[ad_1]
Updated
Fa Abdul was nine years old when she found out she had been circumcised when she was just a baby.
Key Points
- A 2012 study found 93 per cent of Muslim women in Malaysia have been circumcised
- Female circumcision is not prescribed in the Koran or Hadiths, women’s advocates say
- One mother says Malaysia’s culture and society “expected us to do it”
She was among the millions of girls across Malaysia whose families believe that female circumcision protects young girls from committing “sins”.
“Many Muslims in Malaysia will tell you that circumcision will protect girls from growing up and becoming wild,” Ms Abdul said.
Ms Abdul spoke to the ABC about her experience after a new documentary — titled The Hidden Cut — was released last week.
Chen Yih Wen, a senior producer from the group behind the documentary R.AGE, said the team started making the documentary after Malaysia was criticised at a United Nations forum in February.
The UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, held in Switzerland, slammed the country over continuing to practice female circumcision, or female genital mutilation.
The documentary makers discovered that the procedures are widely performed in private clinics and are not regulated.
“The Government said they were developing guidelines in 2012, but none of the medical practitioners that we interviewed said they received it,” Ms Wen said.
Ms Abdul — who is a journalist and works at online news publication Malaysiakini — gave birth to her first child, a girl, at the age of 20.
‘You just follow and stop asking questions’
Due to religious and family pressure, her daughter was subjected to female circumcision.
“The doctor pulled away the labia and used something that looked like a needle to slit the clitoral hood,” she said.
“A [flow] of blood came out and then my daughter started crying.”
A decade later, Ms Abdul’s viewpoint on female circumcision changed dramatically, after she found out that there was no medical benefit and that it was simply a religious ordain.
“We were already born into the culture and that society expected us to do it,” she said.
“Doing it becomes automatic, you just follow and stop asking questions.
“I was young and naive and I actually didn’t know what I was doing — the question I asked myself was: ‘if it’s pointless, then why do we do it?'”
‘We are confusing it with Islam’
A women’s rights group based in Kuala Lumpur — called Sisters of Islam — told the ABC that female circumcision is widely accepted in Malaysia because of a rising conservative movement.
In countries where Islam is the majority religion, according to Sisters of Islam, there is a tendency to “Islamise everything”.
“People have fear to question the practice, as if they are questioning God,” Syarifatul Adibah, a senior program officer from Sisters of Islam, said.
“[Female circumcision] is not prescribed by the Koran or the Hadiths [a collection of Prophet Muhammad’s sayings],” Ms Adibah added.
“But when they consider something as a religious ordain or fatwa, then it’s hard for people to really challenge and debate the issue.”
In 2009, the National Council of Islamic Religious Affairs (JAKIM) in Malaysia ruled that female circumcision became obligatory, moving from recommended, but if harmful must be avoided.
As result, three years later, a study conducted by Dr Maznah Dahlui from Department of Social and Preventive Medicine University of Malaya discovered that 93 per cent of Muslim women surveyed had been circumcised.
More than 80 per cent of respondents said religious obligations were behind the reason, while 16 per cent said to control sexual drives.
Ms Abdul said that society often does a lot of things that copies behaviours from African and Arab countries and defend it as having a religious origin.
“We are confusing it with Islam and we think whatever they do is Islamic,” she said.
She also said regardless religion or cultural tradition, parents have no rights to do whatever they wish to do to their children.
“Not only women, but every human being has the right to their own body,” she said.
The ABC contacted Malaysia’s Ministry of Health, Islamic Medical Association of Malaysia, and Penang Medical College, but they did not respond to requests for comment.
Topics:
women,
womens-status,
human-rights,
sexual-health,
law-crime-and-justice,
sexuality,
malaysia,
indonesia,
asia
First posted
Source link
