Egyptian Dr. Muhammad Wahdan is scared of women. Otherwise this statement would be pretty hard to explain: "In Egypt we have four and a half million spinsters. The definition of a spinster is a woman who has reached 30, without ever receiving a marriage proposal. We have a spinster problem in the Arab world, and the last thing we want is for them to be sexually aroused. Circumcision of the girls who need it makes them chaste, dignified, and pure."
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What we can't quite figure out is what Dr. Mo is so scared of? That a "sexually aroused" female will attack him in a dark alley? Or, perhaps, that a "sexually aroused" female might find him unsatisfactory? We're not quite sure. Neither is a good reason to mutilate young girls, traumatize them for life and risk their death from blood poisoning with a procedure which Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes as follows in her autobiography: "the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests"
Hirsi Ali notes: "In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made "pure" by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five. After the child's clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut or pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl's own scarred flesh. A small hole is carefully situated to permit a thin flow of pee. Only great force can tear the scar tissue wider, for sex. Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. [...] Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure."
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