Honor Games
There's nothing more central to an Arab's sense of self than honor, Shady says—even when that honor is a complete illusion.
Words by Shady Salah.
We are Arabs, we care a lot about honor—especially family honor. We have no problem killing our sisters, daughters or wives in the name of honor. Sometimes we stab a helpless woman more than a dozen times, to show how much we care about honor—even if the first two stabs did
the job. All we need as an excuse is to find out that the woman had a relationship with a man. We even brag about it later, when we get caught and sent to jail.
When one of us gets married to an Arab girl, she must be a virgin. It's not important if the groom is virgin or not; the groom doesn't have to be virgin. He doesn't need to show that he has any honor. All he needs to prove is that he has enough money to afford
getting married.
We don't care much if the groom had previous relationships with other girls, his past in most cases is irrelevant. All we care about is the girl: she has to be pure like a snowflake, never been touched, never been kissed, never even been seen!
We look for a bride with zero mileage, naive and raw. We expect to find all these qualities in an Arab girl—and the final quality test comes on the wedding night. If we see blood after the first penetration, then we're happy. The groom can say to himself, “I'm blessed! She turned out to be virgin as she should be.”
We don't accept any other evidence or explanation. In some families, the bride has to wipe up the blood of her virginity with a white cloth and show it to her parents the next morning. In some cases her mother can't even wait till the next morning, and on the wedding night she stands outside the bedroom to get a fresh, wet result.
Of course, we all stand prepared to take action if we discover that the bride wasn't virgin. The groom will create a big fuss, and call for a family meeting and claim back all the money he paid for the wedding. Then the bride's family elects the hero who will save the family's honor by killing the bride.
We show no mercy when it comes to an Arab girl's honor, but when we decide to get married to a foreigner, a European or an Asian, then it becomes a different story. We don't care if she had previous relationships, and we know that most likely she isn't a virgin. But we don't even ask about it. In that case virginity doesn't matter—she comes from a liberal country, and she's a liberal woman. We can't judge her because she's from a different society, with a different mentality and different traditions. So it's alright. She can be whatever she wants; most of all she doesn’t have to wear the hijab.
We have driven Arab girls crazy, because every young man tells his sister not to date boys while she knows that he dates other girls. If we want girls and women in our families to hold to our traditions and morals, then we should first set a good example! We should know that these days most girls can do whatever they want, and then come back home at the end of the day pretending like nothing happened. Even when a girl loses her virginity, she can have a small surgery to cover things up a few weeks before her wedding.
We can be conservative and teach our daughters how to preserve themselves, but we can never force them to be the little angels we want them to be. We should make them decide by free will to take the safe path. They have to do it by themselves— because that's the only guaranteed way to make it happen. Otherwise we'll be wasting our time, trying to show that we're the kings of the jungle and fooling ourselves into thinking everything is OK, while in reality we might be losing control.
