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a study with university students, Gursoy et al. confirm that certain ideas related to the female body, a woman’s sexuality, ←44 | 45→and her appropriate behavior in public “are most likely formulated from early childhood within the societal structures of the family and the community” (196). Protecting her honor is one of the main duties a girl or woman has to fulfill during a lifetime, which also requires obedience to her parents’ rules. In contrast to dignity cultures, where the concept of honor does not play a significant role in a child’s education, in honor cultures mothers generally make their daughters understand the importance of honor-related values like sexual purity and innocence very early, thus providing them with precise guidelines for their future. Sev’er and Yurdakul’s statement that “[w];omen are also expected to protect the namus of other women and girls related to them, for example their daughters and granddaughters” (973) follows the same logic.

      Spenlen creates a clear link between educational efforts and social appearances in honor cultures by pointing out that a family’s good reputation in public often depends on how children are brought up by their parents, meaning especially how daughters are trained by their mothers and warned about the consequences of potential disobedience: “Auf die Familie darf kein schlechtes Licht fallen, die Selbstdarstellung in der Öffentlichkeit muss positiv ausfallen, und die Meinung der Umwelt wird Gradmesser für den Erfolg elterlicher Erziehung” (142). If daughters do not behave in an adequate way and therefore bring shame on their family’s name, this failure is automatically traced back to bad parenting techniques.⁶² The patriarchal structure of honor cultures promotes inequality in the upbringing of boys and girls: “Es wird zu einer Ungleichheit zwischen Mann und Frau, Bruder und Schwester, Vater und Sohn erzogen” (Spenlen 141; see also Churchill 110–12). Since, according to Pitt-Rivers, honor can be considered a “hereditary quality” (52) in honor cultures, “the shame of the mother is transmitted to the children and a person’s lack of it may be attributed to his birth, hence the power of the insults, the most powerful of all, which relate to the purity of the mother” (52). It is in the mother’s interest to prove her own honor through the education of her daughter(s) toward obedience: “The purity of the daughter reflects that of her mother, and thereby, the honour of her father” (53).

      Sana Al-Khayyat emphasizes that in the “socializing process” of girls, “the most important issue for the mother – and other adults in the family – is how to make them totally submissive. A girl is taught to be obedient from an early age and will be punished if she refuses to do what adults in the family demand of her. It is aib (shameful, immodest) for her to disobey, although it is not necessarily aib for a boy.” (31–32). Gursoy et al. also state that “women are raised from early ←45 | 46→childhood with concepts such as ‘forbidden’ or ‘disgrace’ attached to female sexuality” (197). In her article “Motherhood Creating Its Killer” (in Turkish with an abstract in English), İlknur Meşe questions feminine and masculine roles in the education of children through an analysis of Elif Shafak’s novel Honour. Among other observations she underlines that mothers tend to devalue and belittle their daughters by not expecting anything from them except becoming “marriage material” by finding a husband (see p. 403). By doing so, they treat them like they were treated by their own mothers, remaining an active part of a cycle that has been working for generations. This also appears to be a way for a mother to “make sense of her own suffering”: “she will force her daughter, whether consciously or unconsciously, to surrender to the very same gender system that she herself has surrendered to” (Ghanim, Gender 145). Apart from a few articles which mention the influence of mothers on their daughters, the social sciences do not seem to pay much attention to the responsibility women have in honor cultures by shaping their children’s understanding of gender-specific, collectivistic honor. Here and in other respects, sociology and literature as “collateral (never identical) processes of meaning construction” are not unconnected but rather complementary to each other (Longo 147, see also 36).

      “I wanted nothing more than to fit in and be a respectful wife and bring my daughter up to do the same. Like my mother and her mother before her” (118), writes Sarbjit Kaur Athwal in her autobiographical novel Shamed, confirming that mothers bring up their daughters so that they are “programmed to be the perfect wife” (150). Fictional works dealing with this topic often highlight that girls are taught innocence, obedience, modesty, and decency as well as feelings of guilt and shame by their mothers. Zülfü Livaneli’s Bliss, which focuses on different forms of honor-based violence (which also include the planning of an honor killing), tells three parallel stories with three protagonists. Two of them, i.e., Meryem⁶³ and her cousin Cemal, become directly involved in an incident of honor loss which has consequences for the whole community. The novel highlights honor-related behaviors and reactions from a female and male perspective, giving insights into the corresponding gender-specific value systems. In the novel’s course, Meryem complains that she is taught the shame of being a woman and is punished for it: “I was blamed for everything I did: Don’t laugh loudly, Meryem; don’t flirt, Meryem; you’re grown up now, Meryem; don’t play ←46 | 47→with boys!” (98). Elif Shafak, who writes both in English and Turkish, expresses similar thoughts in an article on honor killings published in The Guardian in 2011:

      Since my childhood I have heard more than once old women advising young women to be modest. Traditionally, females and males are thought to be cut of different cloth. Women are cut of the lightest cambric whereas men of thick, dark velvet. The colour black doesn’t show stains, unlike the colour white, which reveals even the tiniest speck of dirt. A woman who is believed to have lost her modesty is at times worth no more than a chipped coin. There are always two sides of the coin: dignity or disgrace, and little consolation for those who get the wrong side. (“Turkey”)

      In Shafak’s novel Honour, which (as its title indicates) treats honor as its main subject, we find the same “cambric” metaphor when Pembe’s mother Naze teaches her daughters always to stay in the background: “It was all because women were made of the lightest cambric, […] whereas men were cut of thick, dark fabric. That is how God had tailored the two: one superior to the other” (16). Textile production as a primary marker of gender identity has a long history, associated with social values (e.g., white, stainless clothes reflecting innocence) which easily become reified.

      A similar observation about conduct can be made in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de Sable, which especially highlights gender inequality by also touching on different manifestations of honor.⁶⁴ Its protagonist stresses that all female members of the family have been brought up to be obedient and keep silent: “Dans cette famille, les femmes s’enroulent dans un linceul de silence.⁶⁵ … elles obéissent…. Mes sœurs obéissent” (46). Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, which now and then describes honor-related aspects in an intercultural environment, ←47 | 48→provides us with Najwa’s statement “I was a girl and Mama’s responsibility. […] I was going to get married to someone who would determine how the rest of my life flowed” (78). The image of flow suggests an easy course after assenting to marriage, a course whose channel is not hers to carve.⁶⁶

      One of the main reasons why female family members often feel inferior to their male counterparts is their lack of education. It is mostly the mothers who hinder their daughters from going to school. Instead of promoting them intellectually, they rather focus on showing them how to cook and do chores, so that they are well equipped to get married off easily. In her novel Désorientale, Négar Djavadi briefly describes the inequality between boys and girls⁶⁷ that is frequently promoted by their mothers, who are in charge of their children’s education. She highlights that from generation to generation, certain behavioral codes have been passed on concerning the way sons and daughters should be brought up. These gender-specific rules include “girls must help their mothers”⁶⁸ (“fille qui aide maman,” 219), and also deal with their respective futures. The obsession with how to become an excellent wife and mother who later on can teach her own daughter(s) modesty, obedience, and decency explains why the notion of female (especially sexual) honor remains so important for each generation of women in honor cultures, regardless of the country they live in.

      In both Elif Shafak’s Honour and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, which both reveal various types of honor-based violence, the mothers Naze and Nana explicitly

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