Egyptian charged with genital mutilation of 11-year-old girl

The castration of the women of Islam goes a long way in accounting for their broken spirits and submissive natures. Destroyed in their most sensitive and alive tissues, pain becomes a constant. This dreadful practice must be stopped just as we stopped the burning of widows in India and the destruction of Chinese girls' feet by footbinding. Where the hell are the Western feminists?

The castration of the women of Islam goes a long way in accounting for their broken spirits and submissive natures. Destroyed in their most sensitive and alive tissues, pain becomes a constant. This dreadful practice must be stopped just as we stopped the burning of widows in India and the destruction of Chinese girls' feet by footbinding. Where the hell are the Western feminists?

Spencer inserts:

"Circumcision is obligatory (O: for both men and women. For men it consists of removing the prepuce from the penis, and for women, removing the prepuce (Ar. bazr) of the clitoris (n: not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert). (A: Hanbalis hold that circumcision of women is not obligatory but sunna, while Hanafis consider it a mere courtesy to the husband.)" -- 'Umdat al-Salik e4.3

Why does Spencer keep supplying this information that apparently has been shown to be inaccurate? Specifically the parenthetical explanation that "(n: not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert)" has been argued to be an interpolation by a Muslim convert translator of the 'Umdat al-Salik as a specific bit of taqiyya. In fact, the Arabic of the original, apparently, does designate the "clitoris itself". The translator was trying to whitewash the text for Western consumption. Why is Spencer helping that whitewash? This is the second time Spencer has supplied this information, and the last time, I posted a comment about this as well, citing a previous Jihad Watch commenter who supplied the necessary information.

Continued:

And that last time, I was only quoting a previous commenter from Jihad Watch like over a year ago!

Here we go:

This is what I posted here about 3 weeks ago, relating to another story of FGM when Spencer supplied the same apparently wrong translation of the 'Umdat al-Salik:

About a year ago, another commenter here at Jihad Watch provided this information on it:

Rev Dr Mark Durie discusses the way in which Nuh Ha Mim Keller, the English convert to Islam who translated the authoritative sharia law manual, Reliance of the Traveller [= 'Umdat al-Salik], concealed (from those ignorant of Arabic) the full force of the Arabic text that describes female genital mutilation.

[The JW commenter then quoted from Rev. Durie's explanation:]

Female circumcision

‘Umdat al-Salik itself [in English] contains an example of misleading translation.

In Nuh Ha Mim Keller’s edition, the original Arabic text is published facing the English translation. The English translation of the section on circumcision appears to be a deliberate mis-translation of the Arabic instructions for circumcising girls:

[The Arabic text] is translated by Nuh Hah Mim Keller as follows:

"Circumcision is obligatory (O: for both men and women. For men it consists of removing the prepuce from the penis, and for women, removing the prepuce (Ar. Bazr) of the clitoris (n: not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert). (A: Hanbalis hold that circumcision of women is not obligatory but sunna, while Hanafis consider it a mere courtesy to the husband.)"

However what the Arabic actually says is:

"Circumcision is obligatory (for every male and female) by cutting off the piece of skin on the glans of the penis of the male, but circumcision of the female is by cutting out the clitoris (this is called HufaaD)."

This deceptive translation obscures the Shafi’i law, given by ‘Umdat al-Salik, that circumcision of girls by excision of the clitoris is mandatory. This form of female circumcision is widely practiced in Egypt, where the Shafi’i school of Sunni law is followed.

[The JW commenter then concluded:]

"EXCISION OF THE CLITORIS. So one whole school of Islamic law sees nothing wrong with CUTTING IT ALL OUT."

I have never heard of Christians mutilating their little girls this way. I don't recall ever reading in any Christian literature that would ever suggest such a thing.

(A: Hanbalis hold that circumcision of women is not obligatory but sunna, while Hanafis consider it a mere courtesy to the husband.)" -- 'Umdat al-Salik e4.3

A courtesy ! A mere courtesy ! This is what we are importing into Europe. Disgusting perverts who think that cutting into a woman and destroying her sex is a courtesy to the man. Personally I would like to cut the balls off anyone participating or gaining pleasure from these barbaric practices.

Is there any evidence that Christians do this?

Hard to believe. Why do they make this claim?

Yep, where are the Western feminists? Western feminists don't want to impose their views of women's rights on other cultures. How sensitive, they're so phoney.

This infibulation is one of the most barbaric customs on this planet. And as Robert pointed out it has a religious basis in Islam. Muslims say it's mere courtesy to the husband. Which normal man wants to have sex with a woman who is incapable of enjoying it? The most wonderful thing in life becomes a torture for the girls. Yet again a proof that Islam is against humanity.

They keep saying that other people than mohammedans practice this atrocity.

