Why Institutions Matter More Than Religion in Honor-Based Violence – Religion & Liberty Online

In 2025, a video went viral in Pakistan in which a group of armed men were shown killing a couple. According to the First Information Report (FIR), the act was committed before local tribal leader Sardar Shehbaz Khan, who ordered the couple’s killing for engaging in an “immoral relationship.” After the video went viral, many people across Pakistan expressed their outrage. The police arrested 13 individuals in response. As of July 2026, however, the perpetrators still have not been convicted. 

Across the border in Bangladesh, a woman accused of violating community norms is more likely to face public humiliation through a fatwa-backed shalish. Both are forms of honor-based violence carried out in two Muslim-majority, post-colonial states, yet are very different from each other.

In Pakistan, hundreds of women are killed each year in the name of honor, often at the behest of tribal councils. The Sustainable Social Development Organization (SSDO) reported 547 honor killings in 2024 alone. Bangladesh, by contrast, does not record honor killings as a separate category; there, honor-based violence more often takes the form of fatwa-instigated punishments carried out through shalish councils, which are informal, village-level dispute-resolution bodies headed by local elites and religious authorities. These punishments include public humiliation, flogging, and social ostracization of women. Yet this form of honor-based violence has declined sharply in recent years. Not to mention the misuse of fatwas to flog women, some Islamic scholars within the Muslim-majority world consider the elimination of corporal punishments, such as flogging, as the actual goal, rather than merely its reduction. Saudi Arabia, for instance, formally abolished judicial flogging in 2020. 

These divergent patterns are best explained not by religious differences but by differences in institutional structures: the role of tribal councils in Pakistan versus village clerics and shalish councils in Bangladesh.

Although many cases of honor killings go unreported, high-prevalence districts include tribal and feudal areas. These killings, which mostly target women, are carried out when a woman decides to marry someone her family does not approve of, is found to have had a premarital relationship with a man, or does something that apparently brings shame to her family and tribe in the wider society. 

It is important first to understand the structure of these tribal areas where most of the honor killings are carried out. Some of the rural areas in Pakistan are headed by jirga or panchayat (both terms refer to councils of elders or tribal councils) operating as paralegal systems. At the time of Pakistan’s independence from British colonization, the feudal and tribal system was further entrenched to provide political legitimacy to the colonizers. These tribal councils are used to settle disputes in the areas where the formal legal system is not accessible. They are managed by local elites and are composed entirely of men. In the context of honor-based violence, the tribal councils inflict honor-killing punishment to women they believe have defied societal norms, especially around marriage and their definition of “modesty.” 

However, it is important to note that honor killings in Pakistan, an Islamic state, are not committed using religious justifications. In fact, the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) declared honor killings “un-Islamic.” This council is an important constitutional body in Pakistan that oversees the laws to check their compliance with Islamic rulings. In line with this, Pakistan passed two significant pieces of legislation against honor killings. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2004 placed honor killings under a distinct category with serious penalties attached. But it proved ineffective because perpetrators could escape legal consequences through pardons from family members of the victim, a major loophole. The legislation was amended in 2016 with the passage of the Anti-Honor Killings Laws (Criminal Law Amendment) to address the gaps in the previous law. 

Despite these legislative actions, honor killings did not abate, and some civil society organizations pointed to tribal councils as the reason. Hence, in 2019 the Supreme Court of Pakistan ruled that jirgas (tribal councils) are unconstitutional and inconsistent with the country’s obligations under international human rights agreements. The court permitted jirgas to operate only as voluntary mediation bodies in civil matters and prohibited them from exercising criminal authority or using coercion. Despite this ruling, law enforcement has proved ineffective in jirga-related cases pertaining to violence against women, and the conviction rate for this crime stands at 0.5%.

Despite the Supreme Court’s decision to ban jirgas from exercising their authority in matters related to “honor,” they continue to function arbitrarily. Why? Why has the state not been able to check the role of these councils despite clear evidence that they have been oppressive toward women? Several factors help explain their persistence. 

