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COMMENTARY
February 1, 2012
Exposing a sham
So, is "multiculturalism" dead now?This is a question that might have come to anyone's mind, while reading through news reports and commentary on the Shafia "honour killings." And I don't just mean after the verdict was announced on Sunday, but from the beginning of the Kingston trial. For the indulgence of "multiculturalism" went right out the first window, on Day One. Trial by jury is inevitably supplemented with trial by media in a free country. And the media, like their audience, are a hangin' judge. One did not have to be a lawyer to be vexed, while trying to establish what hard evidence the Crown had against Mohammad Shafia, his "second wife" Tooba Yahya, and his son Hamed Shafia, now convicted of the murders of three daughters and the "first wife." As all three accused consistently and vehemently maintained their innocence, I've tried the mental exercise of looking at the case from the defence side. The evidence presented beyond the courtroom to the public struck me as persistently circumstantial. Which is not to say a huge pileup of circumstantial evidence doesn't make a case. But, what if? What if the car in the Kingston Mills lock had, somehow, got there by accident? And while we're being hypothetical, what if the accused, and perhaps also their lawyers, had botched their defence from cultural misunderstandings? The accused might understand "mainstream" Canadian sensibilities well enough to think they might be "framed," but not well enough to avoid compounding the case against them as they struggled to explain circumstantial evidence away. And their Canadian lawyers would then be at a loss to retrieve the situation. While I'm still unable to fully assemble the Crown's case in my mind, I am nevertheless satisfied that, almost certainly, justice has been done. Yet I am also left able easily to imagine circumstances in which, through cultural misunderstandings more complex than the term "honour killings" will ever convey, a miscarriage of justice could happen. The world view, not only of tribal but of urban Afghanistan, is so profoundly different from that of contemporary English Canada, that most of the conversation between us will be at cross purposes. Reading Canadian media reactions to the trial and its verdict, I noticed one big thing. Journalists normally under the constraint of "political correctness," were granted a break, from the nature of the case, and from the fact that in the Canadian mind, "the rights of women" easily trump "honour codes." There was no way Muslims reasonably suspected of having committed honour killings, were going to be granted multicultural indulgence. And this left precious little room for any benefit of the doubt. The defence quite rightly made the point that, simply by invoking the term "honour killings" in all reports, the media had stacked the case against them. This created an overpowering expectation of guilt, so that merely by showing otherwise irrelevant photos of the victims, dressed like typical Canadian girls of their age, the Crown could summon dark imaginings: "Yes, that's why the monster killed them, because his daughters wanted to become Canadians like us." Yet we cannot even begin to imagine everything playing upon the mind of a man like Mohammad Shafia, or in the minds of other family members. We only think we can. Similarly, we only think we can explain - and in the darkest terms possible - what is in the minds of many Muslims across the country who are outraged by the verdict. For instance: those who have threatened violence to Imam Syed Soharwardy, in Calgary, for having denounced honour killings, and saying they have no place in Islam. If it is the cultural and moral order of Afghanistan we are discussing, I have some vague idea about that from reading, and from having travelled fairly extensively in that country, in the days before the Soviet occupation, and therefore long before the Taliban. It had to be taken whole, to make any sense of its parts. Afghan ideas of honour were very different, then as now, from Canadian ideas of honour. To call the former "twisted" is to announce in advance that one has no intention of examining them on their own terms. And therefore, no ability to confute or confront them intelligently. Our difficulty increases because our own ideas about honour have fallen into chaos over the recent past. They are a bundle of contradictions, of which the most fundamental is that we do not know whether honour is something or honour is nothing. We cannot deal with any such ideas in a coherent way. We can only offer knee-jerk, "I feel" responses to what we imagine to be knee-jerk provocations. And this is what made our erstwhile lip service to "multiculturalism" such a bad joke, such a dangerous sham. We lack the equipment to understand even our own culture at the moment, and are thus at a dead loss to interpret any other. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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