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To most Americans, and Westerners generally, it is inconceivable. A father kills his daughter because she fell for the wrong guy. But move East, and in some cultures that is just what is done. A reality no one speaks of.

Norma Khouri can’t stand the silence. She’s written Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan in honor of her best friend, Dalia. Dalia and Khouri met when they were three, and, as Khouri tells it, were nearly inseparable for the next twenty-two years. They were always challenging their culture, Dalia’s religion, and her father. They managed to convince him to allow them to open a hair salon in Amman. It was in the salon where she found the happiness that would ultimately lead to her death penalty.

Dalia, twenty-six years old, was killed—stabbed twelve times with a kitchen knife—for the sake of her family’s honor. Her scandalous behavior? She was seen in public with a Catholic man.

Michel, a major in King Hussein’s Royal Army, was a customer in their salon—a frequent one. Khouri recalls Dalia telling her about him, “’each time he comes in, he says he wants a haircut and tells me to take a little off the ends. Then he spends the whole time talking to me. But I don’t mind. Just looking at him feels good.’”

There was no illicit affair, mind you—though they did kiss twice, held hands, and met many times over the course of a few months, almost always in the company of others, including Khouri. (Khouri has said it could not have been on more than fifteen occasions that they spent time together.) Constantly under Dalia’s father’s eye—usually a brother escorting them, the young women went to great lengths, coordinating with Michael’s sister how and when they would meet.

Dalia knew what she had gotten herself into. Khouri writes,

Our mothers, like all mothers of daughters, did their job by training us to live in an unsympathetic, protected, male-dominated world. I’m certain no woman raised in Jordan has escaped her childhood and young adulthood without hearing things like: “A woman’s honor, once ruined, can never be repaired,” or “Better to lose your life than lose your reputation.” They told us about the woman who chose to kill herself and die honorably rather than allow a potential rapist to assault her, and of the woman who didn’t preserve her honor and was raped only to be murdered by her own family who were protecting her ‘good’ name.

Khouri, a Catholic, is certain that if roles were reversed, and she had been attracted to a Muslim man, she would have suffered a similar fate. She writes, “The killing and imprisonment of women who broke the rules wasn’t just Islamic; it crossed religious lines. Now that the informal affection of childhood had been replaced with rigid control over me, I could picture my brothers battling with my father over who would cast the first stone.”

Caught up in these new feelings—neither Khouri nor Dalia had any experience with romantic love—Dalia dreamed there was a future for her and Michael, outside of Jordan, in either London or Greece, where Michael had friends willing to put them up (and taking Khouri with them). But that would never be.

Dalia’s exuberance became tainted with worry, as they seemed to be closer to their goal of leaving and starting their lives outside of Jordan. Dalia feared her fate when her brother found pine needles in his pickup truck, which fell off one of the women’s blankets after a picnic with Michael and his sister. She was sure the “conspiracy” was unraveling. Khouri writes that Dalia “had turned, quite literally, into a nervous wreck. She wasn’t sleeping or eating properly—I had never seen her like this. . . . She was obsessed with the pine needles Mohammed had found in his truck, and insisted that he’d suspected something ever since, although he’d never said a word to either of us. I tried to believe her, but couldn’t get past the idea that if he suspected us he’d have said something.”

Dalia called Khouri on her last night alive, worried that something was wrong. The next morning Khouri dashed over to Dalia’s house. Upon approaching Dalia’s house and seeing an ambulance drive away, Dalia ran inside. She saw everyone in Dalia’s family except for her life-long friend and asked, “What happened? Where is she?”

The only person who responded was her father. “Where is she? Where she belongs, that’s where she is!” he said angrily.

“What do you mean? What happened?” I asked.

I waited for a moment and when he didn’t reply, I asked again, “Where is she?”

“Don’t worry, if I find out you knew, or helped her in any way, you’ll be following her shortly,” he snapped. The dehumanized way he looked at me and spoke his icy words told me exactly what he meant, but I had to press on. Had to know.

“Following her? Please tell me what happened! Tell me where they took her!” I pleaded.

“God’s will is what happened! What did she think? That my home is a house of whoredom?” he yelled.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“About her and that Catholic man, that’s what I’m talking about. How long did you two think you could hide it from me? How long has she been shaming me and dishonoring my good name?” he hollered.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve made a mistake. Dalia never shamed you. She never would. Please tell me what you’ve done. Is she okay?” I asked.

“I’ve cleaned my house, that’s what I’ve done. I’ve cut out the rotten part and brought honor back to my family name. From now on, no one is allowed to mention that name to me again. I never had a daughter! Understood?” He shouted as he glared, first at me and then at the rest of his family.

In addition to the cultural divides between East and West, Khouri’s book speaks to the inconsistencies within Jordan itself. She begins her book:

Jordan is a place where men in sand-color business suits hold cell phones to one ear and, in the other, hear the whispers of harsh and ancient laws blowing in from the desert. It is a place where a worldly young queen argues eloquently on CNN for human rights, while a father in a middle-class suburb slits his daughter’s throat for committing the most innocent breach of old Bedouin codes of honor.

It is also a country from which the author of Honor Lost had to flee.

Khouri, who is currently in exile in Australia, is translating Honor Lost (titled Forbidden Love in international editions) into Arabic, and has vowed to fight for human rights in the Middle East. Her book is the heartbreaking story of a young woman who didn’t deserve to die, by any objective standard, and is an important contribution to East-West understanding. Khouri, herself a Catholic, is winning no fans among Muslims; she calls Islam “a totalitarian regime operating under the guise of a religion.” But with an unknown number of women killed for “honor” every year—the United Nations estimated the annual toll at 5,000 in 1998—and a continual acceptance of such killings in the Middle East, at the highest levels (in August 2001, the former Jordanian justice minister, asked about honor killings perpetrated on a woman who has been raped, said, "All women killed in cases of honor are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die").

The story of Dalia’s death never made it into any newspaper; Khouri, in Honor Lost, fixes that. But Khouri’s heartbreaking remembrance of Dalia, and her struggle to change Jordanian standards of justice, remind us that bridging the divide between our very different worlds would take much more than a few town-hall meetings.

Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Hudson Institute.