Female Circumcision – The Hidden Truth

How Misogynists and Feminists are feeding upon each other to denigrate an Islamic practice that brings untold benefits to women

The inspiration for writing on this touchy topic arose at a recent week-long workshop held by an international Muslim women’s rights organisation in Kandy which I had the fortune of attending thanks to its local organisers.

This group had a lot of nice things to say about women’s rights in Islam and I must say I agreed with much of it, like the rights of Muslim women to enter into marriage with their free consent and even contract marriages on their own accord or their rights to divorce or pre-nuptial agreements to safeguard their freedoms, all well and good, because Islam concedes all these rights to women, on which topics I too have written extensively.

But there was one topic I begged to differ when they brought up the matter, and that was female circumcision. They asked us to discuss a recent Fatwa issued by Malaysia’s National Council for Islamic Religious Affairs in 2009 that declared that the practice was mandatory for Muslim women. They expected us to rip it to pieces, but I differed. Why, because I could not find anything objectionable in it. Reading it carefully, I noticed that those who had drafted it were not at all motivated by a negative attitude towards women’s rights. Rather it clearly stated that all forms of FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) found by the WHO to be harmful to women such as clitoridectomy (removal of the clitoris) and infibulation (a still more barbaric practice where the female’s external genitalia including the labia minora and clitoris are removed and stitched) were against the Shariah. But it made an exception, stating that all that was necessary in the case of women was to remove the skin covering the clitoris, which it declared to be obligatory, pointing out that a majority of the classical scholars of Islam including Imam Shafi and Imam Hanbali thought it to be so.

I plainly told the sister who was moderating the show, I could see nothing wrong with it, since all they said that was required was to remove the prepuce or the skin covering the clitoris, a relatively minor and harmless procedure very much like male circumcision which like it might confer some health benefits as well. That raised a few eyebrows, probably because none of them had heard such a novel idea before.

Of course there’s really nothing so novel about it. Much has been written about it even by Western Doctors but these studies have been conveniently overlooked to conform to Islamophobic sentiments expressed by a largely Jewish controlled media. This media machine works in different ways. For one thing, it will say that Islam advocates genitally mutilating women to curb their sexuality, citing examples of barbaric forms of FGM practiced in sub-Saharan Africa, thereby associating Islam with a misogynistic attitude. But of late, we see another trend, one that seeks to disassociate female circumcision altogether from Islam without differentiating the proper Islamic form from the rest. Why, you may ask? It’s very simple really. There is a strong body of evidence emerging to support the view that the proper Islamic procedure involving the removal of the clitoral prepuce is beneficial to women and not detrimental to them.

So there you are. It is in the interests of the Jews to criticize female circumcision while promoting male circumcision. Why, because male circumcision is a Jewish practice and female circumcision is not. The medical benefits of male circumcision was established as a fact when the Americans adopted it for hygienic reasons in the early part of the 20th century so that even to this day the majority of male infants born in the US are circumcised.

The practice was shown to confer significant health benefits as borne out by numerous studies that showed a reduction in urinary tract infections, penile cancer, HIV and other STDs as well as a reduction in Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) infections in female partners of circumcised men which could lead to cervical cancer when passed on to women (In favour of circumcision. Brian Morris.1999). The US due to its strong Judeo-Christian background thus came to see male circumcision in a favourable light, but altogether neglected its female equivalent as they did not have such a tradition. Moreover it was an Islamic tradition, not a Judeo-Christian one. It was not until about the early part of the twentieth century that some daring US doctors, reasoned that since women too had a prepuce (the equivalent of the foreskin in males) some of the health benefits conferred on males through circumcision could be enjoyed by women. Moreover they discovered another interesting fact, that the procedure could in fact increase sexual gratification in women since it exposed the surface area of the clitoris to greater stimulation during the sex act as well as in oral sex. Shire Hite’s groundbreaking study on the importance of the clitoris in the arousal and satisfaction of the female led to further interest in this until then rather insignificant part of the female anatomy. To keep a long story short, it is in the interests of the Jews to hide the facts about the benefits of female circumcision, because if it is shown that it is indeed an Islamic practice, and that what Islam advocates is only the removal of the clitoral prepuce and no more, it will be another feather in the cap of Islam. Islamic tradition then becomes a double-edged sword, where both the male and female circumcision it upholds are shown to be beneficial, in contrast to the single-edged sword of the Judaic tradition.