Daughters of Arabia and FGM

Daughters of Arabia, authored by Jean Sasson, the sequel to The Princess is one of the books that is definitely easy to read, extremely gripping and makes you wonder about the societies that we humans created. The book contains numerous narratives that, once read, are difficult to shake off. One such account was that of Fatma, the Egyptian live-in housekeeper of a villa in Cairo of a Saudi Arabian Princess named Sultana (pseudonym) who is a niece of King Faisal. As Princess Sultana with her family goes to Egypt to relax and spend some time in the villa, the princess discovers the miseries in her housekeeper's life.   

As the plot thickens, Fatma reveals to the princess that her granddaughter was to be turned into a woman through the process of FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) and to perform the circumcision, a local barber was to be summoned with no expertise in medical science and no access to sanitized medical instruments. Sultana informs, "the practice of female circumcision was thought to have begun along the Nile valley...many women in Egypt and throughout the continent of Africa were still subjected to this most inhumane ritual." It was heartbreaking to read Fatma wailing and uttering, "The female most blessed is she that has never been born! Next to her in happiness is the female who dies in infancy!" Princess Sultana recalls how her own three sisters were coerced to undergo such a frightening coming of age rite, which degraded the quality of their lives by requiring them to endure long-term agony and complications. She further adds that in Pre-Islamic Arabia, there were numerous circumcised women, and each tribe had a separate custom. The book furnishes its readers with some information collated from the Arab men of Saudi Arabia and recorded by St John Philby in his book The Empty Quarter:

But his strong subject was sex, and he loved to poke fun at Salih by dilating on Manasir practice in the matter of female circumcision. Take it from me, he said, they let thier women come to puberty with clitoris intact and, when a girl is to be married, they make a feast for her circumcision a month or two before the wedding. It is only then that they circumcise them and not at birth as do the other tribes - Qahtan and Murra, Bani Hajir, ay, and 'Ajman. Thus their women grow up more lustful than others, and fine women they are too and that hot! But then they remove everything, making them as smooth as smooth, to cool their ardour without reducing their desire... the girls are dealt with in their tents by women who know their business, and get a dollar or so for the job. They are expert with the scissors, the razor and the needle, which are all used for the operation.

Sultana regarded the above conversation as mere brash male talk. She was bewildered by the misconception that such brutal act of mutilation would make a woman lustful because she was apprised that it was something to make 'a woman chaste, rather than passionate'. Clearly, the rationale behind this cruel rite is very unclear. A man in the society is made to believe that if he marries a circumcised woman, she will be libidinous, whilst a woman is taught that it is a method to keep her pure and virtuous. Sultana explains different techniques to perform FGM. Below are some of those methods:   

While some tribes forbade circumcision of their women altogether, others excised the hood of the clitoris only. The cutting of the hood of the clitoris is the least common method, and is the only procedure that is analogous to male circumcision.

Then, there were those poor women who belonged to tribes in Arabia who removed the whole clitoris, along with the labia minora. This is the most common method of female circumcision and is comparable to removing the head of a man's penis.

There is another, more atrocious and dangerous method of female circumcision, named the pharaonic circumcision. I could scarce imagine the pain experienced by the women who received the pharaonic circumcision. This process is the most extreme, and after the rite is completed, a girl is left without a clitoris, labia minora, or labia majora. If such a procedure were done on a male, it would involve amputation of the penis, and the scrotum around the testicles. 

The Saudi princess after learning Fatma's suffering, resolved to assist her and persuade Fatma's daughter, Elham and her son-in-law to spare their young daughter such an ordeal. She went to their house and in order to convince the parents, she argued, "...nothing in the Koran spoke of such matters, and if God considered it a necessity for women to be circumcised, then surely he would have given that message to Prophet Muhammed when he revealed his wisdom to his messenger." Elham counter-argued, "...while excision or infibulation of girls is not mentioned in the Koran, the practice was founded upon the customs of the Prophet so that it became Sunna, or tradition for all Muslims." She then speaks of a popular hadith, or tradition which informs that Muhammad once instructed Um Attiya, a midwife who was mutilating a little girl's genital to 'Reduce but do not destroy'." In the end, Sultana came to the realization that her words and reasonings were futile in saving the innocent child. Once again orthodoxy triumphed over rationality!  

As per the UNICEF data, it is estimated that around 230 million girls and women have been affected by this barbaric tradition. The UNICEF defines FGM as "all procedures involving the partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons." FGM violates the human rights of both girls and women. In India, one community that is associated with FGM is the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect (a Shia sub-sect). Oftentimes, the mutilated girls face a range of health complications owing to this practice. The use of unsterilized, blunt razor blades, knives, scissors, needles endangers the girls' lives and they bleed to death. If they survive, the trauma deepens.