which are language, location, culture, and religion. Thus too often the result has been a pedagogy of missionizing, telling others what they ought to do differently for reasons justified only by the “enlightened” outsiders’ beliefs.
As I argue in this book, there is a role for anyone interested in contributing to the process of change. But the starting point is to work on understanding concrete situations in which female circumcision is practiced, as well as exploring and understanding one’s own reactions. I offer my experiences as one place to start.
1 Muslims believe the Holy Qur’an to be God’s direct revelation and the first source of guidance concerning righteous living; the example set by the Prophet Mohammed in his lifetime and handed down in the writings known as the Hadith is a secondary source. Thus Muslims are expected to respect and follow these sunna of the Prophet as much as possible.
2 The challenge that the female circumcision controversy poses to these values is deeply significant. For a short discussion of the topic in relation to Star Trek, see Anderson (1997).
3 According to Leila Ahmed, “in Egypt it [clitoridectomy] is as common among Christians as among Muslims” (1992:176). Nahid Toubia, as a Sudanese Christian, discussed the extent of the practice among Christians in the Arabic-speaking northern part of the country in her radio interview for Fresh Air in 1996, in which she commented on her own mother’s determination, as she matured, to prevent it for her younger daughters. See also Toubia 1993:31–32 on Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Additional discussion of Islam and female circumcision is found in Chapter 2, below.
4 Mainly the Ethiopian Jews known as the Falashas, many of whom now live in Israel.
Chapter 1
Patriarchy
My first female circumcision party occurred shortly after my husband Jay and I moved into a house in the Khartoum neighborhood known as As-Sajjana, just south of Qurashi Park. We were younger then—it was the mid-1970s—and still in the glow of the excitement of our second year living in this dusty, hot city. Here our milk was delivered by a man wearing a flowing white jalabiya and turban, riding on a donkey. The neighbors’ goats ate the garbage dumped in the central square beyond our walls, somehow turning it into milk for the evening tea. We joined the rhythm of the neighborhood, more or less, awakened each morning around 4:30 by the call to prayer, enhanced by the loudspeaker from the minaret of the nearby mosque, and retiring in the evening to the sounds of the neighbors’ radios or visitors on the other side of the wall that divided our courtyards.
From our lawn chairs on the second-floor balcony, we could see a lot of neighborhood life. We had covered the balcony rail with straw mats to afford ourselves a little more privacy than the builder of the rather fancy, modern, red-brick house had provided and had decorated with four large clay pots of bougainvilleas from a nursery near the Nile. From the balcony we could see barefoot children playing soccer on the smooth, dusty field and school kids in uniforms wandering home. Itinerant glass-bottle buyers and broom sellers called their trades in nasal chants as their donkeys trotted their routes through the neighborhood. Creaky old cars (like our ancient orange VW bug) had to drive slowly down the bumpy dirt road to avoid scattered broken bricks and drainage ditches. In the mornings we saw women in colorful tobes returning to their homes with baskets of purchases from the market. At noon and at sunset men, and a few women, hurried to the mosque to pray at the appointed times, especially on the holy day, Friday.
In the glaring sun, these public moments burned images into our minds. But one of the reasons we had decided to move to this house from our first apartment, in a high-rise building near the airport, was to be more involved in a neighborhood. Watching was not enough, so we walked a lot, practiced our Arabic by chatting with shopkeepers, bought fresh fried tamiya (felafel) in the evenings from a man preparing it at a nearby corner, and introduced ourselves to the neighbors in the small mud-brick houses on either side of us. But it was not easy to become a part of this neighborhood, as different as we were and living in a house so clearly above (both in height and in social class) the neighborhood norm.
So Jay and I were very pleased the day a neighbor came by and invited us to a party that evening. We eagerly accepted his invitation and promised to be there. He indicated a house across the open space a little way down the street, where a couple of men were at work setting up a string of electric lights at the entrance and across their courtyard inside the wall.
The evening party was to be the formal occasion to celebrate his daughter’s circumcision; the actual operation itself and the initial celebration among the women had already taken place in the morning. We had heard women’s joyful ululation earlier, coming from that direction. Ululation is a sound like no other—a high-pitched, very loud vocalization, almost trill-like in its rhythmic variations in intensity and pitch. When performed simultaneously by several women, it announces to anyone within earshot (a long way in our open neighborhood of houses with open windows) that something significant and joyful is occurring—childbirth, circumcision, a bride’s dance, a reunion. The sound can also drown out many other sounds such as cries of intensity of effort or pain. It is distinctly joyful and contrasts sharply with the other form of neighborhood announcement of a significant event, women’s keening wail of grief upon receiving news of a death. So this time the ululation was a girl’s circumcision.
During the afternoon a truck delivered stacks of blue metal chairs that were taken into the courtyard of the house. The houses on that side of the open space were almost identical: modest government housing originally built for the guards employed at the prison—hence the name of the neighborhood, As-Sajjana (those who work in the sijin, prison). Each home had an entrance through the outside wall into an inner courtyard and at least two rooms. The basic living conditions were good. There was running water, electricity, and some drainage, though the sewage system was something of a mystery. Our own toilets flushed, but our next-door neighbor, like most others, still had a bucket latrine inside the front wall that had to be emptied from time to time by workers who accessed it from the street by opening a small, pale-green wooden cover. The interior walls of most of the houses were smooth and painted. Some families had added rooms, verandas, and animal pens over the years, leaving some court yards rather crowded. Most families still had dirt floors, though some had upgraded a visiting area—a veranda or one of the rooms—to cement tile. Most houses had water-resistant mud-and-dung roofs.
Jay and I waited until we saw from our balcony that evening prayers were finished at the mosque and that many of the guests had begun to arrive at the party. We had been to other sorts of parties with our students and faculty colleagues from the university, so we knew people would be well dressed, perfumed, and festive. We went over in our usual modified Western dress—I usually wore a long colorful jalabiya. The Sudanese considered this garment modest enough for a foreigner, but it was easier to manage than the Sudanese women’s wrap-around tobe.
By that time, the hired musicians had set up and were singing the lilting Sudanese songs that were so popular, accompanied by violin and ‘oud (a round-bodied string instrument related to the lute). We found chairs and tables set out in the courtyard for the men (and me). Something light and delicious to eat and cold drinks were brought to each table.
Eventually, I headed for the back courtyard, as I usually did on social occasions, to look for the women. I found my next-door neighbor Fatma there—she and several other neighbors had been helping prepare the food and were now relaxing with glasses of aromatic tea. She greeted me warmly and seemed pleased to see me there. She took me to a small, freshly painted bedroom to congratulate the girl who had been circumcised that morning.
The girl seemed to be trying to lie still and quiet as her visitors greeted her, but she intermittently moaned and writhed in discomfort. She looked older than I had expected. I was embarrassed to discover that people were putting
