Honor as Revenge: Sex, Forced Marriage, and Retaliatory Control in Sabina Khan’s The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali

Abstract

This paper explores how The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali (2019), the young adult novel by Sabina Khan, represents honour as a retaliatory system of control in the context of a diasporic Bangladeshi-American family, rather than a positive moral virtue. It aims to fill an existing research gap in Muslim YA literature where visibility and Islamophobia often take centre stage over honour-based coercion and how it is narratively portrayed. The analysis focuses on how honour becomes a vehicle for revenge through family-led punishment; how home spaces, cross-border ties, and digital platforms collectively heighten surveillance; and how alternative forms of storytelling and fragile alliances offer limited forms of resistance. Using ideas from intersectional feminist sociology, postcolonial gender theory, and American Muslim cultural criticism, particularly those on honour-based abuse, coercive control, and violence continuum, this study conducts a qualitative close reading of The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali, grouping scenes into six types of control: reputational, bodily/domestic, mobility/documentary, marriage-market, pseudo-medical/ritual, and digital/public. It is revealed that honour operates like a retaliatory economy, converting shame into punishment and recasting care as a morally justified discipline. Coercion is found to depend on intertwined mechanisms that push the protagonist from private restriction into transnational and public vulnerability. The grandmother’s diary and the support of siblings and friends function as harm counter-archives and escape networks, revealing how far honour-based control reaches and where resistance begins to falter. Ultimately, the article
argues that honour works as a transnational disciplinary system and that American Muslim YA fiction sheds critical light on the infrastructures that sustain modern-day honour-based coercion.