Headscarves and Hymens (12 page)

In 1997 the United Nations and the WHO issued a joint statement declaring support for the abandonment of FGM. The next decade saw efforts to eradicate FGM in both law and practice by local agencies and international human rights organizations. Based on the lessons learned through these efforts, in December 2012 the UN General Assembly issued a stronger condemnation of FGM and urged its member nations to formally outlaw the practice. About half the nations that comprise the African Group followed this recommendation, though
enforcement remains inconsistent throughout the cultures that practice FGM.

The WHO classifies FGM into four major types:

I must have been about eighteen or nineteen when I first heard about FGM, through a news magazine article that my friends and I found at the university library in Jeddah. We read the item on FGM in silence and terror. It was not something we (or at least I) associated with “us” at all. Soon after, though, I learned that many women in my extended family had been cut when they were
girls, and I became obsessed with the thought that so many women I loved had been subjected to that cruel procedure. I needed to learn all that I could about this torture performed in the name of love and acceptance, and in denial of its searing physical, psychological, and emotional pain.

The cultural origins of FGM are obscure. In Sudan, infibulation (the most extreme form of FGM) is described as the “Pharaonic” method, and in Egypt the same procedure is known as the “Sudanese” method. This history matters little to the girls brutalized and butchered as their own mothers watch, and sometimes even help to hold them down. Can there be a greater betrayal? And in the name of love! Yes, love. These mothers do not hate their daughters. They have not forgotten the brutalization they themselves endured as their own mothers held them down. How could they? Surely they have not forgotten the pain. Yet they understand—as they hear their daughters’ screams, echoes of their own screams of decades earlier—that without such butchery, their girls will be considered sexually out of control and unmarriageable. So they cut away to make them complete—the irony of cutting, of mutilating, to make whole!

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi recalls her cutting at the age of six: “I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and I did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her
standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them, as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few moments ago.”

How does a girl survive this barbarism with her trust of other people intact, especially after her own mother was there and failed to protect her?

For the lucky few who escape, the god of virginity can creep up on you just when you thought you’d been safely delivered to a husband. In 1994, I covered the UN International Conference on Population and Development. One of the feminist groups participating gave me a report on reproductive rights in Egypt that it had prepared for the conference. Under the FGM section was a story that has never left me. A seventeen-year-old was returned to her mother’s home on her wedding night with a note from the young woman’s husband to his mother-in-law: “If you want your daughter to be married, you know what you need to do.” On the spot, the mother called a traditional midwife to cut off the necessary flesh—a pound of flesh to mark the transaction, the handing over from home to husband, the transition from daughter to wife. Now do you understand why mothers will hold down their daughters and block out their screams? They know what must be done, what must be suffered, what must be silenced, and what must be said for their daughters to earn a husband.

The hymen contains no Off or On switch. A sex drive is not determined by the presence or absence of a hymen; nor is it determined by the clitoris or what remains of it after cutting. Where does desire really begin and end? That does not seem to be a concern to those who insist on FGM. The greater concern is that the family deliver a physical virgin to a husband who can then claim her hymen for himself. But virginity does not rest solely on that fragile membrane otherwise known as the hymen.

The Arab world raises its girls to remain forever mental and emotional virgins. How, after years of having it drilled into you that sex is dirty, that sex is a sin—when your genitals are cut and you are left to contend with the resulting physical and emotional trauma—are you suddenly to enjoy sex, let alone to express what you want?

There is a scene in the Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel
Zaat
in which the protagonist, the eponymous Zaat, a middle-class Egyptian woman, considers subjecting her daughters to genital cutting at her mother’s insistence. Zaat discusses her misgivings with her best female friends, who dissuade her, reminding her of how their own cutting ruined their sex lives.

Why aren’t more mothers coming to this conclusion? Why does it take a male writer to remind women that our society is denying us the right of pleasure? We must create our own ways of writing and speaking honestly about FGM, between women.

Early on during my research on FGM, what I can
only describe as destiny led me to Dr. Nahid Toubia. I was then an eager young feminist but I was unable to find the words to describe how heartsick I was that so many of the women I loved had been violated as girls through genital cutting. Dr. Nahid Toubia helped me find the words.

Toubia was the first woman to qualify as a surgeon in her native Sudan, and she has written extensively about FGM. She would tell me about her delicate discussions with her own mother about her mother’s FGM, and when I asked her how I could be as delicate in my own conversations, she told me never to make the women we love feel like freaks for having been subjected to cutting.

A year or two after I met Toubia, Egypt was forced to confront FGM—not because the country finally understood that we were needlessly and heartlessly slicing our girls’ genitals, but because CNN aired a video of a girl’s cutting and her screams. That poor girl was violated twice—once by the hacking away at her flesh, and again by its airing on satellite television around the world. The video was broadcast right after an interview in which then-president Hosni Mubarak claimed that Egypt no longer practiced FGM. So it wasn’t the horror of FGM that caused outrage, but rather that the president was made to look either mendacious or out of touch.

The local CNN producer—not the U.S. citizens who produced or reported on the piece—was arrested and charged, basically, with making Egypt look bad. And lo
and behold, public service announcements followed in the ensuing years, billboards went up, and for about five minutes we paid attention to the pain of our girls—before sinking back into denial, leaving the heavy lifting to nongovernmental organizations whose tireless work over the years can only be described as Sisyphean.

