Headscarves and Hymens (13 page)

Muslim scholars have differed on whether any form of genital cutting is required, recommended, or optional based on two controversial sayings by the Prophet. Those sayings are considered weak and of little credibility by some scholars because they seem to be in contradiction to the Qur’an, which itself does not mention any form of genital cutting for women. In fact, passages from the Qur’an and Hadith advocate for women’s sexual satisfaction. Both the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad discuss foreplay, and describe sex between a husband and a wife as something to be enjoyed by both; the Wasa’il Hadith even states that omitting foreplay is “cruel” (Wasa’il, vol. 14, p. 40). Isn’t that Islam, too? Why is it not a religious duty to make sex between a husband and wife enjoyable, and therefore a sin to do anything to prevent such enjoyment, including hacking off the very part of a woman’s genitals that would provide her pleasure?

Instead, scholars of the Shafi’i school (one of the four Sunni law schools of Islam) interpret those two dubious Hadiths to allow what is known as the “Sunnah circumcision,” in which the prepuce (retractable fold of skin or hood) and/or the tip of the clitoris is removed. That is supposed to be different and distinct from a clitoridectomy and the more severe forms of cutting listed by the
WHO, but as that institution and others stress, any form of the removal of healthy genital tissue is unnecessary and to be considered a mutilation.

When Egypt banned the practice in 2008, some Muslim Brotherhood legislators opposed the law. And some of the movement’s officials were on record as doing so until recently. The women’s affairs adviser to Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first president after the overthrow of Mubarak, described FGM as “beautification,” and objected to the practice only when it was carried out on girls as young as seven or eight. Parents should wait until their daughters hit puberty, she said. When she made those statements there was, rightly, an outcry. But outcries are hollow and hypocritical unless accompanied by sustained outrage, daily, annually, at the acceptance of FGM in Egypt at large. For some, the outrage was aimed at just the Muslim Brotherhood—attacking only the Muslim Brotherhood’s misogyny was a hobby. Many are clearly and willfully blind to the misogyny that flourishes too easily in Egypt no matter who governs. The Muslim Brotherhood never hid its misogyny, but no one should think it holds the copyright on misogyny just because it was so public about it. Egypt’s alarmingly high rate of FGM and the medicalization of the practice—with the encouragement of a regime that was not allied with the Muslim Brotherhood—is a reminder that Egyptian approval of FGM extends far beyond foolishly honest statements by the Brotherhood and its members.

Djibouti, Egypt, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen are the Arab League member countries most associated with FGM, according to a UNICEF study. If we are to stand a chance of further reducing the prevalence of FGM, it is important to take into account the various other countries where the procedure is practiced, how FGM has traveled along with migration to countries outside the areas where it is usually believed to be prevalent (Africa and the Middle East), and what is being done to fight FGM in each region.

In Sudan, where 88 percent of women ages fifteen to forty-nine have suffered FGM (according to UNICEF), there has been no law against the practice since 1983, when the limited ban on the harshest type, implemented under British rule in 1945, was struck down. Sudan is perhaps the nation in the Middle East and North Africa where the practice is most destructive, for there, as in some parts of southern Egypt, infibulation—the most extreme type of FGM, which involves cutting the clitoris and labia minora and sewing together the edges of the labia majora, leaving a hole for menstrual blood and urine—is performed. This type of FGM has the most dire short- and long-term complications, and in many Sudanese communities, this is the only type of FGM that is considered sufficient.

A recent UNICEF campaign against FGM in Sudan
was called Saleema—the Arabic word for “complete,” meaning that girls should be left as they were born, with their bodily integrity intact—and employed television and radio spots, billboards, and a pledge to boycott the practice of FGM, which six hundred Sudanese communities have signed since the campaign’s launch in 2008. Some activists criticized the campaign’s avoidance of the words
cutting
or
FGM,
attributing this to the desire on the part of the organization to appease conservatives who do not want to see the practice eradicated. The campaign’s organizers defended their approach, which they say was designed to be inclusive rather than confrontational, and to encourage broad dialogue.

