Customer Reviews

Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(73)

 

 

Positive, even glowing reviews have been written in the NYT Book Review and elsewhere about this woman's brave attmept to tell a story that needs to be told. Sure, her prose isn't the greatest, and she stumbles at times, but what a story!

Unfortunately, it's all a complete fabrication. Khouri created a fictional potboiler and had a lot of people fooled. And the great pity of it is that women *are* treated as second class citizens in that part of the world, that family honor killings *do* take place, in countries like Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and Khouri's fabrications will only serve to cast doubt on the real stories.

Id like to share with your readers some of my findings about this book, if I may. Thank you.

The author claims in her book (a claim repeated in her review of Queen Noors book Leap of Faith) that many Jordanian women are in jail for their own protection as they fear that they might be killed by their families. As an Australian of Jordanian descent, I know for a fact that it is indeed true and I believe that it shouldnt happen as it is plain injustice that we should all fight.

But, by writing so in her book, the author shot unknowingly herself in the foot because, if she was REALLY threatened with death by her OWN family for 5 years, why didnt she seek the jails protection against her familys death threat like the other women? Quite the opposite, she spent the last FIVE YEARS of her life in Jordan AT HOME not in jail in fear of her family!

This is yet another undeniable proof that there was NO death threat made against her by her family. In fact, as two reviewers already noticed, her family belongs to a social upper class that does not believe in honour killing. Somehow, she forgot to mention this fact in her book. One wonders why!

If her family REALLY threatened her with death, she would have headed towards the nearest prison asking for protection, the VERY SAME day the threat was made. Something she didnt do for FIVE WHOLE YEARS, by deciding to stay at home. So much for that death threat! Also a death threat that remains active for 5 years is just laughable.

I am therefore sad to say that this book is a pack of lies, written for a gullible and perhaps prejudiced western readership. This death threat claim and episode is just another illustrative example of the tendency of this book to be caught increasingly in the web of its own lies.

So by all means, let us fight honour killing and violence against women worldwide (including my own country Australia) BUT let us not be fooled by this author whose aims are financial and immigration, behind writing this book. Fighting honour killing is one thing and buying this book is another-there is no connection between the two. A carefully orchestrated anti-Jordanian media blitz made the naïve western readership mix between the two.

This book truly does not deserve a place on a bookshelf. Its rightful place is in a dustbin, the dustbin of fake writings where Adolph Hitlers diaries occupy a prominent place already.

Finally, I have found the comments of a fellow Australian (see below) unduly and unjustifiably harsh about Yvonnas review. After all, the reviews aim was to help Amazon readers reach an educated view about this book by highlighting some of the vital discrepancies of this supposedly factual book. There is nothing wrong with that. It is called freedom of expression!

As an immigration officer who has travelled and lived through the middle-east, I have found this book content doubtful, to say the least. The style deliberately constructed to manipulate the emotions of her readers has made me even more suspicious of the author's motives.

In my line of work, I have dealt with claims, as dramatic as the authors', that are made by people eager to enter the west by any means. The author's assertions have simply not been backed up by any material evidence. This is a `love' story with not a single proof! The contrast between this book and Queen Noor's which describes her love story with King Hussein is amazing. In that book, the documented evidence of their love is for all to see-even letters and photos were included!

The author writes that Dalia's death is genuine and her `love' story is true. However, a close inspection shows unbelievable contradictions documented by your reviewers. I may not be Jordanian or a Muslim but, because I have lived for a while in Jordan and the middle-east, I have noticed that the author has been truly careless about her description of her country of origin and Islam. It is as if the author's bottom line, when writing this book, was: `western readers know nothing about Jordan and Islam, so they WILL believe anything they are told anyway'.

For example, the author claim's that photography is forbidden in Islam is blatantly false. As an amateur photographer, I am fascinated by the beauty of Jordan and have attended IN AMMAN photographic exhibitions about the red city of Petra. Also, since she claims to be a close friend to a Muslim lady called Dalia, has the author never seen -in Dalia's home- an Islamic calendar with photos of, say, mosques around the world? I have got one at home! In fact, don't Jordanian newspapers publish photographs? The whole claim seems bizarre and designed to portray her fellow country(men/women) so backward as being afraid of having their souls `stolen' if they pose before a camera lens!

