Or is it rare or only practiced by extremist Muslims? Is it religiously based, or culturally based, or both? Everything I have read, including UN reports, suspect that it's religious and widespread but the countries that practice it, or force it, are in denial, or simply not free states.
This is sickening to me.
It's less a Muslim problem than it is an African one. It's when you combine Sub-Saharan African superstitions with Islamic attitudes towards women that it really shines.
But in Islamic countries like Indonesia, it's non-existent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_female_genital_mutilation_by_country
Also note that North African countries like Algeria and Morocco which are also Islamic don't have this problem, being fostered in the same history as Europe dating back to ancient civilizations like the Phoenicians. Egypt would appear to be the biggest outlier in regards to statistics being one of the most guilty offenders.
I'm a Middle East political scientist, traveled throughout the region and lived in Egypt 2008-2012.
FGM is completely unrelated to Islam. Though, there is a religious mandate for males to be circumcised in the Hadith (prophetic statements of Muhammad) there is no such requirement issued for females.
I'm reality, the cultural practice predates Islam by centuries, and is commonly practiced globally among Christians, Jews, Indigenous African religions, Asia, and even in some areas of South Asia. It is a global phenomenon.
The act was also performed by physicians in Western Europe as a medical treatment for certain perceived female related illnesses. While living in Egypt, I actually interviewed females inquiring their participation in the practice; I found it to have been relatively common among women whom are older than 45 years of age among Muslims and Qibtiyyat (Egyptian Coptic Christian females)-far more common in villages than in large cities such as Cairo and Alexandria.
As a result of modernity, the potential health factors, pressure from NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), more girls going to school, and boys; as Egypt has a very high population of youths who work in order to help financially support their families as Egypt's child labor laws are rarely enforced.
Many young girls will begin working as maids by age 10 and boys the same age working at construction sites. However, with the increase of girls entering primary and secondary school and becoming exposed towards FGM's criticisms and society the practice is gradually fading. An interesting dichotomy in the Middle East is that boys outpopulate girls in school through high school, but there are more girls attending university (many Middle East nations provide free university to females for certain fields). But, cultural change occurs far far more slowly in the Arab World than what we are familiar with in the Developed World.
Contrary to popular opinion, pressure among girls to undergo the ritual is most prevalent from older women such as their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, etc. Moreover, there is tremendous resistance against its attempted eradication-viewing it as cultural emperialism. The view is that it is a time honored tradition dating back to countless generations and is symbolic of entering womanhood and 'know it all' Western women with no appreciation for their cultural and moral norms have no right to interject their ideas into their traditions.
The Maghrabi nations; Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania continue to engage in the tradition, but less common than other nations.
However, their geographic proximity to Europe has absolutely no salience to its prevalence. Its relative dearth is due to it being a foreign tradition prior to the Arabization of that region.
Nope. It is not true.
In places like Mali, it is practiced by as many Christians as Muslims. Religious extremism has less to do with it than traditional folk beliefs. You can say FGM comes from traditional religious beliefs syncretized with Muslim and Christian ideas of chastity, if you wish.
And it is (widely) practiced in only a small section of Africa - it is unheard of in Asian Muslim countries and quite rare in middle-eastern Muslim countries.
Male genital mutilation, however... mostly a Jewish and Christian thing. But that's a topic for another time and place :)
That line really stuck out at me and was quite annoying because it was really ignorant and misinformed. As others have pointed out, it is not a religious practice (at least not with Islam), so mentioning Muslims and Middle Eastern countries in regard to FGM is as offensive as saying that burning people alive is a common Christian practice because some of the people who have burned people alive were Christians (witch hunts).
Yes, some people who practice FGM are Muslim, but most of the practitioners are of other religions (or even none at all). And most of the religious people who do it usually extremists who also do all kinds of other nasty things as well.
The purpose of that line was to point out that FGM is not exclusive to Africa, in order to pave the way for the later scene where the village elder is about to do it to Justine (the professor specifically included “tribes in the Amazon” in the list of FGM practitioners). I suspect that the only reason the professor mentioned Muslims and Middle-Eastern countries was because a list with just two items is linguistically unwieldy and odd, so they need at least one more item.
When they were writing the script, they probably looked up FGM on Wikipedia to see a list of places that it is practice and stopped reading as soon as they had an extra item. Why they (or the actor?) chose to list Muslims and Middle-Eastern countries separately is beyond me; I would have assumed that they would clump them together as synonymous like most Americans would.
(Response notification is off.)
HA HA
As soon as the FGM topic came up, I was like "Oh boy this GONNA BE GOOD!" and then BAM!, they unleashed it all at once.