Just when you think this country cannot surprise you anymore, it does. Just when you begin to believe you’ve grown numb to horror, a new one claws its way into the public eye, and proves you wrong. The recent video of Banu Bibi and Ahsanullah, shot dead in Balochistan for the crime of love, forces us once again to look into the abyss we’ve normalized. A country obsessed with honour, it seems, cannot protect its own.
Thirteen suspects were arrested after the footage emerged. The young couple had married of their own free will, against the will of their families, and paid the ultimate price. Their execution, filmed and distributed like a grotesque warning, wasn’t just a murder. It was a ritual, sanctioned by tribal codes, soaked in the rhetoric of ‘honour’, and enabled by a society that continues to see women’s choices as threats to patriarchal order.
A country obsessed with honour, it seems, cannot protect its own.
From Balochistan to Sindh, the blood does not dry. In January alone, eight more people, five of them women, were murdered in the name of ‘Karo Kari’ across four districts in Sindh. In June this year, 17-year-old Sana Yousaf, a TikTok influencer, was shot dead by her cousin inside her own home, on her birthday. The motive, authorities say, was rooted in “honour-based violence.” In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a couple who had lived in hiding for two decades returned to their village in Mardan, only to be killed the same day.
To count them all would require more ink than this space allows.
Yet this is not just a Pakistani problem, it is a historical one, rooted in centuries of patriarchy disguised as virtue. Ancient Rome allowed the paterfamilias, the father of family, to kill his unmarried daughter for sexual misconduct. The Hammurabi Code of Mesopotamia, dated nearly 4,000 years ago, mandated that women accused of adultery be thrown into rivers. Male adulterers, of course, walked free. The idea that a woman’s body is the vessel of a man’s honour is not new, it is as old as civilization itself.
Historian Matthew A. Goldstein describes honour killing as a tool to control female sexuality, an ancient form of paternity insurance. If women were kept under strict surveillance, denied choice, and punished for deviation, men could rest easy, confident in the legitimacy of their heirs. Honour, then, was just another word for ownership.
This obsession travelled through time and geographies: from Roman laws to Renaissance Europe, where German women accused of adultery were flogged and buried alive. In 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed for adultery, incest, and witchcraft, charges now widely accepted to have been fabricated. Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi wrote that smart women in medieval Europe were called sorceresses and burned alive, not for magic, but for knowledge. The Napoleonic Code gave men legal power to imprison or divorce their wives for infidelity, with no reciprocal rights.
Today, we are led to believe that religion condones honour killings. It does not. Neither the Qur’an nor authentic Hadith permit such extrajudicial violence. Religious scholars overwhelmingly condemn honour killings as haram. Yet in Pakistan, such crimes persist, fueled by misinterpretations of faith and the silence of institutions unwilling to confront them.
In Balochistan, tribal jirgas continue to operate as shadow courts, issuing death sentences that mock the rule of law. The horror compounds when families of the victims become defenders of their own oppression. In the case of Banu Bibi, her mother not only condoned the killing but also rallied behind the tribal chief who sanctioned it. In Punjab, the injustice takes a legal form, where killers exploit forgiveness clauses to walk free. In Sindh, the term ‘Karo Kari’ swallows hundreds of women each year, erasing their lives in silence and shame. A 2014 Pew survey revealed an even darker undercurrent: nearly 40% of Pakistanis saw honour killings as justifiable, with 30% believing they were often justified. This is not culture. This is complicity.
In her 2002 report, UN special rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy called “honour” a magic word that cloaks unspeakable crimes. She was right. It is the linguistic camouflage we use to rationalize murder, to maintain a violent social order that sees women not as citizens but as symbols, repositories of purity, silence, and obedience.
In truth, this is not about honour. It is about control. It is about fear. It is about men who cannot bear the idea of women choosing for themselves. It is about society’s failure to punish those who kill, and its comfort in pretending that honour killings are some fringe custom, confined to remote corners of Balochistan or Tharparkar. They are not. They are everywhere, in every province, in every class, in every story where a woman is punished for asserting her humanity.
So what now?
If our politicians truly want to honour women, they must go beyond symbolism. They must abolish forgiveness loopholes in honour crime cases. They must disband jirgas operating outside the constitution. They must fund shelters, legal aid, and relocation for women at risk. Balochistan’s Chief Minister must personally oversee justice in the case of Banu Bibi and Ahsanullah, and not with words or committee announcements, but with arrests, trials, and public accountability.
Religious leaders must speak louder, clearer, and more consistently: this is not Islam. This is murder. And the murderers are not saviours of family pride or religious dignity, they are criminals, plain and simple.
Most importantly, we the people must stop romanticizing this violence. Honour is not greater than life. There is no family name worth the blood of a daughter.Until we, as a society, disown this perverse idea of honour, we will continue to bury our daughters, sisters, and mothers in its name.
In a land where bullets guard tradition and graves preserve reputation, there is no honour left; only silence, fear, and the blood of the innocent. It is becoming an increasingly terrifying place to raise daughters, and if fear is the intended legacy of these so-called honour killings, then their mission is tragically succeeding.
The writer is a women’s health researcher, women’s rights activist, and columnist based in Nawabshah, Sindh. She can be reached at [email protected]