This kind of careless falsehoods has made me switch off completely. In this spirit, since the author's motto seems `as far as the western readers goes, anything goes', I believe that, as her readers, we have the right to demand enough tangible proofs before believing that Dalia and Michael ever met let alone fell in `love'! It should NOT be that hard, as Michael is ALIVE.

The emotional, rather than intellectual, style of this book account betrays the author's objective: settling in Australia with this book as her vehicle. She is neither the first nor the last to resort to this method of emotional `blackmail' to emigrate to the west as I have met so many applicants, in my professional experience, each with a dramatic story that usually collapses under examination. Like the one about a woman claiming to be a rape victim at home who was found to be a virgin when medically examined!

The fact that there is violence against women in Jordan is undeniable. No one disagrees with the author on this point. However, to concentrate on Jordan and forget for example the awful treatment of native women in Australia and New Zealand (the 1994 film `Once Were Warriors' is a haunting example) is intellectual deception and shows yet again that her over-riding goal is not helping women fight violence but settling in the west.

Had the author criticised, in her book, even slightly, the Australian government for the level of violence against aboriginal women, she would have been banned from entering the country. So she seems to have `fine-tuned' her attention and attacks on Jordan and Islam only! It is her SELECTIVE choice of women's issue that makes her book look suspiciously anti-islamic and anti-arab in character. This is why I believe that this book is not a universal cry for help on behalf of victimised women - it is simply the author's passport to the west.

Since she has successfully settled in Australia by now, let us hope that her future writings will be less about settling scores with Jordan and more about fighting GLOBAL violence against women, starting with her new home -Australia- and her new world - the west!

I read a summary about this book in Australian's Women Weekly Mag and felt great deal of sympathy towards the author and her friend, so I went online and bought the book instantly.

21 pages is the maximum I could go with this book, I could not take the lies in it anymore. As a matter of fact, I believe it should enter the Guiness books of records as "the publication with the largest number of lies ever"!. Norma, maybe this will get you more fame, which is obviously the only reason why you wrote this book.

With all due respect to the people who liked this book, I think you should travel to Jordan before deciding that it was a good book and from the first sight, you will understand that it is all lies.

Being half Jordanian myself, I never saw anything that the author describes in Jordan at this age and time, is it the same Jordan we are talking about?

My suggestion to those reading this review, dont waste your money on a book like this, it is not real and not fun to read at all. The summary written above is all what the book is about.

As a Canadian/Israeli woman involved in helping abused women, I have found this book utterly disappointing. The 'teenage romance' style of the author is uneven and all too often too dramatic, whilst emphasising the superficial and skipping over providing the hard evidence to support the claims contained in her book.

The author has reduced the WORLDWIDE occurrence of violence against women into an unconvincing 'forbidden love' tale between TWO people ONLY. Her story is quite frankly laden with exaggerations and untruths about Jordan in particular and the Muslims in general. It is a typical made-to-order novel to fit within the prevailing anti-islamism of some western media. We must be aware about how prejudices can be created and exploited by writers for financial and personal gains. Norma Khouri is no exception in this respect.

The author, by concentrating SOLELY on Dalia's tragedy, IF it is to believed of course, has failed to put honour killing in its proper worldwide perspective. As a Western reviewer pointed out, Dalia's death is no different from that of a Western woman stabbed to death by her husband/boyfriend on the basis that 'if he cannot have her, then no other man can'.

The point missed on purpose by the author in this book is the difference between Dalia's murder and that of a Western woman resides ONLY in the label used: In Jordan, it is given the emotionally charged label of 'Honour Killing' whereas in the West it is simply labelled 'Domestic Violence'. So it is just a question of `packaging' murder of innocent women; a packaging that is soothing to our Western `sensitivities' by describing Islam as `evil' of course! It is obviously clear that Norma Khouri has quite aptly exploited our fears and prejudices against Islam to her advantage by pushing aside the eternal truth that NO society has the monopoly of good or evil.

In this book, the author's portrayal of the West as the 'land of free love' is baseless, as any Western reader, aware of violence against women, will admit to that. By reinforcing the 'holier than thou' attitude prevailing in the West at the expense of her OWN country, the author misleads the unsuspecting reader into believing the dangerous fallacy that women are killed only in Jordan and those who murder women get away with it only in Jordan.

This baseless fact brings me to my penultimate point. The author talks about men getting away with murder in Jordan. It is true BUT up to a point because there have been some NEW legal remedies against such an unjust situation which have been adopted in Jordan. These facts are known to the author as she herself admitted to it in many of her interviews to the Western media. So why didn't she include them in her book? Could it be because they will sour the image that the author wants the West to have about Islam? In fact, Islam does NOT condone honour killing, regardless of what the author claims.

