Even now, the men at the steel mill where Mubeen Rajhu worked laugh at how easy it was to make him lose his temper.
Some people had seen his sister, Tasleem, in their Lahore slum with a Christian man. She was 18, a good Muslim girl. This couldn’t be allowed.
Ali Raza, a co-worker at the mill, can barely contain a smile as he talks about the hours spent taunting Rajhu about his sister. It went on for months.
“He used to tell us, ‘If you don’t stop, I will kill myself. Stop!’” Raza says. He raises his voice to compete with the sounds of the mill, and other workers gather to listen. They too smile. A few laugh at the memory of Rajhu’s outbursts.
“The guys here told him it would be better to kill your sister,” Raza says.
Rajhu told them he had bought a pistol, and one day in August he stopped coming to work.
Rajhu discovered that his sister had defied the family and married the Christian. For six days he paced. His rage grew. How could she?
On the seventh day, on Aug. 14, he retrieved the pistol from where he had hidden it and walked up to his sister and with one bullet to the head he killed her.
For generations now in Pakistan, they’ve called it “honor” killing, carried out in the name of a family’s reputation.
The killers routinely invoke Islam, but rarely can they cite anything other than their belief that Islam doesn’t allow the mixing of sexes. Even Pakistan’s hard-line Islamic Ideology Council says the practice defies Islamic tenets.
It doesn’t matter: in slums and far-off villages, away from the cosmopolitan city centers, people live in a world where religion is inextricably tied to culture and tradition.
As modernity pushes against tradition, Pakistan has seen an increase in the number of women and girls killed in the name of honor: last year, 1,184 people died, only 88 of them men. The year before that the figure was 1005, and in 2013 it was 869, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. The true numbers are believed to be higher, because many cases go unreported.
The killings have fueled a growing public outrage at the practice. Activists are working to close the legal loophole that lets killers go free.
But for many who have been fighting this practice, it is the mindset of the boy who could kill his sister, or the parent who could kill a daughter, that has to be understood, and changed.

Source: Arab News