The Inner Circle – Friends, Family and Community

The second group of issues to consider are those that involve our ‘inner circle’. That is family, friends and community with whom we are in regular contact. It is difficult to entirely separate ‘inner circle’ issues from personal issues because there is obviously an overlap.

Obviously most of us, most of the time, find that our inner circle provides us with major benefits in terms of our social life. These fulfil some our higher human needs (see Maslow’s Hierarchy and Attachment Theory) and most religions including Islam incorporate these items into their practices, because they were developed by humans with a good empirical understanding of these needs.

However, sometimes things go wrong. There are some ways things that tend to go wrong, that apply mostly to Islamic communities and we’ll take a look at these.

Honour Based Violence (HBV).
How coercion is applied to ensure conformance to local norms.
Morals and legislation.

Again, we cannot possibly hope to cover this in depth here – just raise a few items for consideration in the context of Islam and Muslim communities.

Honour Based Violence (HBV) in a nutshell

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IKWRO definition of HBV ‘Honour based violence’ is an organised and collective crime or incident, which has or may have been committed to protect or defend the honour of the family and/or community’. It could include mutilation, imprisonment, forced marriage or honour forced suicide. Who are typically most likely to be a victim of HBV … Read more…

Are you in danger?

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Muslims do not have a monopoly on so-called ‘honour’ killings and attacks, but they do appear to carry out the vast majority of honour killings. Islamic teachings do not specifically support honour killings, but in practise Islamic states around the world turn a blind eye to it, largely because women are regarded as a commodity … Read more…

Is HBV an issue in NZ?

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The problem of threats, intimidation, physical harm and ‘honour killing’ on religious grounds is a worldwide issue across many religions. In non-Islamic (secular) and multi-cultural countries like New Zealand there is more exposure to other cultures and opportunity for Muslims to stray from the ‘right path’ in one way or another. Many Muslim communities are … Read more…