The Beheading of Aasiya Hassan: Patriarchy-Conferred Privilege?

I just finished my once-per semester lecture on gender-equality (which I deliver to multiple sections), and I'm a little fired up on the topic of discrimination against women at the moment. Plus, I'm reading an extremely fascinating (if somewhat contradictory) scholarly essay on the role of patriarchic systems of dominance in the incidence of interstate wars. (See, "The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States," available here.)

So, I'm finding great interest (but little sympathy) in Melissa McEwan's essay on the murder of Aasiya Hassan in Orchard Park, New York. Mrs. Hassan was allegedly beheaded by her husband, Muzzamil Hassan, in what appears as a classic case of Islamic ritual murder, a beheading in the fashion of Daniel Pearl's, and an "honor killing" in the fashion of literally thousands of women around the world who have been murdered or who are now at risk of death to this Islamic barbarity. According to Phyllis Chesler, the murder of Mrs. Hassan "is very probably an honor killing, a crime which has little to do with western-style domestic violence."

Well, not according to Ms. McEwan:

Particularly in comment ... threads on posts about this story, there are a lot of jokes about how Hassan sure isn't improving Muslims' reputation by beheading his wife, all predicated, of course, on that most basic foundation of prejudice: The insistence that one member of a group represent the entire group. Certainly, I understand the source of the potential irony, but it's contingent on reducing Hassan to one piece of his identity—his religion—and suggesting that his religion is uniquely (or mostly) responsible for his crime. Which, as it turns out, there are people quite eager to do, too.

The thing is, it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.

Now you know the woman who constantly says like a broken record "This shit doesn't happen in a void" isn't about to argue that Hassan was not a product of his environment; I will, however, note that Islam was only one part of his environment. He is also an American resident, which made him the beneficiary of all the patriarchy-conferred privilege inherent to that environment, too. He is a member of a family, which likely granted him a higher status for being male. He is/was a businessperson working in corporate America, which favors and privileges men. Et cetera. In most or all of these overlapping and intersecting environments, violence against women will have been tacitly—and sometimes overtly—condoned via media imagery, advertisements, "jokes," turned blind eyes, public religious admonishments from multiple religions, and possibly intimate example.

So how much sense does it make to blame his religion, exclusively or even primarily?

None.

Which means that anyone who isn't just cynically using the occasion of a woman's gruesome murder by her husband's hand to advance an anti-Islam or anti-religion agenda needs to rethink their argument—because if they really care about the victim at the center of this crime, or any of the millions of women hurt or killed by domestic violence every year, they won't mask the real culprit behind a cheap, and misplaced, shot at a single religion.

The real culprit is undeserved male privilege and the resulting second-class personhood of women.

Folks can see why I'm just not sympathetic to Ms. McEwan's case. You see, there are distinctions between the phenomenon of domestic gender abuse in the United States and the historical subordination of women in Muslin countries, and now in the nations of the West as well where Islamic fundamentalists are increasing their grip.

The U.S. is the international system's leading democracy and few other nations in the history of the world have made as dramatic advances toward civil and poltical rights for women. When I teach this subject in class I'm struck by how agressive the United States has moved to abandon its history of patriarchy and real structures of dominance, and I can certainly understand where continued progress might be expected.

But this isn't the case in Muzzamil Hassan's beheading of his wife. This is not "run-of-the mill" domestic violence, as horrible as such crimes are. Violence against women is never okay. But this is a murder of world-political significance. It illustrates the deeply rooted primordial codes of Islamic culture. "A beheading suggests that the murderer wants to separate his victim’s mind from her body, he does not want to hear what she has to say, he wants her mute, beyond what duct tape can do and he wants her completely severed, disassociated from her ability to flee," as Chesler indicates. Indeed, to read McEwen is revealing of the crass ideological blindness to pure evil in the world today. As a professor who teaches civil rights, and as an advocate for the unlimited advancement of women in politics and society, I'm astounded at the moral bankruptcy of Melissa McEwan and the radical left's cultural relativism.

The logical disjuncture in this kind of thinking among leftists here at home is just too much to fathom sometimes.