Those who support FGM believe they have God on their side. Magda and Umm Muhammad are convinced that the practice is obligatory for Muslims: “Gad al-Haq [former head of Al-Azhar] said that girls should be circumcised, and I believe and trust him.” Magda invoked an oft-cited hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have advised a woman in Medina who performed female circumcision: “Do not cut too severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband.” However, there is considerable debate around the meaning and authenticity of this hadith—none of which shakes the two women’s belief in it.28
There are, however, religious authorities who oppose the practice. Leaders of the Coptic Church, for example, have staked a dramatic defense of girls under the knife. “What a look of fear and panic they will have in their eyes, what a horror … blood … bleeding and severe pain! It is a grave hazard to their present and to their futures when they marry and give birth. Therefore, we must take a decisive and firm stand against this harmful practice … from the Christian perspective—this practice has no religious grounds whatsoever,” say church authorities.29 The message is clearly getting through; today FGM rates are significantly lower in Egypt’s Christian communities than among their Muslim counterparts.30
Shaykh Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti and Egypt’s second highest official Islamic authority, is similarly dismissive: “Genital circumcision of women is a deplorable, inherited custom … it has no basis in the Qur’an with regard to the authentic hadith from the Prophet.… Therefore, the practice must be stopped in support of one of the highest values of Islam, namely to do no harm to another without cause.”31 But such big guns were often dismissed as mouthpieces of a government in hock to the West and a foreign agenda to undermine traditional values. To the intense frustration of anti-FGM activists, there are plenty of local imams who support FGM, themselves often under community pressure to hold the line.32 And so Magda and her neighbors carry on cutting with a clear conscience, religion buttressing a tradition under attack.
Magda’s strong attachment to FGM is about more than just genital aesthetics. If this were merely a question of appearances, it might be easier to change attitudes. But Magda thinks of the clitoris—“below,” as she calls it—as a protopenis that must be cut in order to curb women’s sexual desire. Circumcision, according to this logic, makes a girl “cool,” quenching the fires of female lust. If the clitoris is not tamed, then girls, like boys, will seek sex before marriage, and married women will make sexual demands of their husbands—both of which could be marriage killers, so the thinking goes. “It’s shame in our culture to ask our husbands for sex; I cannot imagine that a woman does that. Western countries are not like us,” Magda told me. “In the hot weather, below [is] aching and that’s why [a woman] should be circumcised. What is the case if her husband died or divorced her, is she going to pull men from the cafés?” Magda would no doubt be surprised to hear the results of a recent study of Cairo commercial sex workers that found that the majority said they had been circumcised.33
The connection Magda makes between FGM and female chastity is not some fringe belief. According to the recent national survey of ever-married women, more than a third of women and men are convinced that the practice prevents illicit sexual relations.34 Or, as they sometimes say in Egypt: “The circumcised woman is a woman with a broken wing.”35 This is the sort of thinking that anti-FGM commercials have targetted when they ask, “Who says FGM is for a girl’s chastity? The chastity of a girl is how you raise her.… Morals are a girl’s only protection.” No need to say protection against what, since everyone watching knows the enemy: untrammeled female desire.
This popular connection between FGM and sex cuts both ways. Those trying to stamp it out argue that circumcision impairs women’s sexual fulfillment. “All types of FGM that are practiced in Egypt deprive a woman of the full pleasure during legitimate sexual relations,” according to one former head of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, the national doctors’ union. “This can create bad feelings in the marital relationship which we know to be the basis of the human race and an important sign of intimacy. Thus the relations become a source of misery and conflict instead of being a source of happiness, understanding and delight.”36 The trouble is the evidence. What research there is on FGM and sexuality in Egypt has yielded mixed results. In a number of studies, circumcised wives have reported diminished libidos and less sexual activity, fewer orgasms, and less pleasure in intercourse than their uncircumcised counterparts, while other research has found little impact, at least in those women with lesser forms of FGM.37
One woman trying to make sense of all this is Mawaheb El-Mouelhy. A leading authority on women’s sexual and reproductive health in Egypt, she has studied the connection between FGM and sexual pleasure in two poor parts of the country: a Cairo slum called Manshiat Nasser and two villages in the governorate of Minya in Upper Egypt. “Most women who shared their personal experience said that sometimes they experience sexual pleasure and on other occasions they did not; and that their pleasure is independent of circumcision,” El-Mouelhy and her colleagues concluded.38 The problem with conventional ways of examining sexual pleasure, say these researchers, is the emphasis on measuring performance—how often, how many, how strong. In their opinion, this doesn’t work for looking at women’s sexual pleasure in Egypt, because their enjoyment is bound up in broader questions of family life: how are the kids, are the bills paid, and—critically—are their husbands happy in bed.
