11.10.2013. Asia Calling reports from Malaysia where female genital mutilation is legal. In 2009 the countries highest Islamic body the Department for Islamic development has declared it mandatory.

And as Nabila Ali reports in June 2013 from KL recent surveys by the University of Malaya are showing practice is on the rise. Yet, not without critics. The organization Sisters in Islam are putting all their efforts into raising awareness about FGM.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpVwOb7A2Ms&w=420&h=315]

4.10.2013. How can it be expained that rates of female genital mutilation are not dropping in one country despite campaigns to eliminate the practice while they decrease in another where no campaign has targeted the issue? How robust are figures when out of the same group of women 94 percent answer to have undergone FGM in one year, but only 84 percent say this when surveyed ten years later? These questions are posed by Henrietta L Moore and William Wyse in the medical journal BMJ referring to the recent Unicef report on FGM.

Read article: Female genital Mutilation/Cutting in BMJ 2013;347:f5603

8.9.2013. A cross-sectional study was conducted in the primary health care centers and the Maternity Teaching Hospital in Erbil city, involving 1987 women aged 15–49 years. The self-reported prevalence of female genital mutilation was 70.3%, while it was 58.6% according to clinical examination of the women’s genitalia. Only 30% of the participants were aware about the health consequences of female genital mutilation. More than one third (36.6%) of the women support the practice and 34.5% have intention to mutilate their daughters.

Berivan A. Yasin, Namir G. Al-Tawil, Nazar P. Shabila and Tariq S. Al-Hadithi: Female genital mutilation among Iraqi Kurdish women: a cross-sectional study from Erbil city, September 2013

The Milla Project

When my daughter was born, I remember there being a huge rush of nurses, doctors, students and various other medical attendants swirling around the doors of the delivery room. On a whiteboard next to the entrance was a hastily drawn-up list of all the various expecting mothers who were delivering at the time. Drawn in smaller fonts right next to the name of the mothers were the words indicating whether the mother was Muslim or not, the expected sex of the baby, and if the baby was a girl born to a Muslim mother, whether she would be circumcised or not. Before long a medical attendant came rushing up to me and asked me whether I wanted my daughter to be circumcised. Before I share with you my decision, let us consider the facts, myths and issues surrounding female circumcision.

Female circumcision is probably one of the least well-known facts about the Malay community. Some non-Malay men who have married Malay women are not even aware of this fact. But it’s there, it happens, and it is even conducted by medical professionals. There has been a general effort by WHO and various other medical and women’s NGOs to eliminate the practice of Female Circumcision (or Female Genital Mutilation as some quarters call it) around the world. These efforts often meet with strong resistance from the local populace due to the strong connection the practice has with local cultures and traditions.

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18.8.2013. A film student made a film about the practice of FGM in the Bohra community in India. First it was seen with suspicion, now she won a national award.

Interview of the director by Yollande D’Mello (dna)

It started out as a college project that Priya Goswami, an alumna of National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, worked on in her final year. In March, the 25-minute documentary, A Pinch of Skin, about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in India, won the National Film Award in the Special Mention category. dna caught up with her for a chat

Why did you choose this topic?
I stumbled upon an article that broached the topic and knew immediately that this would be the subject of my documentary. I had never heard about the practice of Female Genital Mutilation from friends belonging to the Dawoodi Bohra community or otherwise, and wondered why that was. I want to start a conversation. I’m a feminist at heart but I wanted to make an objective film.

How did you convince people to come on record?
I shot in Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Surat and Udaipur where people were either on board or not. We worked around their requests to use silhouettes, not shoot faces or simply record audio. I took whatever they gave me.

How does the film manage to capture emotions without any faces?
Everyone we spoke to had a vociferous opinion to be expressed. We let their body language do the talking. So gesticulating hands and tensed toes make up for facial expressions.

How did the practice of FGM begin?
It’s a myth. There is actually no mention of it in the Quran. Since the community was predominantly merchants, men travelled a lot. Removing the haraam ki boti, as it is called, was a way to control the sexual urges of women and keep them from infidelity. Read More.

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) 12.8.2013. Indonesia should stop allowing doctors, midwives and other health workers to carry out female genital mutilation (FGM) on children and babies as young as six months, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (OHCHR) has said.

The committee also urged the country to pass legislation banning any form of FGM and to put in place penalties that reflect the “gravity of this offence”, which campaigners say is a serious human rights violation. OHCHR made its comments on Friday in observations on the state of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The “medicalisation” of FGM – a term used for when the practice is performed by health practitioners – has emerged as a trend in several countries and campaigners say it is setting back global efforts to eradicate the ancient ritual. It is also seen as one of the biggest risk factors as it is often seen as legitimising FGM. Read more

Gatestone Institute 18.07.2013, by Irfan Al-Alawi

While overshadowed apparently by the general civil conflict over the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) regime in Egypt, the spreading problem of female genital mutilation (FGM) has recently shaken the land of the Nile.

