EGYPT

Asserting bodily rights is a “living hell”

“The stories of our bodies are kept in dark boxes in our memories. It is stigmatised by the Sheikh and the priest. The family punishes us for telling them.”

Thus, began the unraveling of the story of Lama Mohamed, an Egyptian writer born into a conservative Muslim family. “My mother used to tune in to a Quran radio station every day at 8 p.m. and listen to her favorite reciter. She would order us to stay quiet till the end of the reciting,” she wrote in her journal.

As a child, Lama loved playing games—games which “included innocent attempts to discover our little bodies.” But she got yelled at by her mother every time she played with the boys. “My mum implanted fear inside me…For a long period of my life, I felt that my private part is disgusting. I did not have anybody who could answer my childish questions about this part, how does it work and why is it private,” Lama wrote.

When Lama was around eight or nine years old, she learned to touch herself for self-pleasure. “My fingers discovered its first orgasm. I was afraid I would die when I touched that prohibited place. I did not understand the pleasure or what happened to me when I reached orgasm, why did I feel these feelings. Although I did not understand what this pleasure was, I touched myself again and again. My secret habit or my personal pleasure did not stop even when my younger sister told my mum about it and I was harshly punished,” she recalled.

When both Lama and her sister were approaching puberty, her mother and uncle decided that she and her cousins should undergo Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). It was around the same time the International conference on Population and Development was taking place in Cairo and sexual and reproductive health was one if the top agendas. Meanwhile, CNN news channel aired an FGM operation of a small girl, causing huge embarrassment to the government.

This angered the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Gad el Haq, considered the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought in Egypt. He issued an Islamic ruling or fatwa stating that FGM was a ruling of Islam, and whoever stops or prevents it, was not a Muslim. “He destroyed all sincere attempts to end FGM and caused miseries to many girls,” Lama wrote.

“My mum promised me new clothes and delicious food after the operation. She said this operation is important and it will make me a beautiful woman. I refused, and said that I do not want to undergo this operation. She was so angry,” She recalled.

Lama would have had her genitals mutilated, had it not been for her father, an Islamic scholar, who intervened at last. “He said that the prophet did not mutilate his daughters. He [said] FGM is not Islamic,” she wrote.

Although Lama and her sister escaped mutilation, her cousins became victims of FGM like millions of Egyptian girls and women. Egypt has one of highest prevalence of female genital cutting in the world. According to a Unicef Health Issues survey in 2015, 87 percent of Egyptian women aged 15 to 49 have undergone FGM, with 61 percent cut between the age of 5 and 10.