The popular radio show “This American Life” aired a really gripping but terribly honest story about female genital mutilation from the point of view of a Muslim woman who suffered the terrible practice, and now speaks out against it.
Here’s the entire segment [caution – it’s very explicit]:
I was really shocked that they aired this because “This American Life” airs on NPR and it’s usually very liberal, and all about Islam and cultural diversity. But even they can’t ignore the absolute horror of the brutal practice of female genital mutilation in Islam.
Here’s more from the Daily Mail:
Mariya Karimjee, who lives in Karachi, Pakistan, where she spent much of her childhood before her family moved to Texas, said she wore a ‘big girl diaper’ for two days afterwards to help with the bleeding, and said urinating was so painful she would put it off for hours.
‘When I was seven years old, living in Karachi, Pakistan, someone cut out a small but significant part of me,’ she told The Heart.
As a young girl, Mariya, who is from a sect of Shiite Muslims known as Dawoodi Bohra, was taken to a ‘pediatrician’ and told she was having a ‘bug removed’. In fact she was undergoing FGM on the floor of a cutter’s house.
‘When I was seven years old, living in Karachi, Pakistan, someone cut out a small but significant part of me,’ she told The Heart.
As a young girl, Mariya, who is from a sect of Shiite Muslims known as Dawoodi Bohra, was taken to a ‘pediatrician’ and told she was having a ‘bug removed’. In fact she was undergoing FGM on the floor of a cutter’s house.
She said she remembers sitting on a stool and her mother asking quietly whether it was ‘time for me to get the bug removed’.
She told This American Life: ‘According to my mother, a bug was growing in an egg down there, her language, not mine, and that it would hatch and eventually crawl to my brain unless we removed it, she said. My pediatrician agreed, it was time to see the woman who removes the bug.’
She said her grandmother told her about one of her friends who also had the ‘bug’ taken out and she was well enough to ‘jump up and down on her bed’.
But afterwards, Mariya said she felt extremely unwell and continued bleeding for two days.
She said: ‘I did not feel well enough to go around jumping on beds after my surgery. For two days I wore what I can only describe as a big girl diaper wet with blood.
‘Peeing was so painful that I tried to last for hours without going until my mother explained that I could give myself an infection.’
She added: ‘For the next year, I would break out into a cold sweat whenever I saw the kind-faced woman who, on a tarp on her living room floor, had spoken to me softly, took a knife and cut me.’
Many point out that this practice is not actually commanded of Muslims in the Koran – it’s more of a local cultural practice that flourishes under the misogynistic philosophy of the Koran.
The radio segment is pretty tough to listen to, but I would recommend it as it delves into just how awful the practice is.