It took six years for the Jordanian al-Goul family to hunt down their daughter Basma.

She had run away with a man, afraid for her life after her husband suspected her of infidelity. Her husband divorced her and, in hiding, she married the other man. But, back in the overcrowded, largely Palastinian village of Resaifah, where a woman's chastity is everyone's business, the contempt for her family kept spreading.
"We were the most prominent family, with the best reputation," said Um Tayserr, the mother. "Then we were disgraced. Even my brother and his family stopped talking to us. No one would visit us. They would say only, "you have to kill."

Um Tayseer went looking for Basma, carrying a gun. In the end, it was Basma's 16-year old brother, just 10 when she ran away, who pulled the trigger.

"Now we can talk with our heads held high," said Amal, her 18-year old sister.

What is honor?

Abeer Allam, a young Egyptian journalist, remembered how it was explained by a high school biology teacher as he sketched the female reproductive system and pointed to the entrance of the vagina.

"This is where the family honor lies!" the teacher declared, as Mr. Allam remembers it. More than pride, more than honesty, more than anything a man might do, female chastity is seen in the Arab world as an indelible line, the boundary between respect and shame. An unchaste woman, it is sometimes said, is worse than a murderer, affecting not just one victim but her family and her tribe.

Honor killings are not exclusively an Arab phenomenon. they are known in India, Pakistan and Turkey, among other places, particularly among poor, rural muslims. Many Arabs complain that attention to their society's portion of the problem reflects a western tendency to see them as backward.

"When a western man kills his lover or wife, the crime is called a crime of passion," said Mohammed Haj Yahya, an Arab-Israeli sociologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who is active in efforts to combat honor killings. "But when it happens in Arab societies, it is called a family honor killing, and we are viewed as barbarians." In Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and other places where honor killings take place, newspapers rarely mention them.