Free Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks Page B

who has done what was necessary to clear his family name. “Honor” killings are somewhat better documentedamong Palestinians than elsewhere because of the Israeli occupation: many, although not all, of the deaths come to the attention of the Israeli military or civilian police.
    Yet honor killings happen throughout the Islamic world. One of the most notorious, the execution of the Saudi princess Mishaal bint Fahd bin Mohamed in a Jeddah parking lot in 1977, was secretly witnessed by a British expatriate. The airing of a film on the killing, in a documentary titled Death of a Princess, created a diplomatic incident that led to the expulsion of the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia. In the United States, when PBS planned to air the film, a major oil-company sponsor asked that it be canceled. Few of the facts of the affair have ever been confirmed. The story told on British TV held that Mishaal was a married woman who had run off with her lover, Khalid Muhallal, the nephew of the man who is now Saudi Arabia’s information minister, and had spent a few nights with him in a Jeddah hotel before trying to flee the country dressed as a man. She was caught at the airport and handed over to her family.
    But an American woman whose marriage into a prominent Saudi family made her intimate with the people involved in the case tells an even more extreme story. Mishaal, she says, was unmarried. She was killed simply for flouting the family will and running away from an arranged marriage in order to marry a man she loved. Her grandfather, Prince Mohamed, the patriarch of Mishaal’s branch of the ruling family, ignored pleas for clemency even from his younger brother, the king. Mishaal was shot; Khalid Muhallal was beheaded. There was no announcement following the killings as there is with executions that take place after due process of sharia law.
    In either version of the story, under sharia rules of evidence neither of the young people could possibly have been convicted. If the documentary’s account was correct, and Mishaal was a married woman who committed adultery, the penalty would have been death, but only if four witnesses had caught the pair in flagrante delicio at the hotel. Circumstantial evidence, such as being together in the same place overnight, would not have been sufficient. And as an unmarried woman, Mishaal had not committed a capital offense under sharia law.
    It was unusual for an extrajudicial honor killing to be carried outby an upper-class family such as the al-Sauds. Generally, it is the women of poorer and less educated families who are most at risk.
    Tamam’s father had been uneducated and needy: he supported his seven children by working as a gardener. The family lived in the ancient city of Akko, in a crowded quarter close to the Crusader walls that run along the sea front. Because her family was among 156,000 Palestinians who stayed, and didn’t flee, during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, Tamam grew up an Arab with Israeli citizenship, speaking Hebrew as fluently as Arabic. She was the last of five daughters; her name, which translates as “enough,” or “finished,” was her parents’ plea for an end to the long run of unwanted girls. Their prayer was answered, several years later, with the birth of two sons.
    The brothers, too, could have been problems for Tamam. But because they were so much younger, and because she left home when they were still small boys, they never had a chance to feel proprietorial about their sister. “For most of us, our brothers are like big, barking dogs who feel that their whole purpose in life is to guard our bodies,” she said. “It’s a kind of oppression for them, too, that they have to go through their lives feeling this responsibility and worrying that at any moment we will snatch their honor away.”
    After she finished school, Tamam left home immediately to take a live-in job teaching disabled children. Later she trained as a nurse. By the time I met her in