The History of Sex: Istanbul -- 'The Most Horrible Thing Happened in My Family' -- (Chap. II, Pt. 17)

Mehmet notes that most of the 'tradition killings' you read about in Turkey and the rest of Europe are by Kurds, but they're also common among Turks from the countryside.

'In traditional culture, women are the men's honor, and the men will even call them that in conversation.' Instead of calling a sibling 'my sister,' in other words, a man may refer to her as 'my honor.'

And then he tells me: 'The most horrible thing happened in my family.'

Mehmet was in Germany at the time, but he heard the details from his relatives later.

One of his female cousins was having an affair with another cousin who was also married. Both lovers were first cousins, though that wasn't the problem.

'YOU WOULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING'

The controversy started when the woman began threatening that if her lover didn't make good on his promise to divorce his spouse, she would set up home in his house and effectively force him to take her on as another wife. 'That would have been a big scandal. It would not have been seen as a respectable marriage.'

Likewise, divorce wasn't an honorable option. 'In the area where I was born, only three or four women have been divorced.'

So the adulterer did the 'honorable' thing: he killed her—apparently by strangling her with a wire.

Mehmet says the man's mother then helped him dispose of the corpse. 'They burned her body in an industrial furnace.'

The man was arrested and jailed for two days, but without a body as evidence, the authorities ruled that the woman had run off or disappeared.

Within Mehmet's extended family, though, the cousin's murder is an open secret. The killer's mother has even goaded the victim's parents, saying: 'If you were in my position, you would have done the same thing.'

Mehmet still sees the man at family functions. 'He's a killer, but he lives like a respectable man.'

Muzzammil Hassan, founder of Bridges TV, a US network aimed at portraying Muslims in a more positive light;
in 2009, he beheaded his wife in upstate New York after she filed for divorce

Conversely, Mehmet can't tell his family he's gay because 'it would be like being a murderer.' Many homosexuals have been victims of 'honor killings:' their families have them shot dead, usually by a younger brother because he'll get a lighter sentence.

Even so, it's not uncommon for married men to take advantage of sexual segregation to have gay affairs.

Mehmet says he had an older lover who tried to get him to marry his daughter, just so the two of them—father- and son-in-law—could be together.

As a camp comedian used to say, my flabber is gasted. That seems so wrong, I can't even think of the term for condemning it. It wouldn't be incest—maybe just plain old fraud?

My guide's merely bemused. 'And the strange thing was, he was a fundamentalist, a very religious man.'