The men in the study were conflicted on FGM. On the one hand, they consider it their God-given duty as men—their qawama—to protect their women, body and soul. Part of that responsibility is to deliver a virgin bride to any prospective groom, an uphill battle, in their opinion, thanks to the temptations of modern life. Added to that is their desire to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to sex in their own marital beds. And so, to them, circumcision is a good thing because they feel it makes women more manageable. “My wife is circumcised, she is used to my style,” said one study participant. “However, the uncircumcised wife wants sex all the day, so I would have to take pills [Viagra]. If I did not have sex one day, she might have someone [else] to satisfy her.”39
For all this emphasis on male authority, when it comes to FGM, fathers tend to step aside, leaving the decision to cut, or not to cut, to mothers and grandmothers. In the communities studied, it was generally assumed that all girls had been circumcised, and so men hardly ever asked their wives whether they themselves had undergone the procedure. When pressed on the issue, many men admitted that, truthfully, they wouldn’t know one way or the other. But that is changing, thanks to globalization—more specifically, porn. Now that men can see what uncircumcised women look like, it just serves to confirm what they have always believed: uncircumcised women—particularly Westerners—are sexually uncontrollable, and FGM is essential to keep women in check. “We are afraid if we don’t circumcise females, because as we see in the satellite channels, a female can have sexual contact with three men at the same time, and yet it is not enough for her,” one of the men in the study commented, reflecting the views of many.40
On the other hand, for these men, marriage is their big sexual breakthrough. “Sexual happiness represents 50% of marital happiness,” according to one young man.41 Anything that diminishes that experience is a problem. “I will tell you frankly, I got married six months ago, my wife takes a long time to come on and I do not know why,” said a Muslim religious leader from Manshiat Nasser. “I asked one of the shaykhs who knows about health/medicine, he asked me if my wife’s organ [clitoris] is long, I told him no it is short [circumcised], he told me this is why she takes a long time and he advised me to play a little and shake it before being together; it worked.”42 A minority of men in the study were acutely aware of the disadvantages of FGM, but practically speaking, the decision to circumcise was out of their hands.
The bottom line is that the connection between FGM and sexual pleasure is far from cut-
and-dried. “It’s more complicated here than the ‘Western’ idea that the clitoris is so important, and that you can’t experience sexual pleasure without it,” El-Mouelhy explained. Research in Egypt has shown that many women tend to dissociate the clitoris from climax; they consider it a driver of desire but a bit player, at best, in orgasm.43 In El-Mouelhy’s opinion, some basic lessons in anatomy and physiology could go a long way to helping people understand what the clitoris can, and cannot, do. But if anti-FGM campaigners want to use sex as an argument in abolishing the practice, El-Mouelhy and her colleagues recommend that they address such messages to men, who are more focused on the mechanics of sex and may be more receptive to these ideas than are women, who see sexual pleasure in a broader context and often have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude when it comes to the clitoris and sexual fulfillment.
