It is vitally important the UK uses its influence and clout to lead a global campaign that seeks to rid the world of FGM.
Ghaffar Hussain is head of research at counter-extremism think tank Quilliam
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a gross human rights violation that should not be tolerated anywhere in the world.
Despite FGM being illegal in the UK since 1985, there have been no prosecutions to date and a culture of secrecy within communities in which it occurs, combined with misplaced cultural sensitivities, has allowed this practice to thrive.
However, increased awareness and campaigning around the issue has meant there is now more will to enforce existing laws in much more rigorous way.
In spite of the tide swinging in the right way in the UK, the picture is not so good in other countries. Of particular concern is the Maldives. Dr. Mohamed Iyaz Abdul Latheef, vice president of the influential Fiqh Academy of the Maldives, who is also a candidate for the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Adhaalath Party, has issued a fatwa for FGM stating that it is justified on theological grounds.
Due to Dr. Latheef prominent position in Fiqh Academy, which was established by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, there is concern about the influence these calls could have on Maldivian society.
The call for FGM in the Maldives is based on highly literalist and austere interpretations of Islam that have been imported into the country in recent years. These calls are part of a wider lurch towards an archaic form of religious conservatism that is currently taking place and backed by social conservatives in other parts of the world.
My colleague Dr Usama Hasan has challenged the religious justification for FGM, stating:
“FGM has no Islamic sanction – there are just two traditions on the subject, both of which are strongly disputed, with many jurists throughout history discounting them as having nothing to do with the Prophet of Islam, but, like the blasphemy and apostasy laws of medieval Islam, FGM became a theoretical juristic position even though it was rarely practiced. Contemporary Muslim scholars are increasingly opposed to and dismissive of FGM.”
We at Quilliam have welcomed the recent shift towards a tougher approach to the enforcement of existing anti-FGM laws in the UK, and commend the campaign of the young British Somali woman from Bristol, Leyla Hussein, in this regard.
Last Saturday, on International Women’s Day, development minister Lynne Featherstone stated that it was the aim of her department to reduce FGM in Africa by 30 per cent within the next five years. Others, such as Michael Gove, have also made a commitment to stamping out this evil practise.
With this much-welcomed cultural transformation taking place in the UK, it is vitally important that we now use our global influence and clout to lead a global campaign that seeks to rid the world of FGM.
57 Responses to “Calls for the introduction of FGM in the Maldives should worry all of us”
Ortega
Stop playing dumb. You clearly scrabbled around for the Wiki entry so should have read it there.
The WHO claim that it’s rare is in reference to a study in the Sudan, which you could have checked on wiki. It’s not in reference to any other regions.
Are you sitting down? There are international flights to and from the Maldives, and exchanges of ideas. Especially with Ikwanists.
I’m sure you can probably fly to the Maldives from many places. What does that specifically have to do with Egypt?
Then your sneering condescension of “wow” was pointless/
Don’t see the connection.
pkoduah
Campaigning against the mutilation of children is “authoritarian”?
Ortega
It’s authoritarian for muslims to tell other muslims that they’re “unislamic” for practicing a norm that’s been with them since the beginning of their culture being muslim.
Alec
Your ability to blather is incredible. You had not mentioned the gradations here or in the other threads you’ve befouled, only seizing upon a casual references as is the wont of straw-men arguers and dissemblers.
Your obscene line has been throughout seeing FGM as an intellectually interesting argument which you’re aloof from just as butterfly collectors are when discussing alternative means of preservation of specimens.
Read the piece and tell me where the Muslim Brotherhood comes from.
Yes you do. Stop playing dumb.
The longer you refuse to give us your twat to lacerate the more you look like a squalid race-baiter who sees exotic foreign women as displays in an anthropology exhibition but not actual living human beings who’d have their sexual responses – and other gyno/urinary functions – suppressed, and who once were held down as they were mutiliated.
It stunk enough before when it was a Euro commentator like Mary Honeyball, but it’s positively putrid now as you pat Mohammed on his cute Somali head and tell him he’s wrong, or superciliously dismiss Usama Hasan and Ghaffar Hussein as the wrong type of Muslim who cannot comprehend the issue in the way you do… Somalis, Pakistanis, Malaysians, Indonesians, none of them are capable of understanding their own societies in the way you do.
~alec
Ortega
Read the piece and tell me where the Muslim
Brotherhood comes from.
The MB was founded in Egypt. What does that have to do with FGM in the Maldives?
it’s positively putrid now as you pat Mohammed on
his cute Somali head and tell him he’s wrong
I didn’t tell him he was wrong. I said that the forms of FGM practiced in the Horn as more extreme than those practiced in other muslim areas. Facts. Please provide counterfacts if you disagree.
superciliously dismiss Usama Hasan and Ghaffar
Hussein as the wrong type of Muslim who cannot comprehend the issue in the way
you do
Usama Hasan was quoted as making statements that are just
factually inaccurate. For example;
FGM became a theoretical juristic position even
though it was rarely practiced
That is statistically false. Indonesia has 20% of the worlds muslims and it is an accepted norm there, and Indonesia is one of the most educated muslim nations. Either Hasan is lieing, or he’s assuming that it must be a fringe practice overall because it’s not the norm in the culture his ancestors come from.