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EGYPT-WOMEN: The Miserable Tradition Of Female Circumcision
By Deborah Horan
CAIRO, Sep 28 (IPS) - When Shaima Mahmoud was nine years old, her mother, Sabah, called the village midwife to the house to perform a female rite of passage that has been practiced among women in her Egyptian village for as long as anyone can remember.
In a bedroom, Sabah, the midwife and another woman held Shaima down and circumcised her with a pair of sharp scissors. Shaima screamed, her mother recalled, and could not walk for two days.
Asked why she put her daughter through something that she, herself, remembers suffering through 25 years ago, Sabah seemed at a loss for words. ''It was tradition,'' she slowly shrugged from behind her long black headscarf. ''I didn't ask anybody about it. I just followed the tradition.''
Sabah's answer underscores the difficulties that Egypt's feminists face in their fight to eradicate a custom that has been practiced on young girls in Africa for at least two millennium.
Respect for ancient ways is so powerful that despite warnings from health workers that the procedure can cause infection and even death, human rights organisations estimate that every day 3,600 Egyptian girls endure Shaima's experience.
Today, a growing Islamist influence in Egypt has added another dimension to the practice of this age-old custom: religion.
Although female circumcision was practiced for centuries before the advent of Islam, attempts by Egypt's secular government to stamp out the practice have met with fierce resistance among conservative Islamists, particularly since the circumcision of a 12-year-old girl was broadcast on the U.S. Cable News Network in 1994.
The broadcast, which showed the girl whimpering before the operation and then screaming as a local barber circumcised her, catapulted into prime time an issue that had until then been quietly and carefully addressed in women's clinics across Egypt.
By 1995, Egypt's health minister, Ismail Sallam, succumbed to pressure from local and international women organisations and banned female circumcision in government hospitals.
By then, conservative forces had geared up for a fight to retain what they considered an essentially personal, if parental, choice favored by Islam.
Led by Sheikh Yussuf el-Badry, a cleric devoted to infusing Egypt's secular-based legal codes with Islamic Sharia law, sued both the health ministry for ordering the ban and the education ministry for using school books that referred to female circumcision as a ''harmful custom''.
Last June, a Cairo court reversed the health ministry ban based on a legal technicality. Conservatives hailed it as a victory for Islam. ''It is not required by our religion,'' el-Badry explained. ''But it is better for her if she is circumcised.''
His opinion is not shared by all of Egypt's Islamists. Some of the most influential religious leaders, including the two highest religious authorities, the Mufti and the Sheikh of al-Azhar, have stressed that the Koran, Islam's holy book, remains silent on the subject.
Health workers here emphasise that the pre-Islamic practice has more to do with class and age-old custom than with religious beliefs: it is as common among Egypt's Coptic Christian minority, for instance, as among the Muslim majority, while girls from higher class families, no matter what their religion, are more likely not to be circumcised. And it is almost unknown in strict Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.
''Religion is not the number one reason,'' said Dr Mawaheb Mouelhy, who has been fighting to stop what she and her colleagues call 'female genital mutilation', or FGM, from a small clinic in one of Cairo's sprawling urban slums for 12 years.
Instead, circumcision is equated with the preservation of the girl's virtue, regardless of her religion, el-Mouelhy says. And in a society in which notions of family honor are often synonymous with the chastity of their women, that value is paramount.
''They want to protect the girl out of love,'' el-Mouelhy explained. ''They connect it with cleanliness and virginity.''
In villages, proof of virginity is a prerequisite for marriage: the mother of the bride typically displays a bloodied sheet to the villagers the morning after the wedding to demonstrate her daughter's honor. Without such proof, the husband will likely ask for a divorce.
By lowering her sexual desire through circumcision, mothers hope to avoid that unhappy scenario ''They know circumcision will hurt their daughters now,'' el-Mouelhy continued. ''But they think that this way, in the end, she will be able to marry.''
And in a conservative culture in which change comes slowly and respect for elders is expected, wiping out such an entrenched custom is difficult. ''They say, 'my mother had it, my grandmother had it, so my daughter should have it too','' she said.
Away from the cameras and the court decisions, el-Mouelhy has been working with other female gynecologists to change the social and religious attitudes that perpetuate circumcision by teaching poor, often illiterate women about the dangers it can pose to their daughters.
Sometimes, she brings in Muslim clerics who are against circumcision to battle notions that the practice is required by Islam.
With an overhead projector, she graphically explains to the 12 to 15 women who come to her clinic each day what circumcision means. In Egypt, where a 'light' circumcision is the norm, it means snipping off the tip of the clitoris, she says, pointing at the screen with a long wand.
The practice, which anthropologists estimate has been practiced for more than 2,500 years, is most common in central Africa, spanning the sub-Saharan countries from Mauritania in the west to Somalia in the east.
Unlike Egypt, in these countries, circumcision is combined with infibulation, the removal of the outer labia. Afterward, the opening is sewn to prevent pre-marital sex.
Egyptian human rights activists estimate that five to six percent of all circumcised girls suffer some sort of complication, usually prolonged infection or an inability to heal. Each year, a number of girls bleed to death, usually those who suffer from haemophilia.
By explaining the complications that can arise, el-Mouelhy says she hopes to counter the traditional notions that convince mothers, and the husbands and mothers-in-law who stand behind them, to circumcise their daughters.
The women packed in the clinic, most with young children hanging onto them or playing on the floor, seem convinced. When el-Mouelhy asks them if they will circumcise their daughters, they shake their heads in unison. ''Now that I know the complications, I will not do it,'' said Safinaz el-Said, a 23-year-old mother draped in a long black and orange scarf.
Still, there are no studies to indicate how effective health workers have been in reducing the number of circumcisions performed. Some organisations estimate that 70 percent of all Egyptian women are circumcised, but the most recent grass-roots polls put the number above 90 percent.
Health workers say that before the issue became politicised following the CNN report, they were slowly changing the norms. ''Before the coverage, we were making a dent,'' said Aziza Hussein, chairwoman of the Cairo Family Planning Association.
Yet, she is still hopeful that once the spotlight dies down, she and other health workers will be able to make progress once again. ''By the next generation, this will have stopped,'' she predicted. ''We are banking on that.'' (END/IPS/DHO/RJ/97) |
