Yesterday I heard a report on The BBC about the government of Turkey pushing forward a law to criminalize adultery. Interestingly (though not surprisingly) the individual arguing in favor of the law was a conservative woman who said that it was to protect the "honor" of women. I didn't follow the argument too closely, this is typical stuff that you hear out of the Islamic world (especially the Middle Eastern Islamic world). These periodic reversions toward traditionalism by the 'moderate' Islamists of Turkey makes one wonder about the what affect Turkey joining the E.U. might have. Moral traditionalism also makes the fact that American secularists have a favorable view of Islam in comparison to conservative religious folk rather strange (by a 2 to 1 rate even!)!

But I want to move on from these observations of the contemporary world to examining this issue over the long haul. Historically educated people might offer that European societies were just as sexist a few hundred years ago as Islamic societies. The validity of this assertion rests on what you mean by "sexist." I was surprised when reading The Reformation that John Calvin and other Protestant reformers made a point of looking at the grounds for divorce and ascertaining what was reasonable or not, and adultery was one factor that could justify this act. The point is that the implication was that in 1550 in at least the part of Europe we often imagine had the most puritan mores, that is, Calvinist Geneva, adultery was not a capital crime for women. In fact, I later learn that Calvin's brother divorced his own wife after her second incidence of adultery! To me, this suggests that the whole criticism of Islamic sexual purity, especially female purity, as needing to be contextualized in terms of cultural development needs to be reconsidered. After all, in many other ways Europeans of 1550 were more barbaric than Middle Eastern Muslims today, especially their attitude toward their religious minorities. Nevertheless, on the issue of sexual relations transgressing social amity they exhibited greater flexibility.

This line of thought was stimulated by something I have just read in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World: Muslim chroniclers of the day were far more cautious in broaching the topic of the possibility that Genghis Khan's eldest son, Jochi, was not his biological issue. The circumstances are well known, Genghis Khan's wife at the time was kidnapped by a tribe from who Genghis Khan's father had kidnapped his own mother (that is, his mother was betrothed to a member of that tribe). When Genghis Khan's wife was rescued she turned out to be pregnant. The issue of paternity was confused, though it seems that at least publically Genghis Khan did not challenge his son being legitimate. On the other hand, his younger sons did quite frequently, and this issue was a central point in the divisions between various lineages of the Mongol royal family.

In any case the author states that Muslim writers simply could not understand how a man as great as Genghis Khan could allow word of this slight against his honor to persist, it was beyond their conception (one chronicler leaves blank spaces that indicate revision of this topic, as if he simply couldn't believe what he was writing down). That is, his wife had been raped by a stranger, and likely given birth to a bastard. The implication is clear in light of what we know sometimes happens in modern Muslim cultures: rape is no defense against dishonor (among Middle Eastern Muslims at least, though I know that this attitude seems to be surfacing in Muslim Africa and South Asia as well). The Mongols of the time looked at adultery differently, and though inter-clan adultery was not socially accepted, sexual relations between a woman and her husband's close friends or near relatives (with his knowledge) within the context of their circle of tents were not necessarily seen as infidelity in the same way. This sort of behavior is anthropologically attested in other cultures, and today among groups like the Wodaabe. The major point is that Mongols did not have an extreme view of female chastity and honor [1].

One must consider this in light of the fact that the Mongols of the time organized themselves as patrilineal clans on the Steppe-Taiga borderlands, so issues of paternity could be disruptive to the social order. Why did the Mongols and Muslims differ in this respect? Were Middle Eastern Muslims as extreme about female "honor" in the 1200s as they are today? Milder forms of the double-standard and "honor" talk are common in most cultures, from the West to Vietnam. Nevertheless, honor killing seems to be a characteristic of Muslim, in particular Middle Eastern, cultures. Anthropologists chalk this up to the extreme nature of patrlineal clans among the Arabs, and yet Mongols were also formed along the basis of patrilineages.

Addendum: Patrlineages also serve an important role in much of Confucian Asia & among elite Hindus. Is honor killing endemic to these cultures? Obviously different societies can attain different equilibriums the way they deal with the same problems, but it is interesting in light of a tendency for some Westerners to relativize and dismiss the barbarism (relatively) that is characteristic of Muslim cultures in their attitudes toward women.

[1] Among the Taureg female chastity was traditionally not emphasized to the same extent as other Islamic peoples. Today, with the rise of a more conventional Islamic piety and the penetration of the Taureg by clerics from more verdant regions of northern Africa, women's rights seem to be in the process of being curtailed.