Appiah By Appiah Summary

In this chapter, Appiah begins by using a Western example of a satirical comedy in order to prime the reader for dialogue about the notion of honor as it relates to marriage and specifically women in South Asia and the Middle East. He uses the example of penal codes in Italy which placed worth on chastity and disproportionately punished women for crimes that weren’t their fault and allowed marriage to invalidate any previous crimes committed. This social and legal code is also exemplified by the story he tells of a real woman who rebelled against honor convention, to great personal threat. By using both a satirical example and a true story of defiance to show the decline of the absurd Sicilian honor system, he seems to attempt to set the practice we would

consider morally repugnant in a context of Western practices that continued until almost the 21st century.
In the next section, Appiah once again seeks to establish the double standard in terms of female sexuality in both the Western and modern context before citing statistics about a more extreme manifestation of the same double standard: honor killings, a term just as oxymoronic as dueling gentlemen. These statistics lead to the transition into Appiah’s case study for this chapter, which is the murder of Samia Sarwar by her prominent Pushtun family because she sought a divorce for her estranged, abusive husband. Despite the fact that she was permitted a divorce under Pakistani law, her family still felt that it violated an extrajudicial code. Perhaps the most significant part of this story—aside from the murder of an innocent person—is the fact that these high-ranking members of society were allowed to escape any legal ramification, despite the official legislation. In fact, the ones who received the greatest official backlash were those who tried to help Samia with her divorce, receiving rebuke from senators and cultural leaders who cited both national honor and reputation as reasons not to draw attention to the atrocities being committed.
Appiah then goes on, in the next section, to explain both the history and the culture of the Pashtun people, though he makes clear that honor killing is not a problem unique to the region.

The Pashtuns have a community structure founded on tribalism, or the idea that one chooses whose “side” they’re on based solely on the closeness of a blood relationship and their shared group identity. This tribalistic culture contains the seeds of the anti-Imperialist feelings in that constitute the backlash against Western or other perceived interferences with long held cultural practices. These cultural practices resulted in the conception of a similar unique moral code known as the “Pushtunwali;” key tenants include “maintaining one’s honor by loyalty to one’s kin, bravery in battle, hospitality to guests, retaliation for insults, and revenge against injury, weather against one’s family or their tribe. Pakistan is still an Islamic nation, so many Pashtuns consider Pashtunwali and Islam to be completely congruent, though the actual teachings of Islam forbid these kinds of honor killing. As Apiah notes, when pushed, many feel that Pushtunwali, the cultural and community principles, supersede even their religious

practices.
If Pashtuns are willing to override their religion in favor of their community code, then they are certainly willing to override their government, as well. Part of this has to do with the anti-colonial sentiment mentioned above; because many penal codes and laws are holdovers from British colonial times, traditionalists are noticeably resistant to them, and instead rely on older cultural practices. Pakistan is an Islamist country, which means that it bases its government on the principles of Islam and the laws of sharia. In the case of honor killing, this represents a problem because, as the religious leadership gets more fundamentalist, so too do the governmental practices which may have once provided protection for women. As a general rule, when religion gets more conservative, it also tends to bring out the cruelest aspects of the teachings, which may otherwise promote positive values.
Another way in which regressive teachings from Islam affect the legal system is the creation of qisas and diyat, which revert to the tribal and individualized system of injury and revenge. Qisas removes the government as a party from crimes committed, and instead basically makes every case a civil case of citizen against citizen. What this means is that either the injured party or one who survives the injured party is allowed to decide whether or not to the offender deserves equal injury. If one chooses not to go forward with qisas, then they can collect diyat, or compensation for the crime. While some argue that the system should also include the government in prosecuting crimes, the system nonetheless stands. Additionally, the implementation of this sharia tradition could potentially have helped women by removing honor as a justification for murder and making women ineligible as forms of diyat, though of course these particular parts of the law and religion are largely ignored. Even legislation implemented to protect women isn’t enough when it isn’t followed, so Appiah holds that it is the job of citizens to challenge their unethical practices and culture.
In this section, Appiah compares the three historical examples in previous chapters to the current moral crisis in Pakistan, noting similarities and differences in the different situations. In the three previous cases, he notes first that the perception of honorable behavior had to change rather than be abolished, and second, that it had to change into something which now perceived honor in acting contrary to the immoral social practices. He then talks about the concept of collective honor the history of using group identity and reputation to change honor codes. He notes that this type of criticism should come with an educated understanding of the cultural reasons behind such a practice. In essence, why attack the entire society with a hacksaw when you can remove the problem with a scalpel. While it’s true that many of these problems arise from Muslim countries, that doesn’t mean the problem is Muslims in general, or the overall religion of Islam. Rather, it is a combination of religious, cultural, political, and economic factors that contribute to this type of behavior, and the problem should be addressed in an equally nuanced way.
The biggest difference that I think he mainly overlooked was the lack of socio-economical status as a prominent component in this particular honor world; as Appiah himself observes, both urban and rural cultures participate in the practice of honor killing, meaning that, unlike dueling, the transference of honor killings into a lower class cannot be used as a method to expose the ridiculousness of the idea. Similarly, unlike in the case of Atlantic slavery, the lower classes have no reason to believe the practice specifically dishonors them, which makes revolution less likely to come from that angle. Just like in the case of Chinese foot-binding, the group being singled out for dishonorable treatment is women, though I think the idea of Western intervention to change the problem my face even more backlash than it did in China, considering the state of foreign affairs between the two parts of the world and the history of condescending Imperial Colonialism in the reason.
Along with collective honor, Appiah also employs the idea of collective shaming. In addition, he introduces the idea of symbolic affiliation in order to connect those with cultural power to change a practice they aren’t directly involved in by associating them with the dishonor. These practices have recently come under great pressure from both inside and outside the country, and in urban areas, they are beginning to ease social restraints on women, though obviously the general problem of violence against women is still pervasive.
At the end of the chapter, Appiah circles back to the Italian comedy he began with, citing the necessity of satire and strategic ridicule in order to change the perception of a certain practice as honorable. For me, this chapter is probably the one that hits closest to home. While my family is mainly traditional Indian Hindu—a different breed of messed up—I am still fundamentally immersed in South Asian, and specifically sub-continental culture. My neighbor and good friend is first generation Pakistani Ismaili; all of my sister’s ex-boyfriends have come from conservative Islamic households—picture cell phone trackers and forcing daughters to transfer to different schools because they dared to date. Therefore, I can understand the position of both the insider and the outsider that Appiah describes, someone who is still affected by honor codes which they don’t have the power to engage in directly. I can’t pretend to take a neutral third-party position in this moral and honor-related issue when the truth is that I’m always conscious of the ways that I have to change my clothing, behavior, and speech when I visit my mother’s hometown.
If some of the same weird things that happened to me there happened to me here, I might have been able to report them as crime that the authorities; however, my extended family responded in a way that didn’t demand accountability from the perpetrator, but rather handled the matter internally. Only my mother, after spending the last 3 decades in a different country, reacted with the kind of anger that I would consider justified, coming from my Western perspective. My initial feelings as a relative outsider had considerably less effect on my family’s beliefs than my mother’s words, because she understands more about the nuances of societal codes than I do. This, I feel, is the best kind of solution; distancing, but not completely departing, from one’s cultural practices and beliefs in order to examine them more objectively. While the initial push towards cultural revolution may come from the outside, change must ultimately be facilitated by those within a particular honor world, or it means nothing.