But I've never seen anybody produce anything that looks faintly like evidence for that assertion.

Anybody here know different?

Does anyone reading here believe that such a massive trauma at such an impressionable age would not do comensurately massive emotional damage on the victim?

Does anyone reading here believe that such mental damage would not warp the experience of bearing and rearing children?

And the sanctimonious bastards at Al-Azhar University (where our own Dear Leader, Red Hussein went to kiss the Arabs' butts) humpher and fumpher daintily about the proprieties and details and excuses. Those sub-humans are off the bottom of the moral scale for sheer unmixed depravity.

By my lights they are complicit and guilty as hell.

This really calls for some cruel and unusual punishment -- something nasty involving knives and genitalia.

This vile, evil practice has to be stopped along with stoning, beheading, hand chopping and anything else that God created for humans to survive which these bastards take upon themselves to destroy, notforgetting the utter pain and desperation these poor victims are subjected to and the resultant emotonal and trauma that must surely follow. God how I loathe and detest these people and wish they would disappear into a black hole, or hell.

Hi joeblough, I heard it was practised amomg Christians in Ethiopia, too, Ethiopia being a predominantly Christian country, but by no means it's sanctioned by the Hebrew or Christian bible. To the best of my knowledge it's an old African custom, but as usual for all things barbaric, Islam adopted it. It's not in the unholy Quo'ran but in the sunna.

epistemology - yes you're right re FGM.

It's an ancient and nasty African custom that Islam liked, and absorbed and has done nothing whatever to suppress in all parts of Africa where Islam prevails - even while Islam has had no apparent difficulty in stamping out all sorts of other things. I am quite sure that, had the Muslims succeeded in conquering China, they would have absorbed and perpetuated the breaking and binding of little girls' feet.

There are Christian groups - for example, the Mothers' Union, which is an Anglican women's organisation with a worldwide membership - that are trying very hard, with some success, to convince their co-religionists in places like Kenya and Ethiopia, that FGM should be ditched. I think there is a much better chance that the Christians, and even the animists, will give up this practice, than that the Muslims (where it is practised) will give it up.

You might like to google 'Doctor Vagina' to find out about a marvellously funny and earthy no-nonsense Australian women's health worker who's campaigning like mad to raise awareness of how horrible FGM is and why it should be stopped, ASAP. She is VERY un-PC. Who cares how ancient a custom is, if anyone with a gram of sense can see that it is inhuman, cruel, and just plain EVIL - she doesn't believe in being 'sensitive' to customs like that.

I am not sure if I would call Islam a religion...but if it is ..it is the religion of pain and misery....

Allah destroyed my computer again...so I was knocked out for a while...Must have been something I said...Typepad again...cool...

FGM...This should come under 'unspeakable crime'...but should be spoken about a lot just the same...Prosecute...punish...discourage...

Well, I can still speak of the unspeakable evil of islam.
PLEASE READ:
http://www.challenging-islam.org/articles/circumcision.htm
scroll halfway down:
http://middle-east-info.org/gateway/genocide/index.htm
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
http://middle-east-info.org/league/somalia/fgmpictures.htm
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk/DiscView.asp?mid=864&forum_id=2
This is going on in MY SUBURB of the TWIN CITIES. Authorities are looking the other way even though it's against State Law.

Ipsofacto

Christianity has been around since the 1st century AD and has existed in many different cultural contexts.

*ALL* your horror examples (which you appear to be presenting in a tu quoque ;"Christians hate the body even worse than Muslims" mood) come from a very limited period in space and time - 18th and 19th-century northwestern Europe - and, curiously enough, from a time when official 'Christendom' in that part of the world had in any real sense ceased to exist. By the 19th century many of the intellectual elite were active unbelievers and hostile to Christianity. And it was out of *that* elite that the ideas would come that would produce the eugenics movement, and ultimately, Nazism.

I would be interested to know whether all those 'physicians, scientists and philosophers' were Christians: in the 1700s and 1800s it is perfectly possible that some were not, given that that was the era of the Deists and the Freethinkers.

Furthermore: were the figures that you name, these inventors of mad devices, the 'mainstream' or were they the lunatic fringe?

And if you think Christianity is inherently and uniformly anti-body and anti-sex (simply because it promoted monogamy and chastity, which in a pre-modern society without antibiotics and antivirals had a certain practical value, quite apart from anything else!) you have to account for John Donne, for J S Bach's Wedding Cantatas, and Spenser's Epithalamion, to name just three that I am aware of. And Chaucer. (And don't try to tell me that people like this were only 'good' or 'healthy' insofar as they were, in fact, surprise surprise, not *really* Christians...sorry, no can buy).

