• Saphia Azzeddine: French-Moroccan; Bilqiss (2015) mostly takes place in an unnamed Muslim country.
• Tahar Ben Jelloun: French-Moroccan; L’Enfant de Sable (1985) takes place in Marrakesh; La Nuit Sacrée (1987), which is the sequel to L’Enfant de Sable and has the same setting.
• Kamel Daoud: Algerian; Zabor ou Les Psaumes (2017) takes place in an Algerian village called Aboukir (today Mesra).
• Négar Djavadi: French-Iranian; Désorientale (2016), partly set in the waiting room of a hospital in Paris and partly in different places of Iran, covering the end of the 19th century through flashbacks up to the present.
• Mehmet Eroğlu: Turkish; Kıyıdan Uzakta (2018) takes place in contemporary Turkey, on the seaside of the Karaburun Peninsula in the Aegean Region.
• Saleem Haddad: of Lebanese-Palestinian and Iraqi-German origin; Guapa (2016) is set in a nameless Arab country, covering 24 hours with flashbacks to the 1980s and to the protagonist’s stay in America.
• Khaled Hosseini: Afghan-born American; The Kite Runner (2003) takes place in Kabul, Peshawar and Fremont (California) between the years 1975 and 2002; A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), mostly set in Kabul and a village outside of Herat in the years between 1958 until today.
• Sema Kaygusuz: Turkish; Barbarın Kahkahası (2015), meaning The Barbarian’s Laughter, takes place in the motel Mavi Kumru in mid-August of an unknown year and lasts four days; also a few works from her short story collection The Well of Trapped Words (2015).
• Yasmina Khadra (pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul): Algerian; Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (2008), set in Algeria between the 1930s and 1962, with the last chapter taking place in today’s Aix-en-Provence.
• Sahar Khalifeh: Palestinian; The Inheritance (1997) takes place in New York and the outskirts of Wadi al-Rihan today with flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood.
• Zülfü Livaneli: Turkish; Bliss (2002), mostly set in an Anatolian village.
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• Sindiwe Magona: South African; Mother to Mother (1998), set in Guguletu, a suburb of Capetown in August 1993, with occasional flashbacks to 1972.
• Orhan Pamuk: Turkish; Silent House (1983), set in a village not far from Istanbul in 1980.
• Atiq Rahimi: French-Afghan; Syngué Sabour. Pierre de patience (2008), set in Afghanistan or somewhere else (“Quelque part en Afghanistan ou ailleurs”), according to the writer.
• Saliha Scheinhardt: Drei Zypressen (1986), includes three short stories (Erzählungen) that are set in both Turkey and Germany.
• Elif Shafak: Turkish; The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) set in Istanbul and America, as well as Honour (2011), which takes place in a village near the Euphrates and London between the 1970s and today.
• Ayfer Tunç: Turkish; Kapak Kızı (1992) [Cover Girl], takes place on a train between Ankara and Istanbul; Yeşil Peri Gecesi (2010) [The Night of the Green Fairy], partly based on Kapak Kızı and set in Istanbul.
• Robin Yassin-Kassab: British; The Road from Damascus (2008), mostly set in London, with a small part of the plot taking place in Syria.
This list is not exhaustive and we apologize for any omissions.
1.1 Sources of female honor violation
Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists alike “view values as the criteria people use to select and justify actions and to evaluate people (including the self) and events” (Schwartz, “Universals” 1; similarly “Basic” 259). The value of honor can indeed serve as a means of measurement in this sense, providing a scale to evaluate a person’s reputation in a larger social context. It goes hand in hand with the sensations of guilt (in dignity cultures), shame (in honor cultures), and the experience of losing face (in face cultures).56 In honor cultures, this virtue is not only a sentiment internal to an individual inside or outside a group but also “external to him – a matter of his feelings, his behaviour, and the treatment that he receives” (Pitt-Rivers 503).
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A notion of honor that is closely associated with the “purity” of the female body can be considered an essential element of some, often non-Western value systems. Within them, “the greatest dishonour of a man derives from the impurity of his wife” (Pitt-Rivers 52). Not only in the respective home countries, but also abroad,57 the sources of female honor violation are manifold. These can be provoked by a girl’s or a woman’s lost virginity before marriage,58 her disrespect for existing dress codes, her immoral behavior in public like laughing out loud on the street or talking to a man outside her family, her committing adultery, her giving birth to an illegitimate child or only to girls, her infertility, as well as her being the victim of a rape.59 Both in the social imaginary of literary works and in a reality reflected by numerous studies, these seem to be the most frequent causes for a woman to lose her honor and, by doing so, to put her family’s reputation at stake. Even though the novels mentioning blasphemy, alcoholism, or homosexuality are rather rare, these can also be good enough reasons for a woman’s honor loss, followed by private or public punishment. In any of these cases, a woman’s violation of the existing honor codes triggers a more or less violent chain of male actions which need to be visible in public.60 In general, the source or cause of honor loss should not be conceptually separated from its effects. It is not difficult to see that cause is “actual” only in its effect, which is then “the manifestation of the cause”; accordingly cause and effect entail each other (Hegel, The Science of Logic, Vol. 1, Book 2, Section 3, Chapter 3, here p. 494). However, we unfortunately cannot extend our investigation to the various violent consequences of honor and face loss in the space of this volume. A further volume concentrating on such consequences (including honor killings and suicide, among others) is planned to address these matters, also further intercultural situations.
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In their novels, writers like Khaled Hosseini, Sema Kaygusuz, Sindiwe Magona, Yasmina Khadra, Robbin Yassin-Kassab, Ayfer Tunç, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak, Négar Djavadi, and many others describe how a male, traditional understanding of honor codes which often results in an honor-related crime can lead to serious violations of the female body and soul, while at the same time having a lifelong impact on the perpetrator’s and his family’s conscience. Owing to the nature of the topic, literary research sources in some cases tend to foreground the fictional works’ referential quality. Existing research generally clusters around very few of the authors and works we are studying, in particular the work of Ben Jelloun and of Khaled Hosseini, while our analyses go well beyond these. In the following, we will examine the various sources of both female and male honor violation from the perspective of social sciences as well as literary studies, since literature sometimes presents realistic situations which women interviewed in case studies might not have the courage to talk about. In doing so, we are mindful of Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim in Genealogy of Morality (1887) that one should know
how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge. […] There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity” be. (85)
Only if we employ more than one “seeing,” can we recognize the ways in which literature offers “a counterdiscursive staging and semiotic empowering” of what is marginalized (Zapf 63).61
1.1.0 Mothers and disobedient daughters
In honor cultures, mothers pass on the gender-specific notions of female honor as an essential value to their daughters by underlining the importance