Moreover, Norma Khouri is mistaken when she claims that in the West crimes against women land their perpetrators automatically in jail. For example, in the US state of South Carolina, according to a recent study, HALF of the worst offenders against women are discharged and those who are jailed spend less than 2 years behind bars. This situation led a director of a local battered women's shelter to state that `it is no wonder we are No.1 in the nation for women being killed by men'. So after all, in the West, neither men nor some legal systems are that different from their Jordanian counterparts. This is a fact that the author has tried so hard to conceal, in order not to 'complicate' the simplistic and racist view of good (ie 'us', the Westerners) versus evil (ie 'them', the Arabs and Muslims).

In conclusion, people ought to bear in mind that, in the Middle East, the content of this book is dismissed not just by well-meaning men but also by dedicated feminists who have spent their lives fighting for women's rights and who now feel their fight against honour killing has been hijacked by Norma Khouri for her own personal gains; which is a tragedy for their cause.

The author's following statement: 'I hope, by building on the work of activists in Jordan, who are constantly frustrated and suppressed, to bring closer to abolishing these crimes' is sadly a mere wishful and grandiose gesture, to impress her naive readership, because -as she has burnt ALL bridges between her and her country- her standing in Jordan is inexistent.

As a feminist, I feel let down by this book which is not worth spending one's money and time on.

I am a Dutch teacher who worked in Jordan for 8 years. Any enjoyment that this book and its style could have brought me was marred by the sheer audacity of Norma Khouri in describing her birthplace so unfairly and so falsely that it seems to have created a wave of self-righteousness in the west. There is an Arab proverb that says: "A camel points at the back of his fellow camel and mocks". Are we, western women, really that free from male and societal violence?

The anti-arab and anti-islamic sentiments generated and of course exploited by this book seem to miss one truthful fact: Western men do kill western women also. For example, here in the UK, 5 women were killed within one week. Somehow we see our victims as unfortunate statistics to accept as part of the ugly side of our western life but we are led to see any other women killed elsewhere in the world (especially in the Arab/Muslim world) as a crime to be outraged about. This is a double standard to which this book has contributed greatly. Indeed I believe that in her book Norma Khouri is encouraging unwittingly violence against women in the west by carelessly singling out for condemnation Jordanian men in particular and the Arabs/Muslims in general, giving thus comfort to western misogynists. I was personally a victim of male violence at the hand of my former husband who was neither an Arab nor a Muslim.

Norma Khouri writes confidently that all Jordanian men (excepting Michael!) abuse their women. One wonders how she reached such a conclusion. Did she conduct a nationwide thorough statistical study of the Jordanian society? Or did she simply let her disdain towards her own country take over her book? Norma Khouri does not seem to realise that using such over-the-top unproven generalisations and biased exaggerations makes her own book obsolete and definitely not a reference publication to consult when querying about Jordan. Actually, having lived in Jordan, I know that her description of Jordan and especially Amman is quite honestly peppered with lies and distortions destined for the western market.

Of course we must care about and fight violence against women. Unfortunately, it would be a misguided belief to assume that this book is a first-hand account of an honour killing and that, by buying it, one is contributing positively to the cause of eliminating such killings in Jordan because it is very much in doubt that Norma Khouri has had any first-hand experience of honour killing otherwise, as a reviewer noticed, she would have fled the country without delay, once the alleged honour killing of Dalia took place, instead of staying in Jordan for another five years. Also, Norma Khouri has no link whatsoever with Jordan, anymore, apart from Michael whose existence is in doubt too.

I believe that the best way to fight misogynist violence is not by buying this fictional story but it is by helping one's local shelter for women. Once we have eradicated violence at home, we can then set a positive example for others to follow. Otherwise, we are open to the charge of being hypocritical, like the proverbial camel. I heard such an argument in Jordan quite often. It cannot be dismissed that lightly because when one has been a victim of "domestic" violence, one is not inclined anymore to believe that the west is the land of "free love" and "personal freedom" and thus to preach western values to others.