Yet the mass upsurge against the tyrannical fundamentalism of the MB is related, however obscurely, to the protests against FGM.

Late in June, British media reported that Suhair Al-Ba’ta, an Egyptian girl aged 13, died during an FGM “operation.” She reportedly perished from blood loss while subjected to FGM in a village north of Cairo. The latest terrible “death by FGM” of a girl in early adolescence provoked widespread outrage at the practice. Disregarding public opinion, representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), defended FGM as “Islamic.”

FGM has been illegal in Egypt since 2007, after the death in an anesthesia overdose during the mutilation of a 12-year-old girl, Budour Ahmad Shaker. The Egyptian government previously attempted to suppress FGM in 1996, and to reinforce the injunction against it in 1997. Egyptian officials affirmed in 1997 that FGM was not justified by Islam, and were supported in condemning it by scholars from the Al-Azhar Supreme Council of Islamic Research, based in Al-Azhar, the preeminent university in Sunni Islam. The Al-Azhar authorities stated that cutting female sexual organs — even partially– has no foundation in Islam, is medically harmful, and should not be carried out.

Dr. Naglaa El-Adly, research director for Egypt’s National Council for Women, has argued that the Muslim Brotherhood used its influence to prevent enforcement of the laws against FGM. Dr. El-Adly, like other experts, asserts that FGM is an ancient pagan custom in the region, with no basis in Islam. She noted the existence of the problem among Egyptian Christians, and has called on media and religious leaders “to tell people it is not related to Islam or Christianity.”

Read more

15.6.2013. Mirielle Valette explains in the French feminist magazine Sisyphe why the United Nations figures about female genital mutilations are too low. Giving details about evidence from several Asian countries, she questions why the UN does not update their assumptions about FGM.

by Mireille Vallette

The UN communication with regard to sexual mutilations is deceitful. It underestimates the number of excised girls, ignores the reality of excisors countries such as Indonesia, and maintains strict taboo of the religions role. Without it, reality would appear naked : some 300 mio Muslims are concerned by excision and without an active intervention of religious leaders, the scourge will not disappear.

Investigation and call for a mobilization !

Unicef provides annually the status about the situation of female genital mutilation.1) It is estimated that some 130 million women worldwide have endured it and that three million girls are subject annually to the circumciser’s knife or to any other kind of mutilation. Figures are far below reality.

Unicef also announced that these mutilations are decreasing everywhere. It is also false : in some countries, the scourge increases. The agency also asserts that in 25 years, mutilations will have disappeared. A dream…

The implicit assumption of these statistics is that excising countries are known and identified. Howewer, only Africa (and Yemen) fall into this accounting. Does only Africa excise ? No, but to collect representative data and integrate them, Unicef needs the approval of the governments.

What happens in the Middle East and Southeast Asia ? About the first, we do not know much and the second contradicts the findings of Unicef. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the feminine genital mutilations (FGM) are common, and rising. Moreover, they contribute to the increasing medicalization denounced by the WHO in other countries.

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“We left our daughter with the doctor and the nurse. 15 minutes later, the nurse took my daughter out of the operation room to a nearby room, along with three other girls whom the doctor was circumcising,” Mohammed Ibrahim, a farmer, told Egyptian daily al-Masry al-Youm.

“I waited half an hour, hoping that my daughter would wake up, but, unfortunately, unlike the rest of the girls, she did not,” he said.

Read More

See also: Now: Female genital mutilation in Egypt – The tragedy of Suhair al-Bateh reopens the question of female circumcision

31.7.2013. The British Independent interviewed the vice-president of the Pana Center in Kirkuk, Iraq – a partner organization of Wadi. The women’s rights campaigner Awezan Muri talks about her own experiences in her family and the challenges she encounters fighting FGM in Iraq. Figures from the Pana Centre show that 38 per cent of women in Kirkuk are victims.

As a nine-year-old growing up in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, Awezan Nuri narrowly escaped female genital mutilation. “My mother was 12 when she was mutilated,” says the 31-year-old women’s rights campaigner, who is also a renowned poet. “She has told me about the terrible pain, how much she bled that night and how ashamed she was to tell her family she was hurting. She couldn’t talk to her mother, because her mother was the one who’d taken her to be cut. She felt alone and scared.”

Despite the trauma of that experience, Nuri’s mother still pushed for her six daughters to undergo the same process themselves. “She thought it was the responsibility of every Sunni Muslim to do this. Logically, she disagreed with it, but there was so much pressure from society.”

It is a misguided belief among Muslim communities in dozens of countries around the world that the practice is mandated in Islam. For Nuri, it was an intervention by her father that saved her sisters from the knife – he said he did not agree with it. But most Iraqi Kurds are not so lucky.  Figures from the Pana Centre – of which Nuri is vice president, in charge of the campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM) – show that 38 per cent of women in Kirkuk are victims. Among ethnic Kurds, that figure rises to 65 per cent.

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