Ghairat Qatl — Honour Killing Between Law and Custom

This is an expansion of the author’s three part series on veiling. While the aforesaid series examines religious practices and symbols in the public sphere, this piece is an examination of the human cost of upholding those symbols and their underlying cultural belief systems.

Representational Image. (Created with Gemini; edited.)

Does Islamic Jurisprudence Sanction It, and Does the Question Even Matter?

The standard move in liberal apologetic discussions of honour killing is to lead with the statement that Islam does not permit it. The statement is, in the narrow juridical sense, largely accurate. But it is also, as a guide to understanding why such killings happen and persist in Muslim-majority legal environments as well as regions that have been heavily influenced by Islamicate cultures, almost entirely inadequate.

Robert Paul Churchill, in Women in the Crossfire, states flatly that no religion endorses honour killing, while simultaneously showing that honour-shame systems tie female chastity and obedience to male guardianship and enforcement — and that this social matrix is precisely where such killings occur. Kecia Ali, writing for the Brandeis Feminist Sexual Ethics Project in her analysis ‘Honor Killings, Illicit Sex, and Islamic Law,’ captures the necessary precision: certain elements of traditional sexual ethics contribute to the climate of intense scrutiny of female conduct that finds one extreme expression in honour crimes. The question is not whether a particular Qur’anic verse mandates honour killing (it does not), but whether the broader normative structure of Islamic gender law — and its interaction with customary law, penal codes, and judicial practice — creates the conditions in which such killing is enabled, regularised, or effectively tolerated.

What the Fiqh Actually Says (and What It Does Not)

The mainstream jurisprudential position is clear on its own terms. The al-Mawsūʿah al-Fiqhiyyah (vol. 5, p. 280) records that jurists are unanimously agreed that the one who should carry out ḥadd punishments is the ruler or his deputy — not a private individual acting on familial authority. From that premise, fatwā literature generally condemns honour killing as a transgression: killing one who does not deserve to be killed, given that the prescribed punishment for the unmarried fornicator is flogging and exile, not execution. The 2016 Pakistani clerical fatwā condemning honour killing, documented by Zainab Hashmi in the Islamic Law Blog at Harvard Law School, is the most prominent recent instance of this internal Islamic repudiation. It is real, and its significance should not be minimised.

But the fiqh also contains a provision that significantly complicates that picture. Section o1.2 of the Reliance of the Traveller (ʿUmdat al-Sālik) — the authoritative Shāfiʿī manual translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller — states that a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) is not subject to retaliation for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring. The rule does not authorise honour killing. But it creates a de facto impunity loophole that, in legal environments where the rule is operative, produces precisely the practical effect of authorisation. The distinction between ‘not formally sanctioned’ and ‘effectively permitted’ is one of the most important analytic distinctions in this literature, and it is routinely collapsed in both apologetic and polemical treatments of the issue.

Customary Law, Penal Codes, and the Architecture of Impunity

Honour killing is, in most of the jurisdictions where it occurs most frequently, legally prohibited as murder. What sustains it is not formal legal sanction but the interaction of customary practice with legal provisions that, intentionally or otherwise, produce impunity for perpetrators. Are Knudsen, in his CMI Working Paper ‘License to Kill: Honour Killings in Pakistan’ (2004), characterises honour killing as ‘a ritualised form of violence usually with male perpetrators and often, but not always, female victims,’ meted out by private actors according to customary law, with no appeal available. Honour killings form part of what Knudsen terms ‘traditional justice’ or ‘tribal justice,’ a contested form of private retribution.

The Pakistani case is instructive precisely because the mechanisms of impunity are identifiable and documented. The LUMS/Sahsol paper on judicial treatment of honour killing in Pakistan shows how courts applied the qiṣāṣ (retaliation) and diyat (blood money) provisions — derived, via Zia-ul-Haq’s 1979 Hudood Ordinances and subsequent Islamic criminal legislation, from classical Islamic penal law — to allow families to pardon perpetrators who were often family members themselves. In that configuration, the victim’s family is legally empowered to forgive the killer — and since the killer is the victim’s father, brother, or husband, the ‘family’ and the perpetrator are frequently the same people. Some judges in these cases invoked the Qur’anic concept of qawwām (men as protectors or guardians over women, Q. 4:34) in sentencing reasoning, treating the victim as not maʿṣūm al-dam — not inviolable of blood — given her alleged transgression.

