A Thousand Cuts

Perhaps when you look up trustingly at the face that has loved you, held and comforted you, you smile. Even though your heart is thumping and you know your life is going to be changed forever. That you are going to be changed forever. You focus on your mother’s face as you lie in her lap and look up towards the ceiling. She has told you that where she comes from, this ancient ritual was carried out in the open. She herself remembers blue, cloudless skies and a calm day….and her mother’s face.

You want to become a woman. You do. A clean, chaste woman. You yearn to throw off the shackles of your girlhood and this ritual will make you a woman, in all her mystery, a rite of passage into adulthood. That’s what you’ve been told. You can’t wait. You pay little attention to the other person in the room until your mother’s arms tighten around your body, holding you down and putting a cloth in your mouth. Your body tenses. What’s going on? What’s happening? But this if your mother…you trust her. You relax in her arms.

Your legs are pushed apart roughly. And then the cutting begins. The pain of a woman’s life in a traditional society—even one surrounded by modernity—is clarified for you in a blinding insight even though you are only eight. You can’t conceptualize it. You feel it. You experience every excruciating second of it, each cut lasting forever, the pain from one not receding before you feel the cuts again and again. A thousand cuts. You feel the blade slicing through your labia, excising your clitoris. If you are lucky you have passed out by now.

Pieces of the most intimate part of your body are gathered up and thrown away as you are sewn up again, leaving just a tiny hole—no larger than the head of a match-stick-- for your urine and later for your menstrual blood to drain through. When you are married, your husband might need to use a knife to consummate your marriage. Then you are sown up again, perhaps the hole being doubled or tripled in size now that you have a husband. Each time you give birth you are at higher risk of death and if you are not cut during labor you might end up tearing yourself up. That is, of course, if you survive infection and blood loss right after the procedure is completed. You are a woman. Finally!

I had heard of female circumcision, or more accurately female genital mutilation (FGM) in traditional societies in several African countries and even in the Middle East. An obscure hadith makes this heinous practice legitimate and clerics and religious figures in these countries ignore the problem. It’s part of the women’s world, of course. As long as it doesn’t affect men, it’s not really an important problem, not truly a Muslim problem. It is, of course, complicated by the fact that women do it to themselves. They have bought into the religious and cultural reasons. They want to shield their daughters from the shame of being an uncut, and therefore, an unclean girl that no one would want to marry. To them, it is an act of love. They have created an aura of attractive mystery around it.

FGM is actually on the rise, as those who practice it, bring it with them as they make their Diasporic journeys to other lands. An Amnesty International report estimates that about 135 million females worldwide have been subjected to FGM. Approximately 2 million girls a year—6000 a day—are at risk. And the numbers are going up.

Now, these risks are no longer just contained in the 28 African countries that practice it, nor in countries like Indonesia, Egypt, Oman, the UAE, and among some members of the Daudi Bohra sect in India. There are reports of FGM being carried out in Toronto, New York, London, Paris, Rome and Boston to name just a few places. A few years ago, a man was arrested in New York, for holding down his toddler daughter, cranking the music on loud and cutting off her genitals with a razor blade. Her screams penetrated through the music and neighbors in the high-rise building in which they lived called the cops.

Discussions about FGM often break down around the issue of culture and cultural imperialism. But to me, this is a line in the sand. Even if it is endorsed by religion (which there is some dispute about) or done because of love, it is plainly wrong. Any practice that dooms its victim to a life with no sensation, no sexual pleasure, pain, infection, early death, not to mention deep psychological scars, can never be right.

As members of the Ummah, the truly global Muslim Diaspora, it is only right that the change should come from us. I hold little hope of that, however. The Ummah finds protesting cartoons, putting bounties on writers and protecting Allah (who being all-powerful needs no protection) more pressing than saving little girls from a lifetime of pain and suffering. And that may be the most painful cut of all. That FGM might never stop.