Sex and the Citadel (18 page)

CUT AND CHASTE

Keeping women on the straight and narrow is more than a matter of “just say no”; in Egypt one common tool of enforcement is female genital cutting.
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It is an ancient custom, dating into the Pharaonic period, well before the arrival of both Christianity and Islam.
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Fast-forward to the twenty-first century and the practice is still widespread; according to the 2008 national survey of ever-married Egyptian women under fifty, more than 90 percent have been circumcised.
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Egyptians sometimes call the practice
tahara
, which means “purification,” but it is often referred to in English as female genital mutilation (FGM). Between these poles of beauty and butchery lies a more neutral term,
khitan al-inath
, which translates to “female circumcision,” but what we’re talking about here is a more complicated business than a quick snip of the foreskin. FGM can take many forms, but the standard procedure in Egypt is removal of the skin covering the clitoris, usually along with the clitoris itself, and often taking the neighboring tiny flaps of flesh as well.
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Girls generally go under the blade around nine to twelve years of age,
with little warning, let alone consent. Depending on the skill of the practitioner, what’s left is a smooth opening to the vagina and vivid, often jagged, memories for many women.
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“I’m having my daughters done next week,” Umm Muhammad told me as we sat in her tiny, tidy living room drinking bottles of 7Up. Umm Muhammad lives with her handyman husband, her twentysomething unmarried son, and two young daughters in a two-room apartment on a dusty side street in Helwan, a suburb south of Cairo. Helwan is not exactly leafy: in the distance I saw what looked like gleaming towers looming over the scrappy main thoroughfare, but these turned out to be the smokestacks of the town’s famous cement works. Umm Muhammad is in her forties, a substantial figure in a plain blue galabiya and green hijab. She’s quietly good-humored, but she runs a tight ship. There’s no satellite dish to the family TV, and their aging PC does not have an Internet connection because, her son grumbles, his mother doesn’t want him watching “bad things”—meaning porn.

As Umm Muhammad bustled about, her friend Magda—a small, lively woman, like a tiny sparrow in her neat brown gown and headscarf—filled in the details. Magda is the neighborhood expert on FGM, because it’s a large part of how she makes a living. She’s a twenty-first-century
daya
, an untraditional traditional midwife. Historically, the
daya
was the mainstay of women’s health in Egypt, but with the growth of the medical profession, much of a
daya
’s job—delivering babies, dealing with gynecological problems—has passed to doctors, particularly in urban areas. This includes FGM: three-quarters of girls under seventeen in Egypt have been circumcised not by a
daya
as in older generations but by a doctor or nurse.
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This is largely the consequence of anti-FGM campaigns, which stressed the associated health risks: infection, uncontrolled bleeding, severe pain, even death. As a result, parents have turned to what they consider a safe pair of hands—a physician’s—and found a willing set of practitioners, who, if not convinced on moral or social grounds, were understandably happy to supplement their meager public sector incomes with upwards of EGP 100 (USD 16) per procedure.

Magda learned to circumcise at the local medical clinic, where she worked as a nurse’s aide when her husband died, leaving her to support one young daughter and another on the way. When the resident doctor left the district, she took her tools and set herself up as a
daya
. She is proud of her professional approach to the business of FGM, which begins with a careful diagnosis. “A lot of women come to me to ask me for advice and to circumcise their daughters. I see the girls and I say if she needs it or not after I check her. If the lips of her sexual part are big like leaves and the shape is not good, she needs the operation.” Part of the concern here stems from a belief that uncircumcised, flapping labia may make penetration, and therefore conception, more difficult. “I commonly use a
mashrat
[scalpel], and I first give her
bing
[anesthetic], because I am a nurse, not like the others who cut with primitive tools,” she continued. Magda speaks from experience close to home. “My [eldest] daughter had the operation twice: the first time was not beautiful, so I took her to the doctor and he told me she needs to clean the shape, the place, so it was done [again]. My second daughter, who is studying nursing, I did her by myself because I learnt and I had the experience.”

The drive to circumscribe FGM has been running for decades in Egypt, but it picked up speed around 1994, the year Cairo hosted a pivotal international conference on population and development, one of the first concerted efforts to put sexual and reproductive rights on the international agenda. To mark the event, CNN broadcast a now-infamous video of an actual circumcision, which made for extremely queasy viewing.
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Since then, millions of dollars have been poured into fighting FGM, with nationwide campaigns assisted by an army of international agencies and local NGOs. National task forces were formed, fatwas were handed down, and the airwaves hummed with talk shows and TV commercials, reaching almost three-quarters of Egyptian women, trying to persuade them to break with FGM.

The legal standing of FGM makes little difference to the ladies of Helwan. The deaths in 2007 of two girls during FGM in as many months put pressure on the Mubarak government to take action
beyond the bans and restrictions that had been issued, and ignored, for decades. The following year, the government forced a law across fierce parliamentary opposition from representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood to punish those performing FGM (and by extension, parents, as their accomplices) with a fine of up to EGP 5,000 and two years in prison. Magda is skeptical that law on its own can do much to deter the practice. As with so much of the legislation relating to women and children passed during the Mubarak regime, the law is suspected by Magda and other FGM supporters of having more to do with outside influence than homegrown attitudes. To her, FGM is a private matter, not an affair of state. “In the villages, people make circumcision a lot and do not put in mind the government decisions. I believe there is no need to prevent circumcision. I see they [the government] want to do that [ban the practice] to be like Western countries.”

Law aside, FGM is traditionally a quiet affair, without the noisy celebrations that mark male circumcision. And so, Magda reckons, if doctors know and trust a family, they will be happy to pocket the money and do it under the table; unless something goes seriously wrong during the procedure, no one will be the wiser. But doctors, even freshly minted ones, are often as staunchly supportive of the practice as their clients.
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As a recent medical graduate explained to me, physicians themselves are under extreme pressure, from both fellow practitioners and local communities, to do the job. In any case, the law allows FGM on the grounds of “medical necessity,” which leaves physicians plenty of wiggle room. And if all else fails, mothers can always find a
daya
in a far-flung village—back to where it all began.

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.
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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.
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The message is clearly getting through; today FGM rates are significantly lower in Egypt’s Christian communities than among their Muslim counterparts.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Or, as they sometimes say in Egypt: “The circumcised woman is a woman with a broken wing.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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