Qandeel Baloch’s murder in 2016, covered in academic literature from Cambridge and SAGE sources, is the paradigmatic contemporary Pakistani case. A social-media figure killed by her brother for the visibility and perceived immodesty (tabarruj) of her public persona, her killing catalysed a legislative amendment that, at least on paper, closed the qiṣāṣ/diyat pardon loophole for honour-killing cases. Whether that amendment has materially changed outcomes on the ground is a separate and contested question.

Jordan represents a different model: rather than a gap between law and practice, it presents a history of statutory facilitation. Fadia Faqir, in a key article in Third World Quarterly (2001), showed how Jordan’s Article 340 expressly provided reduced sentences for killings carried out in defence of honour — the codified legal regime and the customary tolerance for honour killing were, in that context, effectively coextensive. Human Rights Watch’s 2004 report Honoring the Killers documented the practical consequences: justice routinely denied in cases of what the state itself characterised, in mitigated statutory language, as honour crime. Subsequent reform efforts have been partial, and Hayajneh and Alshdaifat, writing in the Journal of Human Rights Practice (2022), argue that ‘sanction’ in such environments emerges less from scripture in isolation than from the interaction of social, cultural, religious, and legislative realities — a dynamic that resists any clean separation of ‘Islamic law’ from ‘custom.’

Iran’s Article 630 of the Islamic Penal Code is perhaps the starkest example of explicit statutory sanction: it authorised a husband who found his wife committing zinā under stated conditions to kill her and her partner. The provision is not framed as custom but as codified Islamic law.

The Modesty–Honour–Violence Chain

The relationship between female modesty norms and honour killing is not metaphorical — it is definitional. Honour killing is not triggered only by confirmed adultery or premarital sex; it is triggered by the perception of immodesty, the accusation of transgression, or sometimes the mere exercise of female independence. Arash Heydari and colleagues, writing in Current Sociology (2021), found that ‘honour violations’ in such communities routinely include flirting, refusing an arranged marriage, seeking independence, initiating divorce, and — with cruel irony — being the victim of rape. The common denominator is that the woman’s body, movement, and social conduct are treated as family property, and any breach of its prescribed management — whether real, alleged, or merely potential — activates the machinery of enforcement.

Dawn Perlmutter, writing in Anthropoetics (2011), traces the logic explicitly: modesty is how women achieve honour; any appearance of impropriety, even that which ‘has the remote possibility of leading to sex,’ constitutes a violation of the code. The same logic runs through the documentary evidence assembled by Singh and Bhandari in SAGE Open (2021), which includes testimony from a jirga member stating directly that ‘it is upon a man to protect his and his family’s honour, and killing the person who has brought dishonour is the most appreciable way to do so’ — and case material in which girls who ‘exposed their faces and clapped with unrelated men’ faced killing.

That last detail is worth pausing over. The triggering act was not sex, or even flirtation in any charged sense, but the uncovering of the face and physical proximity to unrelated males. Which is to say: the norm being enforced was the segregation norm, the veil norm, the ikhtilāṭ prohibition — the same normative structure discussed in the companion article. The violence does not live in a separate social universe from the prescriptions about dress and space. It lives at the far end of the same continuum.

The Ghayrah Connection

Akbari and Tetreault’s Honor Killing (2014) was the first book to argue that the root cause of honour killing is not culture but the Islamic doctrine of amr bi-l-maʿrūf, and to analyse how ‘ghayra provide[s] the motive and amr bil ma’ruf provides the detailed script that results in “honor” violence and killing.’ The book is polemical in orientation, and its framing — ‘not culture but Islam’ — is itself an overcorrection, since culture and doctrine are not cleanly separable in any living legal tradition. But its argument from primary fiqh sources is not therefore wrong: the doctrinal materials it surveys do construct a normative world in which male guardianship over female sexuality is a religious obligation, failure to enforce that guardianship is a major (kabīra) sin, and the moral weight of the concept of *dayyūth* creates real social pressure on men to act.

