Matrilineal kinship systems do not prevent women’s subordination or female circumcision. Societies that emphasized goddess cults may have had very important and revered roles for women, however, and some writers have interpreted these as matriarchies.
Eventually, anthropologists have had to conclude that if matriarchies ever existed, the evidence that they mirrored patriarchies, that is, senior women ruling and dominating men in their families and society, is slim. But in any case the truly profound opposite of patriarchy is not a matriarchy but a society that is based on gender equality. Several writers have embraced this model, alternately looking to the hunting and gathering and horticultural precursors of agricultural patriarchal civilizations (and their twentieth-century cousins, the marginalized hunter-gatherers who managed to pursue a somewhat parallel adaptation long enough to be observed by anthropologists in recent times) for examples of “different but not unequal” roles between the sexes (e.g., Leacock 1972) or to the apparently peaceful, goddess-worshiping ancient peoples who seemed to emphasize partnerships instead of conflicts in their values (e.g., The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler 1987, and Gimbutas 1989).
It is reasonable to believe that if female circumcision contributes to the oppression of women, it will be found only in the societies in which the oppression of women is established. But because the subordination of women and girls is so common, there is bound to be a strong correlation between patriarchy (broadly defined) and female circumcision. That does not make it causal, of course, because the vast majority of cultures that do not practice female circumcision are also patriarchal.
Antiquity and Folklore
The difficulty of offering a causal explanation for female circumcision practices is further complicated by its antiquity. Various mythologies are part of this set of speculations, and I have encountered them in oral tradition and in print. For example, Al-Safi states that “Female circumcision with infibulation was practised by ancient arabs [the uncapitalized form often means “nomads” in Sudanese writing] long before islam [sic] to protect the shepherd girls against likely male attacks while they were out unescorted with their grazing sheep” (1970:63). According to another speculative origin story, an ancient pharaoh who was endowed with a small sexual organ demanded that women should be infibulated to better enhance his pleasure (Huelsman 1976:123). From a social scientist’s point of view, this is no more believable as the start of a custom that lasted for millennia than is the tale about the origin of clitoridectomy reported by English explorer and “orientalist” Sir Richard Burton (1821–90), who sojourned in Somalia and Sudan during the nineteenth century: “This rite is supposed by Moslems to have been invented by Sarah, who so mutilated Hagar for jealousy and was afterwards ordered by Allah to have herself circumcised. It is now universal … and no Arab would marry a girl ‘unpurified’ by it” (quoted in Brodie 1967:110).
Although the origins of female circumcision practices are unknown, several authors report scattered references to its existence in the Nile Valley at least since the times of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Sudan (Assaad 1980, Sanderson 1981, Rushwan et al. 1983). In addition, there is widespread presumption among contemporary Nile Valley people who practice infibulation that it originated in the society of the pharaohs, as reflected in the contemporary term “pharaonic circumcision.” One study of mummies by Elliot Smith (reported in Sanderson 1981) failed to support this idea because he found no evidence of female circumcision in predynastic or later mummies from Egypt. There are documentary indications, however, that it existed. Sanderson cites a statement from Herodotus that Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hittites, and Ethiopians practiced female excision five hundred years before the birth of Christ. She also notes that “Aramaics have described excision in Egypt in the second century B.C. A Greek papyrus in the British Museum dated 163 B.C. refers to the ‘circumcision’ of girls at the age when they received their dowries in Egypt at Memphis. Strabo described ‘Pharaonic circumcision’ in 23 B.C. amongst the Danakils of Ethiopia and in Egypt. He noted it at Antiphilus, which was situated at about a hundred miles south of the present site of Massawa. He also described excision in the first century A.D. in Egypt” (Sanderson 1981:27).
Meinardus speculated that in ancient Egypt circumcision was related to the Pharaonic belief in the bisexuality of the gods; humans were thought to reflect this in their anatomies, with the feminine “soul” of the man being situated in the prepuce and the masculine “soul” of the woman being in the clitoris. Male circumcision and female clitoridectomy and labia removal are thus needed for one to become fully a man or fully a woman (quoted in Assaad 1980:4). That circumcision operations establish unambiguous gender identity is an idea widespread in circumcising cultures (see Chapter 2). Even if we were able to nail down the origins at a specific location and even if we were able to bring evidence to bear on the speculations of what it meant to thinkers like Meinardus, we would still need to understand why it is preserved by peoples living today. The preservation across the centuries is documented for several locales (Sanderson 1981:26–28), but because so little is written on the specifics of the practices noted, it is difficult for scholars to conclude whether there was a single origin for both infibulation and milder forms that then spread or whether there were many similar practices that influenced one another over the centuries of migrations and contacts.
In the Nile Valley, it appears certain that the practices predated and survived the spread of Christianity to the ruling groups of Nile Valley kingdoms in Sudan in the sixth century C.E. Waves of Arab migration came later, initially nomadic groups who began to intermarry with the indigenous Nile Valley peoples. Later, Arab identity was strengthened when Islamic teachers and Sufis successfully spread the new religion in northern Sudan, where it became the dominant religion by about 1500 C.E. and the language of its sacred texts eventually became the lingua franca.
In Sudan, pharaonic circumcision, along with other pre-Islamic or non-Islamic beliefs and practices, was successfully syncretized into the Sudanese Islamic belief system. These practices were incorporated in such a way that they acquired meaning that was consonant with Islamic beliefs. Indeed, the ability to absorb and incorporate preexisting beliefs and practices, at least for some generations, is one of the characteristics of both Islam and Christianity that has allowed many people to convert without immediate dramatic change to their cultures. Today, however, some of the accepted practices have come under criticism by reformers claiming to speak for a more “authentic” and orthodox Islam, including zar spirit possession practices (discussed further in Chapter 3), folk rituals for agricultural fertility or curing, and even the visits to tombs of venerated holy men. The spread of Islam carried with it the use of amulets and quasi-magical practices and the belief in the special status of descendants of holy men, all of which are still found in Sudan and elsewhere today, but some have almost had to go underground as the Islamist movement has challenged them.
But although pharaonic circumcision is considered one of those pre-existing practices syncretized into Islam, there is reason to believe that some Arabs, too, may have practiced some form of female circumcision in ancient times. During my short period in Saudi Arabia in 1990, I learned that the older generations in certain areas of the country had practiced some form of female circumcision in recent decades, but that people now considered it un-Islamic and the practice was dying out. However, given the fact that long-distance trade and enslavement of peoples resulted in movement across the Hijaz for many centuries, surely Arabs were aware of the practices. Indeed, that the question should have arisen for the Prophet Mohammed (according to the Hadith traditions, discussed below) indicates that this was so. Indeed, one Sudanese writer, Ahmed Al-Safi, draws upon the work of the noted Sudanese linguistic and literary scholar Abdalla al Tayib to note that a “mention in early Islamic verse suggests that at least in so far as the Sudan is concerned the custom [of pharaonic circumcision] could have been derived from Arabia” (Al-Safi 1970:63).
Custom
In the Nile Valley and especially in Sudan, over the centuries the practices have remained or become deeply embedded in local cultures, and the symbolic significance
