By a concerned Gambian anti-FGM/C advocate
In part two (2) of this article, I shall talk about how anti-FGM/C advocates like myself are yet to be convinced that the practice is religious and what is our take on the proposal that the current law should be reversed to make the practice of FGM/C a matter of choice.
In this section, it would be ideal to review the submission that the Qur’an and Sunnah aren’t logical sources. Now I’d ask how was the messenger of Allah SAW able to win and unseal the locks over the hearts of the warlike pagan Arabs? Is it through force, wealth, authority, beauty, etc or is it through the logic that the Qur’an and the messenger of Allah’s way of life presented against the illogical way of life of the pagans? Yes, there are few instances where only faith comes to play and even though we might try to Justify FGM/C only on that grounds, does it warrant us to rubbish the entire Qur’an and Sunnah illogical? Aren’t they the most logical thing you’d ever find on the phase of the earth?
So the fundamental argument forwarded to support FGM/C as a religious instrument is that it helps women stay away from promiscuity as put by one of the “highly educated” as “This corrupted version, couched in carefully misleading medical and scientific jargon designed to promote unrestrained promiscuity prevalent in Western societies, is deceptively sold to us as a major health hazard,” my response to this baseless and dishonest argument has always been that since promiscuity happens between men and women, if circumcision helps women stay away, what helps us men?
Until today I have not gotten an answer to the above question and maybe we’d know why if you please permit me to share a conversation I had with two Sheikhs few months ago about how it is only Allah who can save us from promiscuity and not any one of us even if we are some spiritual giants. That said, Allah in His infinite wisdom has given us the ability to fight our canal desires to the best of our abilities.
One of the Sheiks then shared a story in which he was asked by a lady whose husband is his friend to help talk to his friend to convince him to stop going after anything under the skirt and that the wife is afraid that the husband may contract an infection and transmit it to her. Would you believe the response of the husband to the friend was that, “my friend isn’t this what every man is doing?”
Now if this conversation I just shared doesn’t give us the idea of the kind of society we have, then we might not really be serious about this matter and that tells you more about how we got convinced that in spite of the undisputed divine injunction for both genders to not go near a disastrous sin, Allah and His Messenger told us in order to achieve the objective for both, we need to devise an instrument/practice for only one and then Allah and His Messenger totally disregarded it for the other one and that he may in fact do the sin as he pleases or that for him, his eemaan/Allah consciousness would be enough for him to stay away? The logical question to ask is are our mothers, sisters and daughters created less in this regard? Is this an unfair division by mortal beings or by Allah and His Messenger? To find an answer to this, you might want to join me on a trip to the original sin {And when they tasted of the tree, their private parts became apparent to them, and they began to fasten together over themselves from the leaves of Paradise. And their Lord called to them, “Did I not forbid you from that tree and tell you that Satan is to you a clear enemy?} {They said, “Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves, and if You do not forgive us and have mercy upon us, we will surely be among the losers.} Now would you agree with me if I should tell you that the unfair division is mortally motivated and not divine? And this is why there is not a single evidence of FGM from the book of Allah and can’t be link to it with the Salah (prayer) analogy because Allah did not send down the Qur’an and leave at that but He has a messenger whom He honored with the responsibility of expounding on His words and this is why the Hadith itself is considered a divine revelation because it details many other issues in the Qur’an and not just the five daily prayers.
Furthermore, many prominent Islamic scholars such as Sayyid Sabiq, the author of Fiqh-us-Sunnah, has said that “all hadiths concerning female circumcision are non-authentic” https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/Women/WRGS/FGM/Research/ReligionAndHumanRights.pdf. Dr. Bilal Philips in this link https://www.facebook.com/DrBilalPhilips/videos/10154006552909089/ also mentioned hadiths that are not authentic and would say “the females from the family of the messenger of Allah (SAW) weren’t circumcised and that the messenger of Allah (SAW) did not recommend the practice”.
Now, should we accept the two most salient hadiths that we have been obsessed with all this while, have we taken a moment to ponder on them as Muslims are obliged? Now please let’s try, as there is no harm in trying and the first one we’d pick is the hadith narrated by Umm Atiyyah al-Ansariyyah where A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) said to her: Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband. So most scholars including the pro-FGM in their commentary on this hadith would say that the messenger of Allah (SAW) told the woman if you were to do it then don’t go to the extreme. Isn’t that saying different from “do it but don’t go to the extreme”? Doesn’t it mean “how I wish you do not do it but if you must insist, then don’t go to the extreme”? What we can also deduce from this is that FGM/C was already a deep rooted culture in medina which was predominantly a Jewish and pagan Arab tribe (Aws and Khazraj) settlement who would not have readily accepted the messenger of Allah’s (SAW) wish for the practice to be abolished but even at that, he would have still shown compassion (do not go to the extreme). This to me doesn’t suggest an approval and even if it were an approval, it is an approval for them and not for us Muslims otherwise should we take it an approval for Muslims, are we saying that the Prophet Muhammad SAW ordered his followers to do a harmful practice on their families while he SAW decided to save his own? As there is no evidence in Islamic literature that any of the females of his (SAW) household were ‘circumcised,’ or that the practice was common among the early Muslims. I have asked this question several times and the only response I ever got is the analogy of an animal slaughtered by the companions, cooked and the Prophet (SAW) was served, but he didn’t accept it as a person, but allowed the companion to eat it. I asked was that animal harmful or later found to be harmful to the beloved companions? The answer was obviously a NO because even in our own settings, we don’t get to eat everything the other members of families eat and vice versa and this argument cannot be used to justify a thing that the Prophet (SAW) didn’t do or recommend.