And you have to account for Dante's phrase 'la carne gloriosa e sacra'. I assure you that the doctrine which Dante places in the mouth of Solomon in the Paradiso - the assertion that the souls of the blessed will be more, not less, radiant when reunited with their resurrected bodies - *is* completely consonant with orthodox Christian doctrine.

Dumbledoresarmy--

Sorry about that. I deleted the comment you're referring to because it was so breathtakingly off-topic when a child in Rome is fighting for her life after having undergone torture. But your comment is quite on-topic nonetheless.

11 years old. 11 years old.

Hey, American media - why isn't Oprah doing a show on this? How come ABC, NBC, CBS or CNN doing this story?
How come NOW is not "bringing this issue into focus"?
Has anyone asked Ayaah Hirsi Ali for a comment?

I know that our Dear Leader is too busy ramming his health care plan down our throats, but he has too young daughters ............ surely he has an opinion?

If civilization means anything, it means that the civilized world must stamp out this cruel practice. Where is the UN?

I forgot, busy shopping at exclusive stores in New York City.

Testing...guess the new(est) system works

"Egypt: Infibulation On 11 Year-Old, 1st Charges Brought"
..................

This wasn't just "female circumcision", horrifying as that is. This is full infubulation.

In this grisly procedure, the clitoris is removed, as are both the labia majoris and the labia minoris, and then the vaginal opening is sewn up, sometimes introducing a reed to allow for urination. This is the mutilation Ayaan Hirsi Ali suffered as a child.

As you might imagine, infection--either from the unsanitary conditions of the butcher itself, or from subsequent contamination from urine and fecal matter--is extremely common.

or, sometimes, the procedure is so sloppily--or so "enthusiastically" done, that the girl winds up in the hospital from simple blood loss.

This story also tends to bring the lie to the idea that female "circumcision" is an entirely female phenomenon--some western feminists even consider it a female rite. So why was this FGM carried out by *a 69-year-old man*?

It is good to hear that Egypt is finally prosecuting this crime. They have an uphill battle, though--reportedly, up to *97% of all Egyptian girls* are mutilated.

I hope this little girl survives her brutal maiming.

"It is good to hear that Egypt is finally prosecuting this crime."

It will be interesting to see what punishment is doled out. Is the government really serious about eliminating the vile practice, or is it just bending to outside pressures?

Female circumcision is barbaric and it represents more than just a physical assault on a woman, bad enough as that is. It is an assault on the entire woman as a person of worth and wonder, entitled to dignity and respect and the allowance of complete control over one's personhood.

Unfortunately in Islam, the religion (in effect, the man) owns the woman. The woman doesn't own herself. Female circumcision, so very common in the Islamic world, is demonstrative of this.

Topical trivia:

During the Salem Witch Trials, a woman's clitoris counted as a "devil's teat". Disgusting, no?

More trivia:

A full "skinning" vulvectomy (I kid you not; this is what it is called) for the eradication of cancerous and some pre-cancerous growths on the vulva, involves the removal of the clitoris, the labia minora, and the labia majora. It's exactly the same procedure as "female circumcison" except that it is done in a hospital, with the patient anesthetised, and receiving proper post operative medication and aftercare.

Even under the conditions above, when there is a legitimate reason for it, the experience and the aftermath are shattering.

Reply to dumbledoresarmy.

It is true that my examples only cover a short period of time when the Christian anti-sexual doctrines and hysteria dominated Christian theology and culture. It started with St. Pauls repression of women and sexuality, it got much worse with St. Augustine and culminated at the end of the middle ages when 10.000s of women (among them minors) were executed for the imaginary crime of having sexual contact with the Devil. Martin Luther did not stop this moral panic - on the contrary. Becuse of his insane obcession with witches much more women were burned at the stake in the Protestant countries than in the Catholic.

It is also true that you can find a few Christian philosophers who in the middle ages advocated for the benefit of female masturbation. Christian philosopher Albertus Magnus (1200-1280) recommended that pubescent girls rub their clitorises in order to reduce temptation to engage in intercourse, and thus preserve their chastity.

At the time of reason (enlightentment) the need to fight the sexual sin of masturbation were given a (pseudo)scientific (medical) reason instead of a divine one. The responsibility for this nonsense is a millennium of Christian anti-sexual excesses and pervation of the culture.

Religion is to be blamed for the hideous consequences of the masturbation taboo (which also furnished yet another excuse for cirsumcission among the Victorians). For decades, millions of young men and boys were terrified in adolescence by supposedly “medical” advise that warned them of blindness, nervous collapse, and descent into insanity if they resorted to self-gratification. Stern lectures from clergymen, replete with nonsense about semen as an irreplaceable and finite energy source, dominated the upbringing of generations. Robert Baden-Powell composed an entire obsessive treatise on the subject, which he used to reinforce the muscular Christianity of his Boy Scout movement.

