Muslim Honour-Preservation: February Roundup

It's been a typically busy month for defenders of muslim honour, but thankfully muslims remain ever vigilant against the possible sullying of their good name and are always ready to take decisive action whenever their honour requires defending. What honourable fellows they are!

Some 'highlights' -

A father killed his wife and four daughters in their sleep because he could not bear them adopting a more westernised lifestyle, an inquest heard yesterday.

Mohammed Riaz, 49, found it abhorrent that his eldest daughter wanted to be a fashion designer, and that she and her sisters were likely to reject the Muslim tradition of arranged marriages.

On Hallowe'en last year he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced home in Accrington, Lancs, and set it alight.

Caneze Riaz, 39, woke and tried to protect her three-year-old child, Hannah, who was sleeping with her, but was overcome by fumes. Her other daughters, Sayrah, 16, Sophia, 13, and Alisha, 10, died elsewhere in the house..

Daily Telegraph


Three Palestinian women have been murdered in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, Palestinian Authority security officials and local residents said.

The bodies of the women were discovered early Tuesday in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. One of the victims, a 35-year-old mother of four, was found near the beach. She had been shot at least 13 times in different parts of her body, said a PA security official.

The other two women were killed separately and their bullet-riddled bodies were discovered late Monday.

The security official said he did not rule out the possibility that the three women were killed by male relatives in the context of what is known as "honor killings." Such killings are not unusual among Palestinians and many Arab countries. At least 25 women are murdered every year in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for "bringing shame" on their male relatives.

Jerusalem Post


A Pakistani minister and woman’s activist was shot dead Tuesday by an Islamic extremist for refusing to wear the veil.

Zilla Huma Usman, the minister for social welfare in Punjab province and an ally of President Pervez Musharraf, was killed as she was about to deliver a speech to dozens of party activists, by a "fanatic", who believed that she was dressed inappropriately and that women should not be involved in politics, officials said.

Usman, 35, was wearing the shalwar kameez worn by many professional women in Pakistan, but did not cover her head...

Fox News


NBC News Middle East bureau chief Richard Engel recently appeared on Tim Russert’s program on CNBC to talk about the "unseen Iraq." He told the story of an Iraqi family whose daughter had been kidnapped. When the leader of the kidnappers called the father on the telephone to get ransom, he put the daughter on the phone to show that she was still alive. The father asked her if they had raped her. Crying, she said yes. The father told the daughter to put the kidnapper on the phone again. The father said to the kidnapper: "I don’t want her." So the kidnappers killed her.

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