Love and (dis)honour

A friend writes in an email : "At stone's throw from my house a very young man
has been shot dead ~~his fault, loving a girl, perhaps
related to him, in another village. I am sure the girl will
also be disposed off sooner than later. The weaker vessel
is generally so treated here. Ghani Khan in his book ''The Pathan''
which he wrote about 70 yrs ago remarks about the Pakhtoon,
" He will sell his old wife to buy a new rifle."
If this is how we treat love, the fountainhead of all that is good in human
nature then Nature has a good case for emptying its reserve of calamities
on this province of the brutal Pakhtoons. And, as we say in Pashtu the green
and the dry will burn down together in wildfire."

My response: "The problem is not the 'treatment of love', I am not generalizing it to every Pukhtoon as educated and enlightened sections in our soceity would think and act differently but the real problem is our false concept of honour, our male chauvinism and most of all our 'hypocricy' and double standards. So I, as a Pukhtoon male, would take pride if someone else's sister falls in love with me and will readily boast about it in the circle of my friends. But if my sister falls in love with someone, I'll consider it as a dishonour and will kill her. The same will I do to a man who dares to show a feeling of love to my sister. This mindset is added by our myopic vision and hence by killing our sister or her lover we, in the process, instead of restoring our honour, only expose ourselves in front of others on the one hand and become murderers on the other. I feel only an education which develops rational thinking is our way out of this ignorance."