Last Friday, my sermon in Toronto was about Canadian-Muslim family dynamics and I had about 600 people listening,” he said.
In diaspora populations, honour crimes often stem from clashes between Westernized children and traditional parents, according to Diana Nammi, founder of the London-based International Campaign Against Honour Killings.
“When people are moving to another country, they leave everything they have, all their possessions, behind. But what they can bring with them is what they believe, their culture, their traditions, their religion,” she said.
“Unfortunately, they are choosing to show the worst part of that, and the worst and criminal part of that is controlling women.”
And cultural sensitivity in Canada can interfere with responding appropriately.
“In Canada, we have been extremely culturally sensitive, and that’s a good thing,” said Aysan Sev’er, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto Scarborough and author of an upcoming book on the subject.
“But in this particular case, we may have pushed the pendulum a little to the other side, in the sense that there are cultural components in these types of crimes which we cannot ignore.”
Ujjal Dosanjh, a Liberal MP and Canada’s most high-profile Sikh politician, called for a stronger outcry over such crimes.
“Political correctness prevents us from demanding that the cultural norms that justify such heinous practices as honour killings have no place anywhere in the world. We must never be too sensitive to call a spade a spade,” he said.
“In countries such as Canada, Britain and the United States, the lack of courage to offend, if necessary and appropriate, prevents us from examining why and how this evil persists.”
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