A sensational book that purported to tell the “true” story of the murder of a young Jordanian woman by her father because she dared to date a Christian man has been exposed as a fraud. The scandal was a setback for advocates of women’s rights in Jordan and provided a disturbing case study of how lies and distortions can masquerade as “fact” in Western discussions of the Arab world and Islam.

When Norma Khouri’s book “Forbidden Love” (“Honor Lost” in the US) came out last year, it was a hit, selling more than 250,000 copies globally. In Australia, where the author has been granted asylum, it was voted one of the country’s 100 favorite books of all time. Khouri’s book told the story of how she and her friend “Dalia,” a Muslim woman, opened a unisex hair salon in Amman in the early 1990s. Dalia fell in love with a Christian man, “Michael,” who frequented the salon, and despite the innocence of the affair, she was brutally stabbed to death by her father in 1996. Khouri claimed she fled Jordan after this atrocity, fearing for her own life, eventually making her way to Australia.

However, investigations by a Jordanian journalist, women’s rights activists and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald have revealed the book to be a hoax. There is no evidence the events described took place. If Khouri’s ragged tale could fool major publishers like Random House (in Australia) and Simon and Schuster (in the US), her story fell apart immediately when Rana Husseini, an investigative journalist at the Jordan Times, got hold of it. Since 1994, Husseini has written countless articles on honor crimes in Jordan and can be credited with a major role in galvanizing public opinion against the practice.

This has been a hard road, as Husseini explained by telephone from Amman: “I have always been accused of tarnishing Jordan’s image, of washing dirty laundry in public. But I have always been very careful to explain that honor killing is not part of the Muslim religion, and that although serious, there are only 15-25 cases per year, not thousands, like Khouri claimed falsely in her book.” Husseini pointed out that the practice also occurs among Christian families.

Husseini first heard about Khouri’s book through a flow of e-mails from Australia, since Khouri had published Husseini’s e-mail address without her permission. Some were from Arab-Australians who felt slandered, but many more were from readers who believed that Arabs and Muslims were monsters. “I felt I had to do something,” says Husseini. She contacted the Jordanian National Committee for Women (JNCW), and with the organization’s president, Amal al-Sabbagh, she did a thorough page-by-page analysis of the book and documented dozens of serious errors and anachronisms, covering geography, history, Islam, Arabic language and law.

On page two of her book, for example, Khouri wrote that the Jordan River is “no longer strong enough to flow down to Amman.” Yet, the Jordan River has never flowed anywhere near Amman, not least because it would have meant flowing uphill for a distance of 1 kilometer.

There were also errors about Jordan’s legal system: Khouri claimed that Dalia’s killer was released on bail, even though Jordan never releases suspects on bail in capital offences. Khouri also described the lives of a majority of Jordanian women as being akin to that of prisoners, slavishly serving men in silence and eating their leftovers, She also described a society of fear that was unrecognizable to anyone familiar with Jordan. Husseini’s investigation determined that no salon as described by Khouri had ever existed (unisex salons are in any case illegal), nor had anyone in Khouri’s alleged Amman neighborhood ever heard of her family, or of the brutal murder. Husseini was astonished that Khouri’s book contained not a single reference for any of the thousands of “facts” it reported.

JNCW’s Sabbagh sent a letter detailing these findings to Random House in Australia, but so far the publisher has stood by Khouri. However, the American publisher has withdrawn the book from sale pending an investigation. While the facts of the Khouri hoax are astonishing, it is, sadly, not surprising that so many were ready to believe her. Husseini observes: “The timing of the book was very suspicious, between Sept. 11, 2001, and the war on Iraq. The alleged crime happened in 1996, so why did the book come out after so long?”

In the post-Sept. 11 era, Khouri’s book met a certain demand in the US and other Western societies, where the shortcomings and “backwardness” of Arab and Muslim societies have become a focus of intense interest to which precious little genuine expertise is brought to bear. Indeed the desire to “rescue” Muslim women has become a prominent theme in liberal justifications for US intervention in the region. This was most common at the beginning of the Afghanistan war.

There is also a Western tendency to assume that violence is a pathology when it occurs among Arabs and Muslims, and to apply spurious religious or cultural explanations to explain it. Murder rates in general, and specifically for the murder of women by male family members and intimates, are far higher in the United States than in Jordan, though few analyses attribute this to American culture generally, or to Americans’ devout Christianity.

Husseini points to the well-worn stereotypes that infect Western media discourse about the issues to which she has devoted her career. She notes the exotic artwork on the cover of Khouri’s book, which shows a women clad in black head-covering with only her long-lashed eyes peering out – dress that certainly exists, but is not typical in Jordan, where women outnumber and outperform men in secondary and higher education, and are increasingly present in all sectors of the economy.

“We have this problem (of honor crimes) in Jordan and elsewhere,” says Husseini; “(T)here are people here working on it, the government is working on it and the royal family. The country acknowledged the problem before anyone outside was talking about honor crimes.”

There is resistance to change from conservatives. For example from the opposition Islamic Action Front or some tribal leaders, who often justify their positions by claiming that the campaign against honor crimes is a hostile foreign plot. However, Husseini points out, noted Muslim figures, among them Jordan’s Chief Islamic Justice Sheikh Izzedin al-Tamimi, have come out firmly against the practice, and in recent years there have been 10 major legislative reforms advancing women’s rights in several areas.

The stereotype of helpless women in need of escape, which Khouri’s book has fed, renders these debates and struggles invisible, and disempowers the very women who are campaigning successfully for change from within.

>From The Lebanese Daily Star, August 10, 2004

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