In Honor of Fadime
Murder and Shame
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Part I Swedish Lives
1 Fadime, in Remembrance
2 Sara: “Too Swedish” for a Right to Live
3 Pela, or History Repeats Itself
Part II Honor
4 What Is Honor?
5 The Cross-Cultural Context of Honor Killing
6 Virginity, Virility, and Honor
Part III Fadime’s Case
7 At a Trial
8 Little Sister, Thirteen Years Old
9 A Mother’s Story
10 Naive or Primitive?
11 Strength Born from Grief
Part IV Norwegian Lives
12 Intermission: Honor in the Courtroom
13 Nadia’s Case: Another Question of Honor
14 The Zedini Case: Was Honor at Stake?
15 The Lørenskog Murder: Rethinking Honor
Part V The Appeal
16 The Man in the Woods
17 The Mother
Part VI The Way Forward
18 Speaking in Parliament
19 Integration
20 At Stake: A Perception of Humanity
Part VII Reflections
21 Longing for a Family
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
“Unni Wikan puts tough questions to herself and to her readers in this spellbinding, astonishing and courageous account of her personal journey across moral universes. In Honor of Fadime is far more than a eulogy—it is the best case study ever written about the way liberal and illiberal moral communities misunderstand and react to each other in Northern Europe. If murder is defined as a wrongful killing, is an honor killing murder? What precisely makes an honor killing wrong if it is an act of collective defense and a last resort to protect a family from humiliating and socially consequential harms inflicted on it by one of its members? This brilliant book takes us far beyond the ‘banality of evil’ as we arrive at an eye-opening (even if troubling) comprehension of how a morally decent husband and wife come to feel they have no choice but to kill their daughter.”--Richard A. Shweder, University of Chicago
“[Wikan] plunges the reader into a truly surreal, nightmare world. . . . This is a controlled but harrowing condemnation of an utter anachronism.”
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