Thank you Vlad for this one.
So called ‘honor killings’ have nothing to do with other acts of murder/violence that take place between family members or between people involved in relationships, other than that extreme violence is being carried out. Honor violence involves the family, and relatives of the family, and in some cases from people outside the family, against members deemed to be acting outside the moral value system of the family and community at large.
This is why a husband or wife acting out of rage against a spouse for suspected infidelity, cannot and should not, be confused with traditional Islamic honor killings, they are almost exclusive to the adherents of that ideology. It explains why Christian and Jewish communities -both of whom existed in the Middle east long before the rise of Islam- in spite of living among and within Islamic societies, do not have a honor killing tradition.
