The thing is...FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) is banned in Oman, but Skype is also banned and we can still do this.
I was both enlightened and saddened after having the privilege of reading Dr. Nawal El Saadawi’s book, “The Hidden Face of Eve” during my summer in Jordan. The author is one of the bravest women I know about and one of my heroes. An Egyptian has spent years as a doctor in impoverished villages. Through this experience, she was granted rare access to the women of these villages and their most intimate and painful secrets. Secrets that otherwise may have remained locked up in the shadows of their minds forever. She has helped these women by making their stories known (anonymously) as she has authored over 50 books in her lifetime. Being a woman who has been ambushed and circumcised against her will at a young age with no medication has given her even more of an experience and understanding among those women she writes about. She has been a voice for women in being stronger and growing from their most private and painful experiences. She spent time imprisoned in Egypt for her outspokenness in her writing. Nowadays, she can be seen, 80 years old, still standing up for the things she passionately believes in in Tahrir Square with the people in Egypt who are also protesting.
My outlook on life was completely changed after reading one of her particular books and despite reading it several months ago, excerpts still linger in my head that I analyze and try to faintly fathom. This book is timeless. It was written in the 1970s, during the beginning of the major renaissance era in Oman that was only just beginning to emerge out of the middle ages (literally). A time when his Majesty came into power and transformed the country into the peaceful developing destination it is quickly becoming now. But tucked in the privacy of the quiet village homes throughout the region, there still remains some old-school practices.
Apparently, according to a blog in wordpress.com, Omanis practice female circumcision on a smaller scale, they sadly remove the tip of the clitoris, unlike the African way of brutally slicing everything off. I’m not sure which is worse. Let me point out what I’ve learned in books, this is not an Islamic practice, it is outside the religion of Islam however, many people who practice Islam also have performed this on their children and grandchildren and throughout the generations to protect their girls from straying.
One blog explained that her friend in Dakliyah (near Nizwa) took her 1 and a half year old daughter to have it done as she had it done when she was young too. The hot weather in Oman can make women more sexually excited and this is not good according to these traditional and extremely conservative families in Nizwa and other more rural areas of Oman. It can keep a woman safe from straying and having a partner before marriage which can destroy her hymen but it also destroys sex for her future marital life. Reading this reminded me of what my Omani friend said to me the other day. He is one of nearly 30 kids in the family who live in the same household. His father has three wives. I asked him why his father wanted so many and if he gets tired and his response was that his father does not get tired that the women can get tired. He was telling me that his father has three wives for several reasons but one main reason is perhaps because they get tired during intercourse and that’s why many men still take more than one wife here. I’m not sure if all of that is just true to his experience but there seems to be a lot of men with more than one wife here so that could be one reason of it.
What’s interesting that the blog wrote is that that one and a half year old girl that recently was circumcised, her grandmother was threatened by her grandfather to divorce her if she allowed for another girl in their family to be circumcised. The grandfather condemned the practice rather than the women in the family. Maybe he knows how important it is for intercourse in marital relations for the future. But men want their wives to be able to be stimulated in the future.
How come this is still being practiced in Oman?
And to end this, I just wanted to put up my most favorite excerpt that sums up Nawal El Saadawi’s writings of truth:
“Writing: such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. To this day writing remains my crime. Now, although I am out of prison, I continue to live inside a prison of another sort, one without steel bars. For the technology of oppression and might without justice has become more advanced, and the fetters imposed on mind and body have become invisible. The most dangerous shackles are the invisible ones, because they deceive people into believing they are free. This delusion is the new prison that people inhabit today, north and south, east and west...We inhabit the age of the technology of false consciousness, the technology of hiding truths behind amiable humanistic slogans that may change from one era to another...Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned.”