That being said, decades of campaigns, decrees, and declarations have made a perceptible dent in FGM. While nearly all women in Egypt over the age of forty-five have been circumcised, around 80 percent of those between fifteen and seventeen have been cut.44 That’s a national average; if you look in certain populations, the figures are substantially lower, especially in wealthier circles and urban areas and among the children of mothers educated to secondary school or beyond.45 According to the national survey, over a third of ever-married women under fifty think FGM should be stopped; that may not sound like much, but it is more than double the response from the mid-1990s, and disapproval rates are even higher among young, educated, urban women.46 As one thirtysomething mother of three in Minya remarked, “I will not do anything to my daughter. Ever since we watched this on TV, I have made up my mind.” Should efforts continue at this clip—by no means assured, given the ascent of Egypt’s Islamists—it’s expected that less than half of eighteen-year-olds will be circumcised by 2025.47
VIRGIN GROUND
Just because FGM is declining doesn’t mean that premarital sex is any more acceptable in most quarters. Across the Arab world, female virginity—defined as an intact hymen—remains what could best be described as a big fucking deal. Just how big was demonstrated by a furious debate in the Egyptian parliament in 2009 over an “artificial hymen” from China—essentially a small plastic bag filled with red fluid, designed to simulate the resistance, and bleeding, of defloration. News that it might be making its way onto the Egyptian market was enough to send some parliamentarians into a frenzy and provided a convenient stick with which to poke the Mubarak government. “It will be a blot on the conscience of the NDP [the now-disbanded National Democratic Party] government if it allows these membranes to enter,” a representative of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood warned, arguing the product was a dire threat to Egyptian womanhood, tempting “vulnerable souls into committing vice.”48 Despite the best efforts of several young women I know to find them, I have yet to meet anyone who has actually managed to buy one of these fake hymens on the local market.
The Qur’an makes no mention of the hymen (ghisha’ al-bakara, in Arabic) per se, but it does talk at length about private parts and the importance of protecting them from view. While virginity is, in principle, gender-neutral in the Qur’an, female virgins get special billing, the Virgin Mary coming in for particular praise.49 Then there are the hur, the perpetual virgins of paradise, “maidens restraining their glances, untouched beforehand by man or jinn,” whom Muslim men will marry as a reward for a righteous, God-fearing life, so the faithful believe.50 According to hadith, the Prophet is said to have joked with a newly married companion that he might have had more fun with a virgin than the “mature woman” he took as his wife.51 Female virginity became yet another tool to keep women in line, all the easier to enforce through its intimate connection to family honor, making it a matter of collective concern rather than a private affair.
Opinion polls show the line on virginity, in word if not in deed, holding firm, even in countries, such as Morocco and Lebanon, with a reputation within the Arab world for sexual openness.52 There are certainly some women who don’t care and some men for whom virginity is not a deal breaker. “I have a friend of mine who did it,” Rakha told me. “Before she got engaged, she confessed to her fiancé that she slept with two guys. And he married her. One of the few very respectable guys.” But I’ve met plenty of women across the region who distrust such seeming liberality, fearing their premarital experiences will come back to haunt them when marriage turns rocky and their sexual histories are thrown back in their faces. As my grandmother used to say, “The woman who trusts a man is like a woman who stores water in a sieve.”
In my experience, more men fall into the camp of Kassim, a Cairo pharmacist. “I’m twenty-nine years old. I’ve passed through university; those were the days. I’ve seen lots of girls and I’ve been with lots of girls, that’s a fact. Actually, they were my passion. After you finish class or lab, let’s go and find some girls,” he recollected with a smile. But it’s not a given that getting a girl will get you laid, as Kassim explained. “Normally, in Egypt, let’s say 80 percent [of unmarried couples] no, not sex, but just having fun. They put themselves into the frame we are boyfriend and girlfriend, we can do whatever we can do, but not intercourse,” he observed. Kassim paused for a moment, lost in thought, then corrected himself. “Sometimes, yeah, it reaches intercourse. [But] it’s not for a fact if you have a girlfriend, you’re gonna have sex. No, this is never the fact.”
