Religious or Cultural?

Does Islam justify honour kilings? There's nothing in the Koran specifically endorsing them, and Muslim apologists will blame a tribal medieval mentality rather than Islam itself. And certainly honour killings aren't restricted to Muslims. Yet the majority of cases do occur within Muslim societies. Here's Supna Zaidi at Pajamas Media:

An honor killing is defined as the murder of a girl or woman who has allegedly committed an act that has shamed and embarrassed her family. For the family to show its community that it has reasserted control, the woman is killed. Thus, “harm to reputation” is a partial or complete defense to murder. No passage in the Koran discusses honor killings, but Muslim clerics justify them and secular Muslims either do not punish them or pass laws to mitigate punishment for them. With this, Muslims make honor killings a part of Islam.

Honor killings are justified under Islam in some Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia. For example, tenth-grade textbooks teach Saudi children that it is permissible to kill adulterers. In April 2008, a girl was killed by her father for talking to a boy on Facebook, an online social networking website. A leading Saudi cleric, Sheikh Ali al-Maliki, was outraged that girls had access to such websites where they could post pictures of themselves and otherwise “behave badly,” but showed no concern over the girl actually killed.

Honor killings are justified as a necessary part of culture in other Muslim countries such as Jordan, which is technically a secular kingdom with a representative parliament. In 2001 King Abdallah presented a bill outlining stiff penalties for honor killings, but parliament rejected it, stating, “it [punishing honor killings] would encourage adultery and create new social problems.” Four years later, honor killings accounted for one-third of all violent deaths in Jordan in 2005, where perpetrators received as little as six months in prison under the penal code....

The more secular, educated elites of Muslim countries may not be so backward as to commit such crimes themselves, but they know it is happening and prefer to look the other way. The upper and middle classes have a responsibility as civic and political leaders to defend women through education, the law, and enforcement of meaningful punishments....

If moderates reinforce the line that honor killings are “dripping” with Allah or are part of Eastern culture, those prone to such violent acts will continue on the same path. No Muslim will claim theological authority to enforce change from the mosque... But if everyone starts pointing the finger at Muslim society collectively and asks, “why do you let this happen?” maybe change will finally come.

Such reorientation away from divine “Islam” to fallible, human “Muslims” would move violence such as honor killings from the margins of society into the spotlight.

This will allow the current tangential debate of whether such killings are religious or cultural to finally end so we can focus on the girls who continue to be killed daily.

In the background to this discussion of course, though not discussed in the article, is the degree to which the institutionalised subjugation of women in Islam is reinforced by, and reinforces, the "tribal" notion of family honour and women-as-property that leads to honour killings.