Norma Khouri shocked and titillated the book club set with her 2003 bestseller, Forbidden Love, the “true story” of a young Jordanian Muslim girl slain by her angry father and brothers in an “honor killing.” Her offense was a chaste but taboo romance with a Christian in the Royal Jordanian Army. The book aroused outrage in the Muslim world as the author worked the talk show circuit. Supposedly some Islamic cleric or other issued a fatwa against Khouri; she claimed she could never go home to Jordan again. Soon enough, when exposed as a fraud, her publishers backtracked and mea-culpa’d themselves as Khouri continue to insist on the essential veracity of her story. She even staged a trip to Amman for the benefit of filmmaker Anna Broinowski, whose documentary Forbidden Lies is out on DVD.
Like a mystery novel that takes a sudden turn into the unexpected, Forbidden Lies at first takes Khouria at her word—just like everyone in the West—before swerving into a dense thicket of accusations and evasions. Although Khouri’s shaky grasp of geography should have alerted her publishers, her tale of women oppressed in Muslim society had loud resonance post-911. But then journalists and human rights activists in Jordan came forward with a different take. Yes, “honor killings” occur in their country, but not nearly so often as Khouri claims. Also, dozens of references in Forbidden Love are anachronistic or just wrong and the murder could not have happened as described. The filmmaker interviewed skeptical women on the streets of Amman, some in headscarves and others bareheaded, all of them professing amusement at Khouria’s account of their horrendous lives. Apparently, most women in urban Jordan are happily living in relatively autonomy.
Evidence soon surfaced that Khouri is actually a grifter from Chicago with Jordanian roots. Her remarkable success as a first-time writer resulted from a confluence of sloppy media scrutiny, gullible liberals and right-wing extremists. The Cheney clan offered Khouri much support, since her demonization of Islam as the moral code of savages fit snugly into the neo-conservative program for the Middle East. Khouri continues to protest that the core events of her story happened, but offers little proof.
Forbidden Love did raise awareness of the persistence of honor killing in the backwaters of the Near East, yet her apparent exaggerations and fabrications have not serves the cause of human rights. Forbidden Lies is a compelling examination of social problem and individual pathology.
