This story works hard to give the impression that female genital mutilation is practiced among Muslims only by Dawoodi Bohras, and by Christians and Jews elsewhere. This is a marginal improvement over establishment media stories about FGM before the arrests of the physicians in Michigan; until those arrests, establishment media stories universally claimed that the practice was cultural and not Islamic. But there is a long way to go before the establishment media gets to anything approaching the truth.
In reality FGM is sanctioned by Islamic law: “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 bazr ‘clitoris’ [this is called khufaadh ‘female circumcision’]).” — ‘Umdat al-Salik e4.3, translated by Mark Durie, The Third Choice, p. 64
And it is widespread in 30 Muslim countries, not just among the Dawoodi Bohras.
“Women in small Muslim sect say they have had FGM in Canada,” by Michele Henry and Jayme Poisson, Toronto Star, August 21, 2017:
Women from a small Muslim sect called the Dawoodi Bohras have reported that female genital mutilation has been performed on them in Canada, a study given to the federal government reveals.
The first research of its kind to probe the practice within this tightly knit South Asian community, the study found that 80 per cent of Bohra women surveyed have undergone FGM and two of the study’s 18 Canadian participants said it happened within Canada’s borders.
In Canada, FGM was added to the Criminal Code under aggravated assault in 1997. The study does not provide additional information on the two cases it uncovered.
Most commonly associated with communities in sub-Saharan Africa, FGM is also practised among members of this Muslim sect who trace their roots to Yemen in the 11th century and who migrated to Gujarat, India, in the 1500s.
Authored by Sahiyo, an organization of anti-FGM activists and members of the Dawoodi Bohra community, the study was completed in February. Preliminary results went to officials from Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department in June 2016. The federal government says it is looking into the issue.
The researcher’s findings show that more than 80 per cent of the 385 Dawoodi Bohra women surveyed — including all 18 Canadian participants — want the practice to end and would not do it to their daughters.
Female genital mutilation, also known as female genital cutting or female circumcision, is a procedure that intentionally alters or causes injury to external female organs. It can be inflicted on girls as young as 1 and varies in severity from partial removal of the clitoris to excising the clitoris and labia and stitching up the walls of the vulva to leave only a tiny opening.
Khatna is the South Asian term for genital cutting and, according to the study, the sect’s practice of removing a woman’s clitoris is done for reasons including “religious purposes,” to curb sexual arousal, for cleanliness and to maintain customs and traditions.
The Dawoodi Bohras have recently made FGM-related headlines. A Detroit emergency room doctor charged in April with alleged performing of FGM on 100 young girls is a Dawoodi Bohra. The doctor, Jumana Nagarwala, is in jail awaiting trial. In 2016, a Dawoodi Bohra priest in Sydney, Australia, was convicted for his role in performing FGM.
“The findings (of the study) demonstrate that FGC (female genital cutting) is deeply rooted in the community’s culture,” the authors write. Sahiyo means “friends” in Gujarati.
“Understanding the complex social norms and cultural values systems that shape the meaning and significance of the practice within this community is critical work of anti-FGC advocates.”
For this story, the Star also spoke with three local Dawoodi Bohra women who described what it’s like to undergo khatna in their native countries of India and Kenya at the hands of “practitioners,” not doctors, in non-medical environments such as kitchens, with unsterile razors.
A continuing Star investigation has revealed that Canadian girls have been taken overseas to have the procedure and that thousands more could be at risk of being sent abroad to be subjected to FGM.
Practitioners who perform FGM are “almost certainly entering Canada” to engage in the practice, says an internal report from Canada Border Services Agency, as reported by Global News in July.
FGM is a cultural practice dating back hundreds of years, and organizations including the United Nations say that although it is often perceived as being connected to some Islamic groups, it also occurs in other religious communities, including Christians, Ethiopian Jews and certain traditional African religions.
Only where those non-Muslim communities live in close proximity to a much larger Muslim population.
…The emails say officials learned from the report how over the past two decades there has been a regression of gender equality in the Dawoodi Bohra community worldwide and there is “significant hidden violence against women.” There are roughly 20,000 to 40,000 Dawoodi Bohras in Canada, according to the federal emails.
