by Musa Okwonga
Tuesday, 9 April 2013 at 12:46 pm
On the last day of my Easter holidays, Dr. Phoebe Abe (or, as I know her, my mother) sat down in her living room with me and several women from Somalia, Egypt and Sudan. My mother, a GP, had for some time been looking at the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) with Dr Comfort Momoh MBE. However, this was the first time that I had ever met people with whom she worked. Each of these women had undergone FGM early in their lives, and now, encouraged by her, they were talking frankly about how they felt. One of them spoke of the agony that the procedure still caused her three decades later. Frequently, when bent over with pain, she would receive little understanding from those in her community who did not know what she had experienced. “Sometimes they just call you lazy,” she explained. “Most Somali women are very big,” she said, swiftly outlining the curves of her hips with her outstretched arms. “‘You need to exercise, you need to lose weight,’ they tell you.”
When going to see doctors, she had met with an attitude that was no less frustrating. “Sometimes you feel like maybe they don’t care,” she said. On several occasions when she went for an appointment, complaining of severe backache, she was prescribed painkillers without further examination, which merely led to complications elsewhere: most notably, the ibuprofen that she was given led to stomach pains, only compounding her discomfort.
The true problem lay deeper, and was only diagnosed after she fainted on one of her weekly visits to her GP. As a result of the removal of her clitoris as a child, she now has incessant trouble with her back, and found it very difficult to hold her urine, which she found “very embarrassing”, as a result of which “we have isolated ourselves”, she said looking round at each of her friends in the room. They nodded in agreement.
She said this is how FGM typically happens. When you’re six years old, girls in the year above at the local school, or madrassa, go and have the procedure done; after that, they return to school and they tell you that you’re dirty for not having gone through it until you’ve had it done yourself. “We look up to them like they’re big girls,” she said. At that point, the young girls will go to their mothers and ask when they can have it done too. Then they go and have and it done; and, she says with a wry laugh, “then you get disabled”.
None of these women saw any basis in Islam for FGM, which originated in Egypt from the times of the Pharaohs. “It’s haram – it is prohibited – in our religion to do anything to your daughter,” one of them said. “It’s completely unnecessary. There’s no medical evidence that it helps. [After FGM] you’re physically disabled, in a way, but you’re also mentally traumatised, hating yourself. Every time you go to the toilet and you look down there, you know that there is another woman out there who is normal.”
However, though they had endured this, the women were clear that this was not an exercise in recrimination. “I would not blame my parents for this,” said one of them. “They didn’t do this because they wanted to torture us. It’s time to educate our people. [And] what we want is not sympathy. What we want is to be heard. As we are sitting here talking, this minute there is a child who is being taken to the mountains to be done… It is a crime against humanity. We have daughters: are we going to do exactly the same to our daughters?”
SOURCE: THE INDEPENDENT BLOG
Categories: Africa
It (FGM)seems to be a crime. But some Mullas even told me that such was the practice in the Prophet s.a.w.s. times. I never heard it before.
There were some (Shias) who were saying that there used to be temporary marriage (Mutah)in Madinah. I was surprised. It was reported that Hazrat Hasan rz.a. used to practice that and the parents of the girls used to be much honored by that Mutah.
It is necessary to shunt out such evils from the Muslim society with education and full confidence.
Education, education, education!!!
There is no other solution to human misery but education, 100% literacy should be the goal of all countries specially the so-called third world.
Yes, sure. But, looking at the “First World” 100% literacy alone is not the answer. Some nearly 100% literate countries do act rather strange a lot of the time.