That video exposed a horror that by 1994 had claimed at least 90 percent of ever-married Egyptian women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine. When people in Egypt read those figures—issued by a multitude of organizations, ranging from UNICEF to the WHO, and most recently compiled in a 2013 UN study—they spend more time denying the veracity of the numbers than asking why we still subject our girls to FGM. In 2008 an Egyptian national health survey reported a drop in the prevalence of FGM, claiming that about 74 percent of girls ages fifteen to seventeen had undergone the procedure—giving hope that, despite all odds, those tireless NGOs were making some progress. But the genital mutilation of three-quarters of our girls is still horrific.

FGM is practiced by both Muslims and Christians in Egypt, where many believe it is a religious duty, despite the fact that it is not mentioned in either the Qur’an or the Bible. In 2008, doctors and nurses in Egypt were banned from performing genital cutting after a twelve-year-old girl died from an anesthetic overdose while undergoing the procedure at a private clinic in Minya, in southern Egypt. The ban imposes penalties ranging from
three months to two years in prison and fines of up to 5,000 Egyptian pounds ($715).

But the ban on FGM has done little to curb the practice, which is still being carried out by traditional cutters and sometimes medical practitioners. While most deaths probably go unreported, every now and then a case makes it into the news, as when thirteen-year-old Soheir el-Batea died in June 2013 after a doctor at a private clinic in Daqahleya, northeast of Cairo, performed FGM on her at her family’s request.

The medical report of her death described it as an allergic reaction to penicillin. The doctor who performed the cutting and Soheir’s father stood trial in 2014, in the first case of its kind in Egypt. Finally, a chance for justice. The court acquitted both the doctor and the father. At the time of this writing, Human Rights Watch said it was unable to obtain the full final verdict explaining the acquittal. To coincide with the trial, the BBC produced a television segment in which the correspondent Orla Guerin found a traditional midwife who told her that despite the ban, she had a waiting list of mothers who wanted her to cut their daughters.

The
Guardian
newspaper found that many in Soheir’s village of Diyarb Bektaris supported FGM and believed it was prescribed by Islam. Raslan Fadl, the physician who performed Soheir’s cutting, was also a sheikh—an elder—at the local mosque, according to the paper.

“We circumcise all our children—they say it’s good
for our girls,” Naga Shawky, a forty-year-old housewife, told
The Guardian.
“The law won’t stop anything—the villagers will carry on. Our grandfathers did it and so shall we.”

A sixty-five-year-old farmer told
The Guardian
he did not realize that genital mutilation had been banned. “All the girls get circumcised. Is that not what’s supposed to happen? … Our two daughters are circumcised. They’re married and when they have daughters we will have them circumcised as well.”

Calls to reverse the ban on FGM continue to issue from Islamists and some doctors who claim that girls are more likely to die if their families take them to traditional cutters. Those same doctors conveniently ignore the deaths that have already occurred in private clinics.

Hosna, a fifty-three-year-old widow and a survivor of FGM, told me when we met at the Shehab Center that she cared little for the ban.

“Cutting happens whether it’s against the law or not; it must be carried out because that’s the way to maintain the purity of girls to make sure that the girl is not out of control. We don’t care if it’s against law or if they’re trying to stop it. We know doctors who are willing to continue and have done so,” she said.

NGOs fighting against FGM warn of the “medicalization” of the procedure, in which the barbarism of the practice is whitewashed by the “respectability” that comes from its being performed by trained medical personnel.
The London-based NGO Orchid Project, which works to end FGM, has said that one of the most disturbing aspects of the practice in Egypt is the involvement of the medical profession. According to a report by the group:

Not only does the medicalization of FGM give legitimacy to a harmful practice but it has also added racism to the mix. The Orchid Project quotes a 2011 BBC report
from Egypt: “Of medicalisation, community members said how they are advanced and different from ‘black Africa’ as they aren’t practicing FGC in a barbaric or unhygienic way.” Never mind that several of those countries in “black Africa,” such as Senegal, had made great progress in radically reducing rates of FGM.

The Orchid Project said that anti-FGM work in Egypt had begun in 1904—that’s 110 years of failure. In those 110 years we have “succeeded” in saving just 25 percent of our girls from having their genitals butchered unnecessarily.

I’ve blamed the Arab world’s toxic mix of culture and religion for many of the examples of misogyny I cite in this book. Female genital mutilation is such a difficult practice to eradicate precisely because those two behemoths underpin it. Although both Muslim and Christian girls are subjected to FGM, activists have long complained chiefly of the mosque preachers who instruct their communities that it is their religious duty to cut their daughters.

We Muslims turn ourselves inside out trying to distance ourselves from any Islamic connection to FGM—just as we do with domestic violence—when clearly there are some (too many) who give it a religious justification. Although the Mufti of Egypt joined the Coptic Pope to support the 2008 criminalization and to stress that FGM is required by neither Islam nor Christianity, his words have not sunk in. For some, the Mufti is considered compromised
because he’s state-appointed, so he is seen as saying whatever the regime wants him to say. For others, his words are one rock thrown against a wall of religious support for FGM.