Perhaps we would be saved from the burden of such wild imaginations if we really accept the reality of the above mentioned hadith and that is, Imam Abu Dawud (the compiler) himself rejected the authenticity of this narration by saying: “Its chain of transmitters is not strong. Besides, it is reported not as a direct quote attributed to the Prophet… This hadith is poor in authenticity.”
Following Abu Dawud, many classical authorities noted the lack of authenticity of the hadith, and its inadmissibility as evidence for the derivation of Islamic laws. Renowned hadith expert Ibn Hajar, for instance, dismissed this narration outright (Talkhis al-habir fi takhrij Ahadith ar-Rafi’i al-Kabir).
Yusuf ibn Abd al-Barr similarly concluded:
“It is based on the authority of a transmitter whose report cannot be admitted as evidence… Those who consider (female) circumcision as a sunna, use as evidence this hadith of Abu al-Malih, which is based solely on the evidence of Hajjaj ibn-e-Arta’a, who cannot be admitted as an authority when he is the sole transmitter. The consensus of Muslim scholars shows that circumcision is for men.” (‘Al-Tamhid lima fil-Muwatta min al-M’ani wal-Asanid’, in Shams al-Haq al-Azhim Abadi’s Awn al- ma’bood fi sharh Sunan Abu Dawud)
Muhammad ash-Shawkani also noted in his Nayl al-Awtar (Vol. 1, p. 139) that, “In addition to the fact that the hadith is not valid as reference, it does not give any evidence to prove the case in question.”
There is one further narration which has been used to justify FGM/C as an Islamic practice:
“Circumcision is a tradition for men and honorable for women.” (Musnad Ahmad, 20195)
However, the narrators of this hadith, Usama ibn Umar, Shidad ibn Was and Abdullah ibn Abbas, are all weak (al-Dhahabi, Tanqeeh At-Tahqeeq 2:264; Ibn Kathir, Jami’ Al-Musaneed, 5100; al-Bayhaqi in Sunan Al-Kubra, 8:325). As with the previous hadith, this narration is simply inadmissible from a jurisprudential perspective.
Here is another link connected to Imam Abu Dawud’s commentary on this hadith: https://www.thegambiatimes.com/muddy-waters-of-female-circumcision-in-islam/
Similar, we have looked at the hadith that goes as “When a man sits between the four parts (arms and legs of his wife) and the two circumcised parts meet, then ghusl is obligatory” and argued that assuming this hadith is authentic even though it is not, is the “Hadaf” (target, aim or goal) of this hadith about recommending female circumcision or is it about what necessitates ghusl as to when the organs come in contact, circumcised or uncircumcised? or is Islam only for the circumcised? Don’t we have many Muslims uncircumcised? or did Prophet Muhammad SAW make something not mandatory and then expected everyone to practice it? Or is an intended revert required to be circumcised as explained by the revered Islamic Scholar in this link?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDw4i0OUzss&fbclid=IwAR3Io3yArZ2ej6ZdCn8d4kWi957w_MXe8HrBWX0isAe7l7oXtc_C4NXPVrQ that by extension refutes the claim that female circumcision is done on the basis of purification. Again is the comparison of male and female circumcision not also addressed, bearing in mind that the removal of the prepuce exposes men to more sexual pleasure whereas removing/reducing the clitoris is fundamentally intended to curtail the sexual pleasure of women?
In summary, there is no basis within Islam for FGM/C and since we cannot link it to a single authentic religious source, we often forward several comparisons as to why we condone those practices and not FGM/C? such as abortion, skin bleaching, cosmetic surgeries, sex reassignment surgeries, homosexuality, etc. or we’d ask why are the people whose societies are infiltrated with such practices be the ones to tTo this we may be reminded that these practices are done by people who have the capacity to make those decisions themselves unlike the children that are subjected to FGM and bam, someone may ask “If you don’t take your child to school did you violate his or her right?. If yes, why can’t the parents wait until the child is old enough to make his or her own decisions whether to go to school or not.?” To this, we might say “Your child is not obliged to pray or fast until he attains puberty, but you take him to the Masjid or ask her to fast right? How is any of this (school, prayer, fasting, etc.) comparable to harming a child?
Secondly, some of these practices for example Abortion as far as am concerned remains criminalised in The Gambia based on the British Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, which only permits abortion if it is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life. But why are we comparing a matter which concerns Gambian Muslims to something that doesn’t concern them? We know very well that no sane and genuine Muslim is advocating for the legality of abortion except in the case mentioned as well as homosexuality, prostitution, skin bleaching, etc. but what some of us said is that their rights as human beings should be guaranteed as Allah himself sanctioned and at most what a Muslim can do is not to associate with them but not to persecute or at worst kill them.
About the bill that seeks to the reverse the FGM/C law, we have heard the cry for it to be repealed to make it matter of choice but we might also want to consider the cry for a law that makes it should a matter of choice as long as the girl child would be in a capacity to make the choices themselves, that might become the only reasonable compromise in this matter of a significant national interest.
Finally, I reiterate that it was very difficult for me to join this conversation and coming from an extended Mandinka family where only three (3) females were not subjected to the practice should lend credence to my claim. The case of these three (3) makes me grateful and hopeful for the continuous advocacies and it is in itself an indication of the impact of the advocacies and awareness creation. Today, thanks to such efforts including access to religious knowledge many parents have saved their daughters from the harmful practice regardless of their own realities with the practice and I therefore cheer on the frontlines in this laudable cause albeit my message will always be for all advocates to be civil in their advocacy either on religious, social, cultural, health or legal grounds while we all await the outcome of the bill seeking to reverse the law on FGM/C and take the outcome in good faith.
AsSalamu Alaykum Warahmatullah Wabarakatuh!
By a concerned Gambian religious anti-FGM/C advocate
