Female genital mutilation and democracy

VFR reader Barbara Gilbert, R.N., brings up another Muslim custom that shows the utter incompatibility between democracy and Islam:

There are more, much more, painful questions than polygamy about Muslims’ culture and traditions. As a nurse, I feel it is important that people demand that women’s rights everywhere must be extended to include protection from the common brutal Muslim practice of female genital mutilation. The simplest form involves only circumcision, but it can extend to horrible acts of mutilation, and even result in death. For in depth descriptions, I refer you to this article at wikipedia.

It is the act of savage barbarians. It is butchery. How can anyone believe that Muslim men will ever respect women or women’s rights in a democratic society when they are permitted to commit this heinous act?

I wonder if Mr. Bush or Ms. Rice is aware of the practice?

My reply:

The key point you’re making is, given the prevalence of these practices (not just in black Africa and Muslim Africa including Egypt, but in the Muslim Near East as well including Iraq), sexual inequality is profoundly—to a degree inconceivable to us—built into these societies. Therefore, if women’s equality is, as President Bush says, a “non-negotiable” feature of democracy, then on that basis alone these societies can never have democracy.

Of course, you’re making a different argument. You’re saying that FGM must be rooted out, both to end this horror in itself, and also to further the conditions for male respect for women and thus the possibility of women’s rights. I’m all for people working to bring this monstrous evil to an end. But right now, and for hundreds of years past, it exists. And changing the deep-seated customs of a people is extremely difficult or even impossible short of totalitarian measures. For Bush and his supporters to think that peoples who believe in such things and practice them are essentially like us and that, above all else, they desire individual freedom (if only someone will deliver it to them), is the wildest fantasy.

Barbara Gilbert:

Quite correct. And having been brought here by immigrants, it is being practiced in this country to a greater degree than is realized. While working in ER departments and on an paramedic team, I witnessed other practices of that culture. Women are “attended” by several men when brought to an emergency facility, for instance, and not allowed a private examination by a physician. It is my personal belief that the men do not wish to have the secret revealed.

While it is openly practiced and acknowledged in many countries in Africa, the Arab nationals take great pains to hide it. It is being discovered in the emergency rooms and private offices of physicians who are sought out secretly. Individual freedom? For an Arab woman? Ridiculous!

They are so different from us that they will never integrate into our society because of cultural, religious or political differences. Their customs and traditions eliminate the very concept of democracy. I consider the Muslim women who immigrate as imported chattel. Not only will they never practice democracy in their own countries, they cannot practice it in ours.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 23, 2005 09:47 PM | Send