The most persuasive opponents of FGM are the survivors themselves. Nariman, a thirty-five-year-old Egyptian woman who spoke to me for the BBC documentary, said the revolution had changed her mind about FGM. “I’m one of five sisters and we’ve all had it done to us,” she said. “Before the revolution I didn’t know it wasn’t necessary. It happened to me and I feel like I was done an injustice. I feel it has affected my life and I didn’t want this. If I have daughters I will not have this done to them.”

Nesma el-Khattab, the young lawyer who works at the Shehab Center, positioned her stance against FGM as part of the revolution as well: “My fight was taken home. My personal revolution began when I was twelve or thirteen. I began to say no to many things in the family. All the women are supposed to wear niqab but I
said no to niqab, I fought to go to university, I fought to study law, I fought to work here.

“I fought to work on women’s rights—one of my sisters in niqab said, ‘As long as you’re working in women’s rights, it means you’ve lost faith and gone against God.’ If that’s the case, so be it because I love my work.

“I fought so I could get all these rights. I fought against cutting, which happened to me when I was nine. I told my family, ‘If you do it to my younger sister, I’m going to turn this house upside down.’

“Before, I was saying no. Then the revolution came, and then I began to say, ‘I demand!’ It’s way out there now: head-to-head confrontation. I would go to Tahrir without our family knowing and my mother would say, ‘You’re not allowed back in the house.’ I’m twenty-four. I’ve been fighting for years but the revolution took it to another level.”

That is exactly the connection between the personal and the political, the home and the street, and the street and the state that we must make if we are to save our girls.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has created a YouTube channel called Too Much Pain, featuring a collection of videos sharing individual stories of FGM. In one video, Djenabou Teliwel Diallo, who was born in Guinea, where the prevalence rate of FGM is 96 percent, tells of her excision, which happened in a large ceremony with a hundred other young girls.
“Everyone was waiting for their turn. I was waiting too and I could hear the screams of the ones who went in before me. Screams. I was just there, frozen. I couldn’t run away because it would mean dishonor for my family.” Later Djenabou’s grandmother attempted a second excision because Djenabou’s mother believed the first one had not been done properly. This time, the procedure almost killed Djenabou when her grandmother nicked a vein. Her story is deeply heartbreaking, yet also hopeful: she now lives in Belgium and works as an anti-FGM advocate.

In New York City in 2003, I had the privilege to meet a married couple from Ethiopia and two young sisters from Kenya who had bucked centuries of tradition to say no to FGM. When she got married in 2002 in Kembata, Ethiopia, Genet Girma wore a placard that read “I Am Not Circumcised, Learn from Me.” Adisie Abosie, her groom, wore a placard reading “I Am Very Happy to Be Marrying an Uncircumcised Woman.” Genet had broken with a rite of passage for girls and young women in that part of Ethiopia in which girls are subjected to what is known as step-two female genital mutilation, or excision: the partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora.

How did Genet and Adisie escape? At their schools, the Kembatta Women’s Self-Help Center helped them
make the connection between genital mutilation and the difficult childbirths they had seen their mothers suffer.

Genet ran away from home to escape mutilation. Her family, and Adisie’s, disowned the couple, but the two persevered and held their wedding in public to spread their message. Some two thousand people attended the ceremony, which was covered extensively by Ethiopia’s media. Since their public stand, several other couples have followed suit by publicly rejecting mutilation.

My other two heroes are Edna and Beatrice Kandie, sisters from Kenya. Not only can they happily claim to have saved themselves, four younger sisters, and many other girls from genital mutilation, but they can also boast of changing the law in their country.

After learning from a pastor at their church that the Bible prescribed circumcision for boys only, the sisters told their father they would not undergo the ritual. “Our father was very hostile at first, and we had to run away from home,” said Beatrice, fifteen.

After they fled, the sisters contacted the human rights activist and lawyer Ken Wafula, who helped secure a court protection order that forbade their father from forcing them to undergo mutilation. This precedent led to legislation in Kenya that criminalizes female genital mutilation. “Most of our friends and the whole community abandoned us because they didn’t like what we were
doing,” said Beatrice, “but they’ve accepted us now. Since our case, nobody in our village has been circumcised. I’m happy.”