This is a source of frustration for young men, keen to get some sexual know-how before their wedding nights. “Normally, men seek for experience before marriage. I’m not gonna talk about [religiously] strict people, naive people; I’m talking about a normal person,” Kassim noted. “I would rather have this experience, at least let’s say how to kiss, how to unbuckle the bra by one hand, those are skills. I would rather do this instead of getting married, and I’m all of a sudden, Whoops, we need some help from some other third party. It’s a shame to ask one of my friends what to do.”
Kassim, who studied abroad, managed to pad out his sexual résumé with an Italian girlfriend, whom he contemplated marrying, though their relationship eventually foundered. However, he drew the line on premarital sex with the woman he eventually wed, the sister of one of his friends. “As an Egyptian, she has to be a virgin,” he insisted. Why the difference? “If she’s foreign, it puts the girl into a different classification other than Egyptian women. If it’s fine with me, [then] it’s fine with my parents, my family; they have nothing to do with this [decision],” Kassim explained. “[But] if I marry an Egyptian girl from an Egyptian family, this is where my mother and father come.”
And how. In Egypt, virginity can be very much a family affair, thanks to dukhla. The word means “entry” and refers to defloration of the bride on her wedding night. Dukhla baladi, so-called “country-style” defloration, was a time-honored custom in Egypt, for Muslims and Christians alike, in which the daya would pierce the bride’s hymen with her finger or a razor wrapped in a white cloth, with the groom looking on (or taking the lead) and mothers in attendance. The bloodstained laf al-sharaf (sheet of honor) would then be shown off to nearest and dearest to demonstrate that the family had kept its good name and duly delivered a virgin bride to the groom.
When my father was a boy, visits to the family farm in the Nile Delta, north of Cairo, were punctuated by post-dukhla celebrations for women in the village. There was a special song, “Bride, You Have Whitened the Gauze”—that is, honored the family—sung by female relatives and friends as they paraded from home to home with the bloodstained sheet, collecting presents for the couple, laughing and ululating in celebration. Even as a child, my father knew exactly what had happened—it was a joyous event to be shared by all, not some shameful sex-stained episode to conceal.
In recent decades, however, a new kind of wedding night ceremony has gained traction: dukhla afrangi. Afrangi comes from the Arabic word for “Frank,” the term used to describe Europeans in the medieval period, and in days gone by, it was Egyptian shorthand fo
r anything new or foreign. Dukhla afrangi essentially pushes bystanders out of the marriage chamber and replaces a finger with an exclusively male member to break the hymen—that is, straight-up sexual intercourse. The bloodstained sheet or handkerchief, however, remains part of the program, to be shown to the bride’s family and other concerned parties. Then there is what you might call dukhla afrangi 2.0, which is what happened to one young woman I know, a scientist in her midtwenties who recently married. In the run-up to the big day, the prospective groom was bombarded with calls from her father, a Cairo lawyer, who insisted that his son-in-law text him right after the defloration to let him know that his daughter had bled as expected. The steady stream of calls and messages reminding him of this duty made the groom so anxious that he tried to take his bride to the cinema, instead of the honeymoon suite, on their wedding night to avoid the situation altogether. In the end, the newlyweds managed to consummate their union as required, the groom having turned off his phone. Undeterred, her parents turned up the next day to collect the sheet of honor. While slightly more private, dukhla afrangi still piles on the pressure: on brides to prove their virginity and on grooms to demonstrate their virility—far from easy, given the wedding night jitters discussed earlier.
As for old-style dukhla baladi, personal accounts make it sound about as pleasant for the women at the center of the ceremony as their circumcision was years before, and particularly traumatic for those with hymens that don’t break as anticipated. Indeed, there are voices that condemn dukhla baladi as a form of sexual violence against women, a sort of family-sanctioned rape. From an Islamic perspective, some consider the practice haram on a number of grounds, among them that it violates the penis-meets-vagina definition of legitimate sexual intercourse. And for those who hold such notions dear, it also undermines the value of virginity, reducing what should be a focus on broader questions of morality and conduct to a bit of anatomy and a late-night performance.
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