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lost her ‘ird.

      Ermers gives a semantic overview of different honor nuances that can be found in Turkish⁴⁵ and Arabic, of which particularly the definitions of “şeref”/“šaraf” and “namus”/‘ird will serve our purposes. He provides rather non-gendered connotations of “şeref” in Turkish, seeing it as a sign of high social status, pride, non-sexual moral standing, respectability, and good reputation (38–39).⁴⁶ However, in the context of honor-based violence, it must be stated that “şeref” just like “šaraf” is not gender-neutral, as it mostly refers to the honor of the man whose reputation is damaged by the fact that a female relative loses her honor “namus.” In general, Ermers is against a “gender bias” (31), claiming that, for instance, allocating “sexual restraint as an honor attribute exclusive to women” is not justified (34). Yet the fact that there is a specific expression to describe the sexual honor of women (namus/’ird), with none exclusively depicting the notion of male sexual honor that can be lost, speaks for itself and thus against Ermers’s statement that sexual restraint is positively evaluated “for both genders” (34). We will show in the following that men who have a “reputation of not controlling their sexual desires,” who make undesired sexual advances or who are accused of rape (34) are often judged less severely in honor cultures than a woman who does the same.

      Similarly to Reddy as well as Sev’er and Yurdakul, Bilgili and Vural insist on the fact that the expression “sharaf” (or “şeref”) stands for a man’s honor, which is the sum of his own masculinity, his social status, and his power to protect his ←35 | 36→own and his family’s name (see Bilgili and Vural 66; on “warrior masculinity,” Churchill 138 ff.).⁴⁷ Delaney stresses that “a man’s honor depends on his ability to control ‘his’ woman” (39), which at the same time highlights a woman’s being regarded as a man’s property. Among other duties, the responsible male always has to keep an eye on the female relative’s immaculate appearance in public. Whereas in dignity cultures individual honor is at least theoretically opposed to individual guilt, in honor cultures female shame (originally individual, but then made public), resulting from a woman’s violation of existing honor codes, can quickly trigger the loss of collective honor. Taking all these different aspects into account, we can thus claim that, in honor cultures, there exist some kinds of gender-specific honor that can usually not be found in dignity cultures.

      Secondly, honor cultures are generally characterized by a complex interrelation between mostly collectivistic but also partly individualistic understandings of honor-related issues, because people wish to maintain a positive self-image as well as a positive group image.⁴⁸ Members of honor-shame communities display “some collectivist characteristics” and at the same time “affinities with individualist cultures” (Churchill 95). This idea of honor as a group value is opposed to a characteristically individualistic perception of honor in dignity cultures, which is one of the main reasons why Fischer et al. distinguish between “individualistic versus honour-related values” (Fischer et al. 149). According to Caffaro et al. as well as Cihangir, only a few studies take the aspects of individualism versus collectivism into account when examining particular understandings of honor. However, especially in the context of immigration, these factors need to ←36 | 37→be examined to get a better grasp of the overall concept.⁴⁹ When individuals have qualities on which others reflect, they undergo a formal reduction, based on “a particular relational identity” (Oprisko 30). As a result, for immigrants who have been living in a dignity culture for several generations, honor-related rumors about their family that might be spreading in their neighborhood still have a lastingly negative impact on their family name, regardless of the fact that they are far away from their homeland.

      Concerning rumor and gossip, which can be a direct consequence of honor loss, Karen Adkins stresses that gossip “functions selectively”: “we sort through information to figure out what we want to pay attention to”; in using gossip “we synthesize, we combine disparate bits of information (often that don’t intrinsically appear to belong together) into a story or explanation for some sort of dissonant behavior, act, value, or person” (3). The backdrop of “our previous ideas, beliefs, and sometimes prejudices,” of which we may be unaware, is decisive (Adkins 3). Though the terms “gossip” and “rumor” are frequently used as (near-)synonyms, Adkins argues that there is “an assumed relationship of trust, or some common background, present in gossip, from its infancy, that doesn’t exist for rumor” (11); accordingly, “gossip’s origins are in intimacy, rumor’s in anonymity” (Adkins 78). Thus gossip can be “a rich medium for revealing, critiquing, or reinforcing power dynamics,” within institutions but also by extension within communities (Adkins 77).⁵⁰ Here we should note that in her essay collection Aramızdaki Ağaç, Sema ←37 | 38→Kaygusuz describes “dedikodu” (meaning both “rumor” and “gossip” in Turkish) as a form of communication which makes humankind a frightening community. It is a sort of cannibalism because somebody’s “human flesh” is provided and then this “meat” is eaten (“ötekinin etini vermek”/“insan eti yemek”: 100). Someone is thus eaten alive, turning her/him into a socially dead person as a consequence of a community’s destructive judgment.⁵¹

      Social studies and literature show that honor automatically turns into a collective matter which needs to be defended and/or restored, as soon as a woman violates honor-specific codes through her immoral behavior. At this point, saving the family’s reputation in public is regarded as a collective responsibility which mostly concerns male family members but sometimes also requires women as their helpers.⁵² Considerable efforts to cleanse family honor are a key characteristic or even a requirement of honor cultures, sometimes leading to an honor killing (see Churchill 59, Ermers 273) or other types of violence.⁵³ In contrast, ←38 | 39→the honor code women are expected to follow is not so much about honor itself since, according to patriarchal thinking, they can only lose their honor but not restore it; it is rather about how to keep their (sexual) purity intact and avoid (sexual) shame so that they do not stain the intact (collective) family honor by becoming the source of neighborhood gossip.

      According to Cihangir, King, Rodriguez Mosquera et al. and others, the ideologeme of a woman’s sexual purity is directly linked to her family’s reputation and social status. Since a person’s honor is not an individual but a collective matter that is permanently exposed to external judgment, this group value is extremely fragile. The patriarchal structure typical of honor cultures promotes ←39 | 40→male power and male honor, which explains why the focus lies not so much on a woman’s honor but rather on her shame.⁵⁴ In Hofstede’s analysis of cultural dimensions, the scoring results concerning power distance also reflect the patriarchal structure of such societies,⁵⁵ which goes hand in hand with an over-emphasis on both masculinity and collectivism. The fact that there are no words in dignity cultures to describe male and female honor separately may once again serve to prove that such a concept does not exist in cultures where honor is not a gender-specific, collective issue.

      As it is not possible to cover all fiction dealing with honor-based topics, this book can only present a selection of contemporary literary works focusing on honor cultures. In terms of languages, this scope is mostly limited to novels and short stories in English and French original texts or translations and to those written in Turkish. However, the range of represented countries is relatively wide, comprising among others Afghanistan, Algeria, India, Iran, Morocco, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, and also immigrant communities of England. For our comparative analysis, we have tried to choose a fairly equal number of male and female authors whose works were published in the period between 1985 and 2017. In alphabetical order of authors’ last names, the list of works includes

      • Khader Abdolah: Persian-Dutch; My Father’s Notebook (2000) is partly set in Saffron Village and Isfahan, depicting recent Iran, with occasional flashbacks ←40 | 41→to the Pahlavi kingdom under Reza Shah, and partly in the Dutch region Flevopolder.

      • Leila Aboulela: Sudanese; Minaret (2005) is set in Khartoum and London between the years 1984 and 2004.

      • Ramziya Abbas al-Iryani: Yemeni; short story “Misfortune in the Alley” (2005) presumably set in Yemen, included in Dalya Cohen-Mor’s literary anthology.

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