Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks

job wasn’t easy: she had to talk her patients out of ancient practices such as placing heavy stones on the bodies of laboring women to hasten delivery, or firing off rifles next to their ears to “frighten” the baby out of the womb. Traditionally, infibulated women are restitched after each childbirth, an excruciating procedure that delays recovery and increases the risk of infection.
    “Now I know there’s no use to it, and as I was convinced I hope I’ll convince others. But it’s a difficult job,” Aset said. Sometimes women demanded the stitches because they feared their husbands’ rejection. Others just didn’t believe Aset’s assertion that the practice was damaging. If a woman insisted, Aset reinfibulated her, hoping at least that the clean instruments she used would do less damage than those of the traditional local midwife, who would almost certainly be called in if she refused.
    Because some Christians and animists also practice genital mutilation, many Muslims resent the way it is linked most closely with-their own faith. But one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.
    Widespread mutilation seems to have originated in Stone Age central Africa and traveled north, down the Nile, into ancient Egypt. It wasn’t until Arab-Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the eighth century that the practices spread out of Africa in a systematic way, parallel to the dissemination of Islam, reaching as far as Pakistan and Indonesia. They drifted back to a few places on the Arabian Peninsula: in the Buraimi Oasis in the United Arab Emirates, it was traditional until a few years ago to remove about an eighth of an inch of the clitoris from all six-year-old girls. Asked the reasons for the practice,the Buraimi women couldn’t give any. Well versed in their religion, they knew that no such practice was advocated in the Koran, and they were aware that many neighboring tribes didn’t do it. But they knew that what they hoped for from the operation was to safeguard their daughters’ chastity, because upon that chastity depended the honor of the girls’ fathers and brothers.
    While some Muslims protest the linkage of mutilation with their faith, few religious figures speak out against the practice, and numerous Islamic texts still advocate it. In Australia, I once heard an educated and articulate young Muslim express gratitude for the removal of part of her own clitoris: “It reminds me that my marriage is about more important things than pleasure,” she said.
    In London in 1992, Donu Kogbara, a Sunday Times investigative reporter, had no trouble finding a doctor who agreed to remove her clitoris, even though the operation has been banned in Britain since the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act was passed in 1985. The reporter simply told the Harley Street doctor, Farouk Siddique, that her fiance was insisting she have the operation before their marriage.
    In most Muslim countries women are the custodians of their male relatives’ honor. If a wife commits adultery or a daughter has sex before marriage, or is even suspected of having done so, they dishonor their father, their brothers and sometimes the whole family that bears their name. To lessen or destroy sexual pleasure is to lessen temptation; a fallback in case the religious injunctions on veiling and seclusion somehow fail to do the job.
    Yet the lessening of women’s sexual pleasure directly contradicts the teachings of Muhammad.
    To Muslims, every word of the Koran is sacrosanct. “There is no doubt in this book,” the Koran says, and every Muslim believes that its 6,000 verses constitute the direct instruction of God. But there are debates about Islam’s second source of religious instruction: the massive body of hadith, or anecdotal traditions about the prophet’s life and sayings, compiled by the early Muslims in a formidable research effort in the two centuries following Muhammad’s