There is good and evil wherever we are. However, for obvious reasons, Norma Khouri has written this book to make us believe that Jordan (and Islam "naturally") are the land of evil whereas the west (and Australia "especially") are the land of good. The racist undertone is so plain to see! All in all, Norma Khouri has done a great disservice to the cause that she claims to have espoused by not being objective and truthful in her present book when describing Jordan and its social problems. This book does not even deserve one star.

I, a Jordanian-American also a devoted supporter of women's rights and development in the region, was quite disappointed with this book. While most of us agree with Norma that the legal and cultural justifications for honour killings are wrong, we should not go about educating ourselves and others by fostering stereotypes which degrade Islam and Arabs in general. Such seemed to be the case as I read through Honor Lost. While Norma in some ways painted a vivid picture of Jordan by describing its geographic landscape and food, in other ways she merely generalizes and essentializes life in Jordan to a prison and suggests that Arab women are oppressed while western women are liberated. While her life and that of her friend may have been as she described, she cannot assume although she does that this is the life of all women in Jordan. Just like in the West, the Middle East is diverse, not all women live the same. Norma failed to mention the night life in Jordan which includes not only elite women, and that most Muslim men and women in Jordan shake hands and eat together (she writes otherwise). Norma also attacked Islam by selectively citing from the Qur'an, stating that it supported honor killings. In actuality Islam does not openly support honor killings any more than Christianity does. One can selectively cite from the Bible as well to suggest that it is inherently oppressive to women. Also, Jordanians today do not adhere to the Islamic laws of Saudi Arabia, for example, but you would never know that from reading this book. Her numerous references to Muslims reminded me (as a Christian myself) of the discriminatory comments I hear from Arab Christians (and others) about Muslims - she just repeated what she probably heard all her life about Islam to justify the 'superiority' of her religion. We should be writing and promoting books that paint realistic pictures which do not idealize nor stereotype the Middle East. If we do not educate ourselves and others about such matters as honour killings through appropriate channels, we risk doing more harm than good, which is the outcome of this latest book. ...

This book seems to me conceived with moving to the west in mind; based on the apparent belief that western people are ready to believe anything said or written about the Middle-East. Otherwise, it is hard to understand why it was written with no regard for accuracy, objectivity or logic. The author has, most certainly, shown no intention in this book to initiate a dialogue with her fellow Jordanians. About its style, one cannot enjoy its ups and downs if one doubts the cohesiveness of the story. Unfortunately, it was my case!

In this review, I'll concentrate on the author's following claim, related to the period after Dalia's death, that amazingly enough has escaped all your reviewers' attention so far. The claim is that her immediate family threatened her with death for `shaming' them before Dalia's family, prompting her to wait for five years to get a visa to `escape' from Jordan. This claim will be challenged using this book itself.

If I may, I'd like first to remind your readers what the author wrote, when Dalia died: Michael had already arranged travel papers not just for him and Dalia but for the author as well and they were to be ready `within few months'. Therefore, just few months after Dalia's untimely death, those travel documents had arrived and were ready for use by Michael and the author if they wanted to leave Jordan. So, why didn't they use those visas to escape to the west? Indeed, why did the author claim to be living under a death threat originating from her family and yet chose to stay at home for another five years, despite having her visa available within months after Dalia's death? There is only one logical explanation: Her family never issued a death threat against her, in the first place!

Actually, based on how she describes her father and family in her book, they must have felt sorry for her for losing Dalia, in such a horrible way. In an interview to an Australian Sunday newspaper last January, the author said `if she returns home, she will be probably shunned or killed by her loved ones'. Claiming to be killed is expected of her (It is by doing so that she settled in Australia) but the surprise is she admits that after all she could be just shunned by her family; which actually fits her family's social standing because, as a reviewer pointed out already, her family is known to belong to the Establishment within which `honour killings' are frowned upon. Somehow, the author failed to mention this fact in her book, presumably to make the `death threat' from her family against her seem believable.

The post-Dalia course of events suggests thus that she let the validity of that first exit visa lapse and chose to stay for another five years at home as no death threat was actually issued against her.

Also the idea that it takes five years to obtain a visa to leave Jordan is ridiculous: It took just about a year for Michael to get those first three visas, according to the author herself. In this book, the reader is left wanting more as to why five whole years were supposedly needed, this time, to get such a visa, instead of one year or so.

However the way that five-year period in Amman after Dalia's death is described in the book, highlights once more the tendency that the author possesses in contradicting herself from one chapter to the other.

