February 1, 2003

A Friendship Sundered by Muslim Code of Honor

By SETH MYDANS

YDNEY, Australia â€" It is 3 a.m. and the loneliness has become too much for Norma Khouri. Risking discovery, she dials the number of an aunt in Jordan, the homeland she fled three years ago in fear and anger and secrecy.

"Sing to me," she tells her aunt, the only family member she dares to call.

"Let's sing the song we used to sing when we were together."

And so, as Ms. Khouri tells the story now, the two women joined their voices as they had when life was happier, in an old ballad that now seems to have been written just for them.

"I carve your name, my love, into the ancient walls, and you write my name in the sand by the road.

"Tomorrow the rains will come, washing over wounds that have never healed. Your name will remain, and mine will disappear."

The song, Ms. Khouri said, left her in tears, for the home she had abandoned, for the family she had defied and shamed, and for her childhood friend, a young woman she calls Dalia, who had been stabbed to death by her own father because she had been seen in public walking with a man.

That killing transformed Ms. Khouri, who is now 32. She became her friend's avenger, writing letters and signing petitions against the widespread practice in Muslim nations of what are known as "honor killings." Fearing for her life, she fled to Greece and then to Australia.

Now, with the publication of her friend's story, "Honor Lost" (Simon &

Schuster), this dark-haired woman with even darker eyes is stepping forward as a public face for all the women who risk death for violating a brutal desert code of behavior.

"I want the world to know Dalia the way I knew her," Ms. Khouri said in an interview here. "And I want them to know that she represents thousands of women who are still dying, and who had brothers and sisters and friends in their lives who are missing them the way I am missing Dalia."

Her book has surged up the best-seller lists of Australia and France and is being published now in the United States and throughout Europe. Ms. Khouri said she hoped to bring international pressure on Jordan to remove laws that effectively permit men to kill their wives, sisters and daughters.

"From the time I lost Dalia I became obsessed with honor killings," Ms. Khouri said. "Before, I was always the quiet one. Now I won't shut up."

After one recent interview in an Arabic-language magazine, the e-mail responses included death threats.

"Norma Khouri what you are doing is very shameful," one message read. "You are bringing more problems for Islam and Arab men. Now for the honor of Islam you must apologize. If you do not then we cannot stop what must happen. Blood for honor."

Born to middle-class parents in the same year, Ms. Khouri and Dalia formed a bond that she said was special to women in a male-dominated culture she calls "a stifling prison, tense with the risk of death at the hands of loved ones."

Seeking a small niche of freedom, the two friends opened a beauty parlor, one of the few livelihoods available to women. In the privacy of a back room they shared forbidden cigarettes and rebellious thoughts and plotted the small deceptions that are essential to most women in Jordan to make life bearable.

There was a streak of subversiveness in both young women. "When I'm told I can't do something," Ms. Khouri said, "that's what I want to do."

The daughter of a building contractor whose Roman Catholic family lived by the same code as their Muslim neighbors, Ms. Khouri was sent to the American School in the capital, Amman, where she learned flawless English.

The purpose, she said, was not to prepare her for a career but to make her a more eligible prospect for marriage, after which she would spend her life as a housekeeper, rarely venturing into the street without a male escort. She has remained single, however.

The daily humiliations of women permeate their lives, she said, even on family trips to the beach at Aqaba, where they can only swim fully clothed.

"Sad and ludicrous â€" but all too familiar â€" is the sight of a woman struggling to stay afloat while her voluminous black dress billows up around her despite her efforts to beat it back into the waves," Ms. Khouri writes.

Nevertheless, she says, "While we boil inside, we obey."

The lessons are learned early. Like other girls, she said, she was told by her mother the exemplary tale of a woman who had killed herself rather than despoil her family's honor by being raped.

"They buried her in gold," her mother said.

By contrast, Dalia, murdered in shame by her father, was buried without ceremony in an unmarked grave.

Like most other men who kill for honor, Dalia's father spent no time behind bars. The man she loved also avoided punishment, but he has dedicated himself now to helping abused women.

Female chastity â€" and the appearance of chastity â€" is the bedrock of the culture's code of honor. Thousands of women in Muslim nations are believed to die at the hands of relatives each year for perceived breaches of honor.

The sheer number of these killings seems in a strange way to be a celebration of life; even the threat of murder cannot stifle attraction and tenderness.

At the age of 26, Dalia became a victim, both of the power of unbidden love and the determination of her culture to crush it. She could not help herself.

Through elaborate deceptions with the complicity of Ms. Khouri she held secret, though chaste, meetings with a young Catholic man named Michael.

In retrospect, the outcome was inevitable. As with other unmarried women, it was the job of her brothers to monitor her movements like detectives.

The final chapters of Ms. Khouri's book accelerate with grief and passion.

Dalia was stabbed 12 times in the chest, Ms. Khouri writes, and her father stood over her to be sure she was dead before calling an ambulance.

"I've cleansed my house," he shouted when Ms. Khouri ran in through the door, just a block away from her own home. "I've cut the rotten part and brought honor back to my family name."

"Tears flooded my eyes and I began wailing, as so many centuries of grieving Arab women had done before me," Ms. Khouri writes.

Then, in language that went well beyond traditional grief, she shouted at him:

"Dalia never shamed you, you shamed yourself. You've turned your home into a house of murder. The spilling of her innocent blood has stained your name, your hands and your soul forever."

At home, her mother tried to calm her, urging her to bear the burden so many others had shared.

"I wondered what she'd experienced to make her so understanding now," her daughter writes. "I knew that this wonderful woman had spent her life doing her best to portray an image of happiness, yet I wondered if she'd ever felt genuine joy."

Ms. Khouri was forced to return to Dalia's house to apologize to her friend's father, but her words carried a sarcastic undertone that left her own father shamed and apologetic.

"I was angry and I wanted revenge, and I wanted Dalia back and I wanted to do to him what he did to her," Ms. Khouri said in the interview.

Her book was her catharsis, written in minuscule script in an appointment book she had shared with Dalia. Her story ends as she boards an airplane to leave her homeland, perhaps forever.

"As it took off, I wept," she writes. "I cried out of joy and fear. I cried for my mother, and for the empty seats that should have been Dalia's and Michael's.

I cried for the stark rose beauty of the desert, for the mystique of Aqaba, even the gossips in the salon who had no hope of ever having anything bigger or better to do. I cried for my father, as trapped in his prison of laws, pride and obligations as my mother."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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