Female Genital Mutilation

Really, guys, how bad would it be to outlaw this?

The Baltimore Sun gives some well-deserved op-ed space to a German NGO which has spent at least a decade trying to focus world attention on the practice of female genital mutialion, or rather cutting, if you prefer - the practice meant to perserve a woman's sexual honor (purity) before marriage. Even Ken Livingstone, the famous multiculturalist mayor of London condemns the practice.

WADI, which has had a presence in Iraq for over ten years, published a study in 2005 which suggested that FGM is well, normal in the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Sixty percent of the 1,554 girls and women they interviewed over age ten said they had undergone the procedure themselves.

Previously, most scholars believed that the practice was more or less confined to Africa (in Egypt some 90 percent of women are thought to have had this done).

Thus the WADI report that this was happening in Iraqi Kurdistan was surprising. I mean, Iraqi Kurds have been the biggest opponents of sharia, as the Christian Science Monitor observed in 2005 when news of this study first came out.

Iraqi Kurdish women told WADI staff members that any girl who did not have this procedure done would essentially be considered unmarriageable. Some thought the reason behind the practice was because women who didn't get circumcised were promiscuous or the food they cooked was unclean. Others thought the rationale had a religious component.

This is because, as one Kurdish cleric told the Monitor, most Kurds are Muslim and subscribe to the Shafii legal tradition in Islam which mandates that both men and women be circumcised. This is opposed to say the Hanbali tradition, the tradition in Saudi Arabia, which says that only men need be circumcised.

While this may be Kurdish legal tradition, a WADI staffer did tell the Monitor that in his experience, most Kurdish imams were pretty easy to convince that the practice should be abandoned.

The real die-hards the Monitor went on to report, were the older women. They apparently just can't be convinced that men would really stay with uncircumcised women over the long-haul.

(Were they also suggesting that this may be the reason for our high divorce rate here in the West?)

Anyway, the good news is that after some initial embarrassment and denial, Iraqi Kurdish politicos of all stripes seem to be finally swallowing their pride and are at least willing to discuss the problem.

As Thomas Von Der Osten-Sacken and Thomas Uwer write in the Sun, "perhaps the most important factor enabling an NGO to uncover the problem of FGM in Iraqi Kurdistan was the existence of civil society structures and popular demand for individual rights."

I think what they mean to say here is that if liberal seculary democracy survives in Iraq, female genital mutilation won't.

And now we end on a tragi-comic note. When WADI presented these findings in Vienna (i.e., in front of the UN and other human rights' organizations) this spring, some Iraqi groups suggested that WADI was only airing these ugly secrets because, yes, you guessed it, WADI is an Israeli agent.

Those Zionists, even behind the plot to eliminate female genital mutilation.

You can see a longer discussion of this issue in the latest issue of the Middle East Quarterly, "Is female genitual mutilation an Islamic problem?"