For example, she writes early on of being afraid of seeing Michael in public, before Dalia's death. However, later on, once Dalia is dead, she writes that she and Michael kept meeting in public places unafraid of being seen together for five whole years! How can the author reconcile these two contradictory statements within the same book? It also contradicts her earlier claim that her only reason to meet Michael was as Dalia's matchmaker. Does the author expect her readers to square the circle, on her behalf, to make a sense of these obvious contradictions?

The five-year long association between the author and Michael, after the death of the unfortunate Dalia, has not thus been fully explained in this book. In fact this whole five-year period has been written in such a cavalier way, with no regard for the readers' common sense, that it is one of the lowest points of this book.

Therefore, the events as chronicled in this book suggest that there was no death threat hanging, like a sword of Damocles, above the author's head for five years and most certainly she left home for Australia on her own volition, with a date of her own choosing: Year 2000. As pointed out, she could have left in 1995, if she wanted to, with her first visa.

Putting aside my professional interest in this book (I am an English literature teacher), as a Jordanian woman and a fellow Christian, I feel let down by the author for trivialising an issue like honour killing by denigrating her country and making up a `love story' out of a simple flirt that went horribly wrong. With her eyes set on Australia, the author piled up so many layers of misinformation that her book has become worthless to us Jordanian women and men who are fighting the honour killing mentality and, yes, winning!

To those interested in serious studies about how a society like Jordan thinks and behaves, I recommend, with your permission, the series of books -written by a former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong- which are available in Amazon. Kind Regards.

As an Arab, Jordanian, Muslim woman educated in the West and living in the heart of Amman, Jordan, for the past 20 years, I was astonished at Ms. Khouri's attempt at portraying Jordanian women as being subservient to the men in our families and society. Her sweeping statements about the status of women in this country, in addition to her similarly-sweeping statements about our culture, heritage and religion(s), are so extremely misleading -- and often outright false -- that one wonders about the author's real agenda. I am extremely disappointed that such an important issue as the murder of women and girls done in the name of honor has been degraded into such bad fiction. Honor crimes do exist in Jordan, as in other parts of the region. It is by no means excusable under any circumstances and any pretexts. And it is no secret these murders happen. Jordanian women activists have been at the forefront of fighting these crimes and continue to do so relentlessly. They continue to fight for women's civil rights, and achievements, as slow as they may be, are being made in that direction.

So, NO, not all, not even most, women here are subservient or stay in the kitchen. Walk in the streets of Amman and go to its restaurants, cafes and clubs and you will see that half are women, some veiled, some not. Go to any government institution or private company, and you will see a substantial percentage of the work force are women. It is truly insulting that Ms. Khouri gives the impression, through her book, that we are slaves, mindless, helpless creatures, who have only two choices: Either live as slaves at home in Jordan, or escape to the West to be free. That is far from the truth.

Ms. Khouri's book, which she claims to be a true story about her Muslim best friend's brutal murder by her father because she loved a young Christian man (which she often refers to as "Catholic," very unusual reference to Christians here), is so packed with false information, including important and unimportant details, that one wonders about the credibility of the whole story.

Examples: -- The writer does not know the countries that border her own country? She included Lebanon and Kuwait as bordering Jordan. They don't. -- At one point, Ms. Khouri writes that her brother gave her a 50-dinar bill. There were no 50-dinar bills in 1996, and only came out after King Abdullah assumed the throne in 1999. -- She writes her father was shocked to see a man (taxi driver) at her front door waiting to be paid the fare, repeatedly complaining about how strict her and her best friend, Dalia's, fathers and brothers were, not allowing them out of the house without a chaperone, not allowed to speak to men, etc. But yet, these very same backward men allow them to open a unisex hair salon where men can come and go as they please and have their daughters cut men's hair? It just doesn't fit, and certainly not in the lower-middle class area of Jabal Hussein. If their fathers and brothers were so concerned about their "family name," they would NEVER have allowed them the luxury of opening a unisex salon. -- The Islamic Action Front did not have a majority in Parliament when the National Assembly rejected revoking the law that gave lenient punishment to the killers of women. In fact, the Islamic Action Front boycotted these parliamentary elections and not one single member was in the National Assembly at the time. Or was this piece of misinformation slipped in to blame the Islamic movement for parliament's unjust decision?

The list is endless, and that's why I question the credibility of the whole story and on an issue that is so important to many of us.

Ms. Khouri is clearly a fiction-writer, though not a very good one. And I urge NO ONE to read it, unless you want to waste your time, like I did.