The Pakistani state continues to rely on these councils for security reasons, such as counterterrorism efforts in security-vulnerable areas. In this case, the state must collaborate with the councils, and that collaboration constrains the state from taking strict action against the latter’s use of honor-based violence. Secondly, the state also seeks tribal councils’ help in maintaining local stability in some of the rural areas. Formal judicial institutions in Pakistan are not expanded to rural areas, hence jirgas act in dispute-resolution matters in those areas. For example, in June 2025 the federal government formed a committee to explore reviving the jirga system in KPK province as an alternate dispute-resolution mechanism, this on Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s directive. This decision reflects a lack of resources to expand more formal judicial oversight, also reminiscent of colonial practice in its own use of jirgas. But this comes at the cost of sacrificing those individuals’ lives who go against tribal norms of honor. 

Bangladesh’s form of honor-based violence is structurally different from Pakistan’s. The primary institutional vehicle is not the jirga of tribal landowners but the shalish. Local religious scholars or clerics have instead issued fatwas to punish women they believe have violated Islamic norms. Councils impose public corporal punishments on women, including flogging, as well as social ostracization.

A fatwa is a nonbinding legal opinion on a point concerning Islamic law. According to Islamic law, fatwas can be issued only by qualified Islamic scholars who have done rigorous study in Quranic interpretation, hadith (sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), and Islamic jurisprudence. However, in the context of rural Bangladesh, local clerics, who are not well versed in Islamic law, act as self-appointed muftis (highly trained Islamic legal scholars authorized to issue formal legal opinions) to punish women under the guise of religion. The use of fatwas to punish women grew alongside the spread of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on development projects in the 1990s. Local clerics targeted NGOs such as Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), Nijera Kori, and Grameen Bank through social boycotts and intimidation of women associated with these organizations. But as rural people became more aware of their rights, they started questioning the fatwas issued by the clerics. Against this backdrop, the Bangladesh High Court passed a judgment in 2001 and declared all forms of fatwas illegal. Later, in 2010, the Supreme Court allowed the issuing of fatwas but banned their enforcement, especially in the context of extrajudicial punishments. 

For the past few years, honor-based violence cases have been declining in Bangladesh. For example, in 2022 the number of total reported cases was six, as highlighted by the Bangladeshi NGO Ain-o-Salish Kendra (ASK), whereas in the first decade of this century, ASK assembled news reports of at least 330 such incidents. 

The decline in honor-based violence against women in rural areas of Bangladesh can be attributed to the role of civil society, mainly NGOs, that initiated women’s empowerment projects and also transformed shalish through intervention. Many NGOs have promoted NGO-mediated shalish, in which women also participate in the decision-making process. Rather than abolishing shalish councils, Bangladesh has transformed them in a way that they can still be helpful in dispute-resolution matters without violating human rights. 

NGOs have also been empowering marginalized groups, especially women, in the rural areas through skill development, financial literacy, and education. Naila Kabeer, a professor of gender and development at the London School of Economics, in her book Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings and Expressions, explores the role of an NGO-led shalish, Nijera Kori (NK), and argues that it has empowered people to question rulings issued by local clerics that are distorted interpretations of Islam. As a result, clerics in those rural areas where NK operates are careful in interpreting religious law. Ironically, the NGO activities that initially provoked local clerics to resist them were the ones that weakened those same clerics’ authority. 

As can be seen, the comparison between Pakistan and Bangladesh in terms of different forms and frequency of honor-based violence suggests that reducing such violence requires more than just criminal legislation or theological reform. Institutional foundations that provide women with accessible dispute resolution and civic participation appear to matter more than religious affiliation alone. Bangladesh’s case demonstrates that an informal justice system can be reformed rather than abolished. However, Bangladesh’s experience with fatwa-instigated violence should also not be romanticized. Public flogging, social ostracization, and other forms of extrajudicial punishment are serious human rights abuses. But these practices have become increasingly rare over the past two decades as NGO-led initiatives and community participation have undermined the authority of coercive fatwas and reformed the shalish system. On the other hand, Pakistan’s continued reliance on tribal institutions shows how legal reform can be ineffective without institutional change. The comparison further challenges a common assumption that honor-based violence is a consequence of Islamic belief. Pakistan and Bangladesh share similar religious traditions, yet their varying institutional frameworks resulted in different outcomes. This shows that civil society and state-initiated policies can be more decisive than religious doctrine in shaping how gender-based violence is addressed.