Dear Editor,

I read with interest the letter on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), written by veteran journalist M. B. Sillah who had, no doubt been a mentor to many Gambian journalists, including my humble self. In the letter; ‘The Arrogance of Undue Knowledge and FGM’, Mr. Sillah describes FGM (female circumcision – as he prefers to call it) as an Islamic injunction. He went on to question why opponents of FGM have not equally opposed male circumcision. He even went to the extent of saying that “The faithful believers and the cultural Gambian men have vowed not to marry a Solimma Musso (uncircumcised woman) and that the circumcision of their daughters and sons would go on forever on any account…..”

While I have great regards for Mr. Sillah and his stance on the issue, but I also differ with him on many aspects. In the first place, both male and female circumcisions are purely cultural practices which pre-dated all the great religions that we know today – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is therefore quite erroneous for anyone to attribute the practice to Islam or any other religion. The two are completely different.
While I agree with him that both male and female circumcisions are mutilations, but with the physical nature of the female body and the very fact that women conceive and give birth through the birth canal, there are far much greater health risks in circumcising them than in subjecting the boys to the same practice. In the case of boys, there is very little health risk, even though both are neither religious injunctions nor are they medically necessary, but they are mere cultural practices being practised by an ever dwindling number of people for no justifiable reasons apart from them being part of our cultural values and norms.
Mr. Sillah is therefore one of those few conservatives who are still willing to stand up to defend such archaic cultural practices like FGM but he should be rest assured that they are fighting a losing battle. It is just a matter of time before such harmful cultural practices are consigned to the dustbin of history. It is therefore quite erroneous for Mr. Sillah to state in his letter that ‘female circumcision is mandatory for Muslim women has been unanimously accepted.’ We have seen that even conservative countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, the bastion of Islam, and indeed all the countries of the Middle East, have abandoned the practice. Therefore, one would wonder what justification anyone would have to want to cling on to it as an Islamic injunction.
There has been enough indisputable evidence provided by medical science showing the risks that FGM poses to our women folk. Health experts have also agreed that there is no point in removing a healthy human organ. Therefore, there is no justifiable reason to subject our girl children to such cruelty just to satisfy some traditional dinosaurs who still insist on preserving our harmful cultural values.
There is no doubt that the more educated our society becomes, the more people will abandon such harmful practices. It is quite inconceivable for educated people to continue to subject their girl children to such backward cultural norms after it has been proven beyond any shadow of doubt that the practices have negative health implications. There is absolutely no point in continuing with a practice which has no other use than to preserve an archaic cultural norm.