Myrne’s more careful historical account makes the necessary distinction: ghayrah/dayyūth discourse does not itself constitute a fiqh licence to murder. What it does is construct a moral world of sexual proprietorship, gender hierarchy, and policing of women’s movement and visibility — a moral world that, under conditions of customary law, impunity in formal courts, or the suspension of state authority, can be radicalised into violence. Honour killing, as Knudsen notes, is extra-judicial punishment meted out by private actors according to customary law, with no way to repeal the sentence. The premeditated character of most such killings — victims murdered according to a plan, not in a moment of uncontrolled fury — maps directly onto the ghayrah duty to act, as distinct from the merely emotional response of a provoked individual. Lama Abu-Odeh, in her important article in the American Journal of Comparative Law (2010), makes a related point: honour-killing law and its adjudication discipline not only women’s sexuality but also men’s masculinity — men are judged by whether they successfully regulate ‘their’ women. In communities structured by that double discipline, a man who fails to act on a perceived dishonour does not simply look weak; he is, in the operative moral vocabulary, a dayyūth, a man excluded from paradise.

That is the connective tissue that the ‘Islam doesn’t sanction honour killing’ formulation consistently fails to address. The formal doctrinal prohibition on vigilante punishment is real. So is the normative structure — spanning theology, customary law, penal codes, and judicial practice — that makes honour killing a rational and, within its own terms, a morally intelligible act.

References

• Abu-Odeh, Lama, ‘Honor Killings and the Construction of Gender in Arab Societies’, American Journal of Comparative Law, 58/4 (2010).
• Akbari, Daniel, & Tetreault, Paul, Honor Killing: A Professional’s Guide to Sexual Relations and Ghayra Violence from the Islamic Sources (CreateSpace, 2014).
• Al-Dhahabī, Shams al-Dīn, Kitāb al-Kabāʾir (primary source, d. 748/1348).
• Ali, Kecia, ‘Honor Killings, Illicit Sex, and Islamic Law’, Brandeis Feminist Sexual Ethics Project (online resource).
• Barry, ‘Gender Roots: Conceptualising “Honor” Killing…’, senior thesis, Gettysburg College (2016).
• Churchill, Robert Paul, Women in the Crossfire: The International Campaign to End Honor Killing (OUP, 2018).
• Faqir, Fadia, ‘Intrafamily Femicide in Defence of Honour: The Case of Jordan’, Third World Quarterly, 22/1 (2001).
• Hashmi, Zainab, ‘The “Unpardonable” Sin of Honor Killing: A Fatwā’, Islamic Law Blog, Harvard Law School (2021).
• Hayajneh, A. M., & Alshdaifat, S. A. (2022). Is the law per se to blame for exacerbating so-called ‘honour killings’? The case of Jordan. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 14(2), 648–675. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huab052
• Heydari, Arash, et al., ‘Honor Killing as a Dark Side of Modernity’, Current Sociology, 69/7 (2021).
• Human Rights Watch, Honoring the Killers: Justice Denied for ‘Honor’ Crimes in Jordan (2004).
• Knudsen, Are, ‘License to Kill: Honour Killings in Pakistan’, CMI Working Paper 2004:1 (Chr. Michelsen Institute, 2004).
• LUMS/Sahsol, ‘“Honour” Killings in Pakistan: Judicial and Legal Treatment of the Crime’ (unpublished paper).
• Myrne, Pernilla, ‘Discussing Ghayra in Abbasid Literature: Jealousy as a Manly Virtue or Sign of Mutual Affection’, Journal of Abbasid Studies, 1/1 (2014), pp. 46–54.
• Perlmutter, Dawn, ‘The Semiotics of Honor Killing & Ritual Murder’, Anthropoetics, XVII/1 (2011).
• Reliance of the Traveller (ʿUmdat al-Sālik), trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Amana Publications, 1994), section o1.2.
• Singh, Prashant, & Bhandari, Vandana, ‘Legacy of Honor and Violence’, SAGE Open, 11/3 (2021).
• Tucker, Judith, Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2008).