Last month 12-year old Budour died after her family chose to have her clitoris surgically mutilated. This little Egyptian girl is only one of the estimated 6,000 girls who undergo
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) every single day, but her death has triggered the slowly working cogs of progress towards eradicating this vicious cultural practice meant to control and condemn women's sexuality.
I just wanted to point out the ludicrous. The Ministry of Health in Egypt has pretty much banned the practice in its many forms, but it’s never a problem to find doctors who will perform it, even in the most modern clinics. Remember the Hippocratic Oath that they pledged to never to harm?
The Grand Mufti of Egypt, the head of the religious establishment, has outlawed FGM. The head of the supreme council for Islamic affairs has gone on record saying that “female circumcision” is a non-Islamic tradition and there is nothing in the Islamic law enforcing it. But the extremist Islamic Brotherhood and some of the more radical Muslim organizations consider banning it to be a smear of their beliefs.
With women finally placing themselves in the forefront of the battle, women like Egypt’s first woman, Suzanne Mubarak and Somali supermodel,
Waris Dirie it has become ever more apparent that this war of liberation is being fought and resisted by women. The establishment has realized that FGM cannot carry on, but it is the women, the generation that had it done to them, that are refusing to budge when it comes to their daughters.
Polls in Egypt have shown that 80% of women in rural areas and 73% of women in urban areas still support FGM. Does it matter that there are fines or jail sentences or that doctors and nurses stand to lose their licenses? No, there will always be a willing barber or midwife, who will rise to the call when they believe that Mother knows best.
Listen, mothers, this may just sound like culturally-insensitive noise pollution
a la Western bleeding hearts and secular lawmakers, who don’t have very much sway in your world. But it is not only us doing the shouting. Listen to the voices of those victims that have stepped out of the societies that did this to them, and are rewarded with the security to have their say. They are telling us of their suffering and they are telling us how they mourn those parts of their sexuality that you pillaged from them. So you have disabled them but you did not managed to de-sexualize them. You have failed.
So stop it.