Titled “Understanding Female Genital Cutting in the Dawoodi Bohra Community,” the Sahiyo study surveyed 385 Dawoodi Bohra women across the globe, including women in Canada, the U.S., Australia and the United Kingdom, in an attempt to shed light where “little or no data” exists. It aims to inform policy makers and health professionals in order to “end the practice,” the study said, that has left most of its participants with emotional scars — anger, haunting memories and frustration in their sexual lives.
“I feel robbed and cheated of my sexuality,” one respondent told the study’s researchers.
Shaheeda Tavawalla-Kirtane, Sahiyo’s Canadian co-founder, who works in India to raise awareness about FGM, said she has been tweeting to Canadian ministers because Canada should be aware this “crime” is happening on its soil. The Sahiyo study suggests creating a hotline for at-risk girls and education about FGM for front-line workers, such as teachers.
Some of the study’s participants reported that, typically at the age of 7, they were told they were having the procedure to remove a “worm” and that khatna was part of the religion.
The religious justification for this practice may come from passages in the Da’aim al-Islam, a sacred Islamic text that informs the tenets and traditions of the Dawoodi Bohras. According to The Pillars of Islam, a respected translation of the text, cutting will lead to “greater purity.”…
marina says
But Canada’s Liberal government has removed condemnation of “barbaric cultural practices”female genital mutilation from the citizenship exam.
mortimer says
Jihadi Justin says it isn’t ‘barbaric’ when Muslims do it … even if it actually is barbaric. Muslims get a free pass.
John Forbes says
The REGRESSIVE LEFT has bowed to ISLAM in CANADA & continues to do so in the course of winning votes from the MALE sections of the community!The TRUDEAN/WYNN Brotherhood Liberals have allowed the basic protection for these women to be removed at the Request of the males in Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood where the Trudeau Liberals power bases seen to lie!
This sort of thing seems to be happening all over the WEST as appeasement & accommodation is the order of the day rather that applying the HOST COUNTRIES Laws as they should be applied !
Next will be a DEMAND that SHARIA be allowed in city pockets & as the populations expand so with the SHARIA areas ! FGM will not be the only BARBARITY then !
Guest says
So only when a girl complains do the Canadians get off their asses
Ric says
Indeed, one can blame Canada, well, at least the Boy King, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government. Trudeau, the younger, has always been an appeaser and apologist to Radicalism. The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree, his father, Pierre, was of the same disposition.
One can be assured that little if anything will befall a Muslim choosing to perform or have this barbarity, Female Genital Mutilation enforced upon them. Canada will continue bow and scrape to Islam as do most Western Nations. It matters naught that this barbarous and uncivilized evil-doing is involuntary or forced, the fact that it is allegedly illegal Trudeau et al, dares not to raise the hackles of Canada’s Islamic communities. The Liberal government always has pandered to the immigrant, adoptive Canadians’ votes radical or otherwise even if they are breaking the nation’s legislation.
mortimer says
Jihadi Justin the pretend feminist who won’t protect MUSLIM WOMEN from FGM.
Andy says
Where is that feminist commie/moslem loving nazi leftist Trudeau to speak out against this barbaric act against women!!
Muslima Refuses To Appear In Court Because Of Sharia Law, They Have 6 Words For Her
Muslima Refuses To Appear In Court Because Of Sharia Law, They Have 6 Words For Her
Andy says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuFQ2koyVPo
Andy says
Cowardly Muslim Migrants Beat On White Girl Until Angry Boyfriend Shows Up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaicVJS9aaI
mortimer says
When will these 7th century savages hunt down the REMAINING 20% and CUT THEM?
Matthieu Baudin says
Female Castration (FGM) is an international disgrace and a continuing demonstration of the amazing backwardness of Traditional Islam which condones and protects this violent form of rape against young girls. Jihad Watch supporters have shown themselves to be totally committed and at the forefront of the many people around the world who are mobilising to remove this cultural scourge from the face of the earth. We will never be silenced around this monstrous travesty.
dumbledoresarmy says
Just like slavery and child ‘marriage’ and forced marriage and polygyny and wife-beating this evil and cruel – and health-destroying as well as soul-destroying – practice did not *originate* with Islam, and is practised by some groups other than Muslims; but when Muslims encountered FGM, instead of anathematising and suppressing it, as they successfully did to many other non-Islamic practices they encountered, they embraced and absorbed and perpetuated it.
