EMAIL to BBC:
Congratulation for covering the barbarity of FGM.
But…. you said that FGM is "not in any religious text".
Actually, it is in Islamic religious texts.
It's in the Umdat al-Salik ("The Reliance of the Traveller"), the Classic Manual of Islamic Jurisprudence, approved by Al-Azhar University, the oldest and most authoritative university in the Islamic world and the one which Obama spoke at on June 4 2009.
At e4.3 the Umdat says:
"Circumcision is obligatory for both men and women. For men it consists of removing the prepuce from the penis and for women removing the prepuce of the clitoris…" [my emphasis].
(Sorry to be so graphic, it's in the text….)
Sure, FGM was a cultural thing before Islam. But then Mohammad gave it his seal of approval, which made it normative in the Islamic world, the reason that it's almost exclusively practiced in majority Islam countries today.
Kudos to the Masai cricket team and their campaign against FGM!
Peter Forsythe.
Discovery Bay
Hong Kong
