Female circum… whaaaaat?

I was shocked to learn from Naomi yes­ter­day that female cir­cum­ci­sion is prac­ticed in Sin­ga­pore. I had no idea.

You learn a lot from moth­er­hood forums, where Naomi stum­bled upon dis­cus­sions on whether to cir­cum­cise, where to cir­cum­cise, how to do it and how much is done and how much is charged.

I’ve always thought that female cir­cum­ci­sions were only car­ried out in some tribes in Africa, and that there was never any reli­gious basis for doing so.

Fur­ther googling the sub­ject:

In Singapore’s small Mus­lim com­mu­nity, female cir­cum­ci­sion involves nick­ing the pre­puce, the skin cov­er­ing the clitoris.

It is markedly dif­fer­ent from the prac­tices of some Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties in Africa and the Mid­dle East decried by human rights activists as female gen­i­tal muti­la­tion. In those cases, a young girl’s cli­toris is clipped and burned. In a few com­mu­ni­ties, all the exter­nal gen­i­tals are cut off and the rem­nant tis­sue is sewn up to leave only a small opening.

Those prac­tices orig­i­nated 1,400 years ago, before the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, says Noor Aisha Binte Abdul Rah­man, a pro­fes­sor at the National Uni­ver­sity of Singapore.

Singapore’s milder form is viewed as sym­bolic of this tradition.

But any­way, I’ve always known male cir­cum­ci­sion to be ‘com­pul­sory’ among Mus­lim males, and I’ve a story of a friend of mine who’s Mus­lim, but whose mother man­aged to hide him from the circumcisor’s (is that what they’re called?) scis­sors until he was about eight or ten years old, when he was found out by his mosque mates, pre­sum­ably when they went to the loo together.

My friend was dragged kick­ing and scream­ing to the cir­cum­ci­sion table and given the sunat. His mother, heart­bro­ken and guilt-ridden by her only son’s wails and pleas, bought him an Apple com­puter to help soothe him as he recovered.

A few years ago this friend and I were talk­ing about com­put­ers, and he was com­plain­ing that his lap­top was on the blink. He couldn’t afford a new one at the time, and said that he thought about ask­ing his mother for a loan, but decided against it even­tu­ally, because “I think my mother will sunat me again”.