One school of Sunni Muslim sharia, the Shafiite, declares it to be *obligatory*, and specifies that it is carried out **but CUTTING OUT the clitoris**. Just reading those words, if you have any knowledge of the female genital anatomy at all, is to shudder; because – unlike removing a foreskin from a male – ‘cutting out’ the clitoris (and they don’t just cut off the tip, they often rummage around, in order to rip out the entire organ most of which is embedded amongst surrounding tissues and structures) involves hacking around with sharp knives in a part of the body where the merest slip can cause damage to the urethra or to blood vessels. Girls have died of catastrophic blood loss after botched FGM. Or catastrophic infections.
The fact that FGM is *obligatory* under Shafiite sharia is why it is found in places like Indonesia where the pre-Islamic culture knew nothing whatsoever of FGM and did not practise it at all. ISLAM brought FGM to Indonesia. So much for the usual claim that it is about ‘African’ culture.
The other three schools of Sunni sharia – Maliki, Hanbali, Hanifite – do NOT condemn nor forbid FGM; two *praise* it though not calling it obligatory.
And although I’m not familiar with the Shiite view on FGM, one may bear in mind that the Dahwoodi Bohra are an offshoot of *Shiite* Islam. So one wonders just how much FGM might be going on, ‘under the radar’, amongst Shiites, and what sorts of things lurk in Shiite texts that might never have been translated out of the source languages.
Just A Concerned Citizen says
“…unlike removing a foreskin from a male”
I think that once more, you protest too much. Respectfully, it’s clear that as you are woefully lacking knowledge of the male genital anatomy. Far from being the “useless flap,” it is too often taken for, the intact male prepuce is up to half of the skin of the penis and the only moveable part; innervated with over 20,000 erogenous nerves (if you insist on such comparisons, the clitoris is only in the ballpark of 8,000). Not to mention that by conservative estimates, a boy will die every other day from the procedure in the so-called free world. As is the case with Islam, in this day and age of information, there is zero excuse for continuing willful ignorance.
The fundamental point is that genital cutting isn’t a pissing contest, nor the Harm Olympics–the same rights are being violated, regardless of the wide array of tragic outcomes for the victim, male or female.
Strange that I don’t even have to be a woman to understand why FGM is wrong, though.
dumbledoresarmy says
HOWEVER
a woman who has had her clitoris *cut out*, right down to the root, will NOT be able to experience orgasm. Full stop. Also: sex doesn’t just become sans-climax; it becomes, very often, *painful*, especially if she has been infibulated.
A male who has been circumcised *does* experience climax, and, to judge from observation, a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying experience. I speak as the wife of a man who was circumcised, as so many non-Jewish and non-Muslim western males were, during infancy. You may claim that uncircumcised men experience a *better*/ more intense climax; but the difference between a woman who has suffered FGM and one who has not, is not that the mutilated woman experiences ‘diminished’ pleasure but that the mutilated woman CANNOT achieve climax, because the organ that makes it possible, for a woman to do so, is GONE..sliced up and ripped out by the root. It’s not that she has a ‘less intense’ climax; it’s that she has NO climax at all, and can’t.
Also: infibulated women very often suffer from ‘banked up’ urine and menses which become breeding grounds for systemic infection.
And childbirth becomes even more dangerous than it already is; because the scar tissue can impede delivery of the child… and often *does*, causing death of mother and/ or baby, or if not death, then prolonged labour leading to other difficulties … or the poor woman has to be slashed open.
Can you really claim with a straight face that circumcised men are exposed to the *same* level and degree of life-threatening misery, that a woman subjected to FGM endures?
Mike says
The Conservatives in Canada had plans for a Barbaric Cultural Practices hotline.
Of course, I’m sure that the plug has been pulled on it by the “Liberals”.
Enough said.
Andy says
Here is another Canadian story, A bit off topic but still should be addressed about what leftists are doing to society.
Ontario teachers’ union wants to erase Canadian history
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6s0rvb33g
Carolyne says
Some years ago Jay Leno said that his wife was active in a group which is trying to eradicate FGM. At the time, I knew nothing about it and really didn’t know what he was talking about. Now I know. I haven’t heard anything in recent years about her activities, but I wonder if she is still active in the organization and congratulate her for knowing about this and trying to do something about it years ago. Wouldn’t one think that today’s celebrities who claim to be feminists would try to do something to help these poor girls and women? Linda Sarsour for instance. Madonna, for instance? Rosie O’Donnell, for instance?