In this review, I'll concentrate on the author's inability to be objective and truthful and her ability to cover it up by exploiting the remaining `crusade' spirit within the West towards the Arabs/Muslims. About its style, one cannot enjoy its ups and downs if one doubts the story veracity. Unfortunately, as a Jordanian Christian woman, it is my case!

The kind of reaction that this book has generated is a telling example of why and how advertising works in the West: People believe what they want to believe-never mind the evidence or the lack of it as for this book.

With not a shred of hard evidence of any kind to back up her story of being involved in a honour killing, Norma Khouri managed to convince many of her Western readers (who never set foot in Jordan) that she is telling the truth and she is the voice of Jordanian feminism all the way from Australia! She is indeed the example of a self-appointed feminist as no one in Jordan relates to her anymore, not because she spoke against honour killing (so many of us have done so for years before she did) but because she told so many lies about us Jordanians and our country in her book.

What seems so illustrative of how Norma Khouri has succeeded in exploiting the latent Western prejudices against the Arabs/Muslims is how some people are reacting towards any criticism of this fictional book. Accusations of being a `supporter of honour killing' and of being a `self-declared feminist' are levelled at the critics. The irony is the critics have experienced the real Jordan whereas those applauding this book most probably have never lived in Jordan! So how can they vouch for the authenticity of this fictional book?

In this book, Norma Khouri stumbles from one illogical and self-contradictory statement to the other. I shall mention just two of them:

(a) Once Dalia was supposedly killed (where is the proof of that? How do we know she did not die naturally?), Norma Khouri was so `horrified' that instead of taking any plane to anywhere to escape she decided to stay in Jordan for the NEXT FIVE YEARS-no less than that! So much for Dalia dying of honour killing!

(b) Once Norma Khouri was supposedly threatened with death by her family (which by the way does not believe in honour killing as it belongs to the ruling establishment-a fact known by us Jordanians), Norma Khouri was so `horrified' that she chose to stay at home for a FURTHER FIVE YEARS! So much for the family threat!

Her behaviour betrays two simple truths. Norma Khouri never witnessed an honour killing and was never threatened by her family. She left Jordan because, after 5 years of running the salon on her own after Dalia's death, she got bored and decided to seek a new life abroad. There is nothing wrong with that except that to cross the immigration hurdle in Australia, she came up with this fictional story that makes the anti-Arab Western hearts melt and minds explode with indignation, by defaming her own country.

About Dalia, it is clear that she did not die of honour killing. Youth is no shield against death-I lost a friend to brain cancer when she was 32.

As for Michael's existence, the fact that not a single word has come out of him or about him since the publication of this book leads to one and ONLY ONE conclusion: Michael is a fictional character created by the author in her bid to `cook' this self-contradictory love story that never was. She claims that he is at the forefront of fighting honour killing in Jordan. So how come none of us has heard of this eminent public figure? No one knows who he is-how strange! Our anti-honour killing movement is open by nature to everyone, including members of our royal family. So there is no place and NO NEED for scarlet pimpernels amongst us. The logical implication is then Michael is a creation of Norma Khouri's vivid imagination.

Her amazing creativity, which does not see lying and distorting facts at will as a line not to be crossed, has allowed her not only to create a love story out of thin air but also to create her own version of Jordan in a parallel universe that looks like a concentration camp for women. As a Jordanian woman, I do not recognise my own birthplace in her book but I understand why Western readers are easily taken in by this fictional book. I admit that I too for a while was fooled into believing that Michael existed and Dalia was killed.

Norma Khouri is without a doubt a successful writer of fiction. However honour killing is not a fictional issue to us. It is a real question of life and death. So my advice to the author is to leave the fight against honour killing to us who, unlike her, did not desert Jordan for a new life in the West. If she cared this much about honour killing, she should have stayed in Jordan as it was boredom that made her leave the country and not any `threat' from her family. Since she has settled in Australia, perhaps she could help better the status of women there by beginning with putting her feminist zeal at the service of the Aboriginal women for whom alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, prostitution and domestic violence and murder are a daily lot. I am looking forward to her book on how she contributed to the welfare of Australian women.

In the meantime, to those interested in serious studies about how a society like Jordan thinks and behaves, I recommend, with your permission, the series of books -written by a former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong- which are available in Amazon. Kind regards from Amman, THE REAL AMMAN!