Murder in the Name of Honor by Rana Husseini

sustain Article 340 and one of the most interesting of these was on a website hosted by a local internet company called Baladna. No longer in service, Baladna encouraged public debates and started several chat rooms or forums for people to voice their opinions on various topics. They had started a Women’s Forum, which I moderated.
    Identities of the participants in this forum could be withheld and so many ordinary people felt they were able to speak freely and in safety. A man named Michael Ibrahim wrote, ‘May the blood of every dishonourably murdered girl haunt those of our deputies who voted down the abolishment.’
    Sultan Abu Mariam spoke for many people when he wrote, ‘Let’s move and do something for our country and our children’s future … Jordan is our beloved country and deserves the best out of us so let’s fight for a better life, so we know that we earned it.’ Batir Wardam, a Jordanian columnist, agreed, calling the deputies ‘a disgrace to our intelligence’.
    In December of that year, we met with the Speaker of the Lower House, Abdul Hadi Majali, to hand him the 15,300 signatures we’d collected in less than six months. Majali criticized the government, saying it had acted hastily and had ‘caused the intent of the draft to be misunderstood by the MPs’, a statement that I published in an article for
The Jordan Times
on 19 December 1999.
    Majali happened to be out of the country when the law was debated in the Lower House. He told us he had since discussed theissue with many MPs and they thought that if a man killed his wife after surprising her in the act of adultery, then the law stated that he would be sentenced to fifteen years. ‘That was the main reason they rejected the draft,’ he told me, in exasperation.
    Almost a month later, the legal committee at the Upper House upheld the Lower House’s decision. They debated the idea of giving women the same leniency as men were receiving in Article 340, but decided to do nothing in the end.
    But there was one final ace up our sleeve. The Senate, our Supreme Court, is appointed by the King and, thanks in part to royal influence, they upheld the draft bill to amend Article 340 and returned it to the Lower House for a second debate. Senator Leila Sharaf, a much-respected female politician and activist in Jordan, said that keeping Article 340 in the Penal Code was an insult to society. ‘Do you think that women refrain from adultery merely to avoid punishment? Why is it always that a woman is the only one blamed for adultery? Doesn’t she have a partner who should be punished?’
    On the other side, Deputy Mohammad Rafat from the Balqa Governorate criticized the senators’ decision: ‘The Lower House has already taken its decision, and there is nothing to add. The senators have only worsened the situation.’
    Around this time I spoke with the experienced political analyst and adviser to the late King Hussein, Adnan Abu Odeh, who described the Lower House MPs as traditionalists who came from a pastoral culture. He told me during the interview that they would never amend Article 340 because they wanted to keep the status quo. If they failed to keep the status quo, then they would be replaced by people who could.
    â€˜They would be afraid of people saying this deputy voted against the law. “Let’s see,” they would say. “What he would do if his daughter did something wrong? What would he do?” This means someone else would substitute him in his own constituency,’ Abu Odeh said.
    Former Jordanian Prime Minister Dr Fayez Tarawneh also told me in an interview that the MPs ‘did not do a good job on this issue and were immature because … people were holding a peaceful demonstration to present them with signatures.’
    Dr Tarawneh said the problem was that many deputies did not understand the issue and did not even bother to try and