If speaking out against street sexual harassment has long been taboo, then openly discussing FGM has been even further off limits. But it is an especially important, and lifesaving, conversation we must have. Even when FGM is discussed in the Arab world, it is usually under the assumption that it is an “African thing,” and its supposed lack of prevalence in the Arabian Peninsula and other parts of Asia, for example, is used to explain its cultural rather than Islamic roots. However, according to the Iraqi German NGO WADI, which has produced a website to document FGM globally called Stop FGM Middle East, genital cutting is not just an “African problem,” but has been documented in the Arabian Peninsula and other parts of Asia.

In Saudi Arabia, WADI reports that clinical research about the possible connection between female sexual dysfunction (FSD) and FGM, conducted in 2007–2008, found that of 260 women interviewed at a Jeddah clinic, half of them had been cut. In the Saudi study, the participants are believed to be a mix of Saudi and migrant women, who come from countries more traditionally associated with FGM. Additionally, a study in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia of 4,800 pregnant women found that 38 percent of them had been subjected to FGM. According to an article in the Saudi English-language paper
Arab
News,
“The procedure is rare in regions other than the south of Saudi Arabia but people from that region or from countries that perform it who are living in Saudi Arabia find the people and the place to perform it on their daughters, even though it is not allowed in hospitals and clinics.”

Research by students at Dubai Women’s College reported that FGM is also practiced in the United Arab Emirates for tribal and Islamic reasons. In their published research, the students said that in a 2002 survey of two hundred students of both sexes, 34 percent of females said they had undergone the procedure. The report included several firsthand accounts of students who recalled when they were cut: some were just babies, and others were seven or eight years old.

The U.S. embassy in the Omani capital, Muscat, held a recent panel discussion on FGM in which it emerged that the practice may be quite widespread in Oman, both in the north and in the southern province of Dhofar. Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of Pakistan and India, and Kurdish areas of northern Iraq also subject girls to FGM. The incident rates of FGM are rarely reported in these countries, most likely because of taboo and silencing. In the absence of official figures, UN bodies such as UNICEF do not include these places among their lists of countries where FGM is practiced.

FGM is also performed in Europe, where the practice continues among some immigrant populations.

FGM may be one of the most prevalent forms of “severe physical child abuse” taking place in Britain, according to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. The practice has been outlawed in the United Kingdom since 1985, but the first prosecution for it took place only in 2014. Why have there not been more prosecutions over a practice that threatens an estimated sixty-five thousand girls under the age of thirteen? Members of Parliament accurately ascribe the failure of authorities to deal with FGM to “misplaced concern for cultural sensitivities over the rights of the child.” In its report, the committee called this failure to tackle the growing practice of FGM in the United Kingdom a “national scandal” that has resulted in the preventable abuse of thousands of girls.

Again and again, we fail to protect our girls and women. Those who hesitate to criticize genital mutilation out of respect for other cultures should listen to Bogaletch Gebre, director of the Kembatta Women’s Self-Help Center, who was cut at the age of six: “When culture affects one’s human integrity, when it violates it—be it in terms of gender or in terms of ethnic group—that culture should be condemned, because whenever one of us is hurt or violated, all of us are violated.”

It is helpful to remember that clitoridectomy was once practiced in Britain, in the nineteenth century, and in the United States, where articles extolling the virtues of “female circumcision” continued to appear sporadically in medical journals until the 1960s; some of these journals
contained “reports of girls or women being subjected to various procedures, particularly the shortening of their labia or clitoris when parents or a husband judged them ‘too long,’ ” according to Robert Darby, who has cataloged a history of circumcisions of various kinds.

Darby notes on his website, History of Circumcision, that in Britain the procedure was promoted by Isaac Baker Brown, a mid-Victorian proponent of clitoridectomy as a cure for masturbation and nervous complaints. Although his work fell into disgrace, and there were no reliable statistics on clitoridectomy in Britain after the 1860s, the practice seems to have persisted longer in the United States.