And the sexual-hysteria about masturbation continue to this day especially in America – much less in Europe.

Beginning with the Kinsey Report of 1948, masturbation was demystified and even discovered to be beneficial. In 1966, Masters & Johnson revealed the practice to be virtually universal in North America, cutting across all boundaries of sex, age, race, and social class. In 1971 Goldstein, Haeberle & McBride determined masturbation to be the most common form of sexual activity among humans.

It is clear that masturbation has had a dynamic and varied history. It now almost universally accepted by the medical community that masturbation is a common, safe, and normal practice which occurs in infants, teenagers, and adults.

Despite this new attitude, the actual practice and discussion of masturbation continues to be a social taboo within most societies. Former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder was immediately dismissed by President Clinton in 1994 after she stated that masturbation “is something that is part of human sexuality and its part of something that perhaps should be taught.”

It is easy to blame the Muslim culture for the difficulties of getting rid of sexual traditions and taboos physical harmful or deadly but the West still has a long way to go before we get out of the grib of the anti-sexual traditions in Christianity. Two hundred years of secularism seems to short a period to eliminate the inherited Christian sexual taboos.

I wonder FGM is covered under the Obama Health Care Plan?

Sorry -

I wonder if FGM is covered under the Obama Health Care Plan?

Ipso Facto, I respect much of what you have to say, but comparing some American Christians' supposed squeemishness over contemplating their own children's masturbation with Muslim parent's mutilation of their girls seems like the worst sort of moral equivalence.

FGM leads to--at best--a lifetime of joyless intercourse. At worst, it can lead to painful and dangerous intercourse (with infibulation), lifelong pain, incontinence, dangerous childbirth (including fistulas, where scar tissue has so occluded the vagina that the fetus punches through the vaginal wall into the colon during birth), infection and death from blood loss.

You claim "...and the sexual-hysteria about masturbation continue to this day especially in America". I'd like to see evidence of that.

I'd also like to see a case where this supposed phenomenon has put a pre-pubescent child in the hospital, fighting for her life.

epistemology & dumbledoresarmy:

So if I am understanding this,

-- you both think it's credible that African Christians do this as well, and,

-- dumbledoresarmy: you call the practice ancient, so I infer that you've seen something credible to indicate that it predates at least the arrival of mohammedanism -- I can't tell if you're asserting that it predates African Christianity.

So the differentiators here are:
-- The popularity of the practice among the societies where it's present
-- The institutional response by the governments and religious whatevers in those societies

So how deeply embedded is this as a specifically AFRICAN thing?

Is it significantlty less common among the Christians?
Do the native religion folks practice it at all?
Are the local churches condemning it?
Are the local governments condemning it?

As repelled as I am by the prospect of even thinking about this crap, I think it's important to establish whether mohammedanism really is a major influence here.

I realize we are talking inches and ounces of evil, but there is still a difference between:
-- The mohammedans do it much more than everybody else, and
-- The mohammedan preachers are more blase about it, but the culture really follows common African norms

Any data?

joeblough,

The point is, Islam regulates the personal, familial and sexual beliefs and behaviors of societies more effectively and obsessively than any other culture on earth -- so the fact that FGM thrives in many Muslim countries at minimum shows that it is officially countenanced by Islam. Then we have the manual of Islamic law specifically mandating cutting out the clitoris. Show me one Christian manual of law that does that.

gravenimage said about Ipso Facto:

"Ipso Facto, I respect much of what you have to say, but comparing some American Christians' supposed squeemishness over contemplating their own children's masturbation with Muslim parent's mutilation of their girls seems like the worst sort of moral equivalence."

I have noticed Ipso Facto play the equivalency game a few times before, in a variety of ways. To imply an equation of Western puritanism in terms of attitudes against masturbation with Islamic FGM is like saying that a recently boiled egg is hot just like the surface of the Sun! Sure, both of them are "hot", but the equation is ridiculous, irrelevant and, frankly -- in this context -- treasonous.

Andrew Bostom also has featured the crucial emendation by Mark Durie of the 'Umdat al-Salik to show that it does, in fact, mandate cutting out the clitoris, contrary to the parenthetical whitewash inserted into the text by the Muslim convert who translated the 'Umdat. See this article on Bostom's blog from January of 2008:

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/01/22/clarification-of-islamic-law-support-for-female-genital-mutilation-by-dr-mark-durie/

I wish Spencer would excise that parenthetical whitewash every time he quotes from the 'Umdat -- "(n: not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert)" -- or at least tell us why he continues to preserve it in his quote of the 'Umdat in this regard.

Where are AbdullaMikhail's comments about this? Didn't he, not more than a week ago, under the old comment system, assure us "There is no FGM in Egypt!"?

It's not one individual Muslim who should be in the dock.It's Islam that should be there.