It’s a religious requirement
Carving up girls like so much deli meat is “culture” in Somalia (and elsewhere).
The father of a 10-year-old girl who died after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) in Somalia has defended the practice.
Dahir Nur’s daughter died of blood loss on 17 July, two days after being taken to a traditional circumciser.
But he told Voice of America (VOA) “people in the area are content” with FGMeven considering the dangers, adding it is the country’s “culture”.
Cultures can change, though. It’s possible to examine particulars of a culture and decide that some of them are bad and have to go.
Efforts to criminalise FGM in Somalia have been stalled by politicians, who fear it will alienate voters who believe it is a religious requirement, while girls who have not undergone it are reportedly taunted for not being cut.
These “religious requirements” that are supposed to originate from a god who can not now be asked to explain or justify or reform or terminate said requirements are one of the worst inventions humans have come up with.
Slavery is the culture of the American south, as is Jim Crow. Tell me again why we are supposed to genuflect before culture?
Also, it isn’t a religious requirement… and the local clerics damn well know it.
“Sure, my daughter died, but that’s a small price to pay to avoid the prospect of her experiencing sexual pleasure someday.”
Well, it’s an obvious outcome of cultural relativism, it’s racist to impose Western concepts of human rights on the rest of the world. I am thinking of those women who suffer FGM, or are about to be stoned to death for ‘adultery’, or are forced to marry a man 50 years older, or are murdered because the groom’s family thought that their dowries were inadequate. I’m sure they all cherish their society’s rich cultural traditions and resent Western moralising, as their men will confirm.
Its been pointed out that FGM lacks Koranic support. I’m not sure what might be dug up in the jungle of the Hadith collections. Religious Authority, which so often means the seamless embrace of local barbarisms which are ensconced as Deeply Held Religious dreck, almost never translates into any morally coherent conduct.
The anti-abortion crusade of the Christian Right also lacks Biblical support, but if the church says so, it is so. (Interpretation, you know). It always comes back to the same thing – the hatred of sex, at least of women having sex, unless the man instructs them to and they are going to risk getting pregnant. It is control. It is misogyny read backwards into vague phrases in an ancient document that wanted to keep women “in their place” and make sure men always ruled.