Female Genital Mutilation: A Crime Under Law, Rejected by Religion and Medicine — Not a Custom Worth Keeping

Some wrong customs are practised in the street in full view of everyone; we see them and we are angered. A far more dangerous custom is practised behind closed doors, in complete family silence — and in the name of care and fear for the girl, not in the name of hurting her. Female genital mutilation is that custom: a crime punishable under Egyptian law with penalties reaching felony level, yet it still finds people who practise it out of an inherited conviction that it means "protection," "purity" and "tradition."

We begin where this particular file must begin: we do not write to shame families, nor to accuse mothers and grandmothers of hard hearts. Most of those who took this step did so believing they were doing right — they inherited the certainty as they inherited the family name. We write to say clearly that this inherited certainty is wrong at its roots: wrong medically, wrong religiously, wrong legally — and before all of that, wrong against a little girl who has no say in the matter.

In medicine there is no longer any debate at all. The World Health Organization and medical bodies across the world — joined by Egypt's Ministry of Health and the Doctors' Syndicate — have settled it: FGM has not one health benefit, and its harms are real and lasting, beginning with the risks of the procedure itself and extending to physical and psychological effects that can accompany a girl through her whole life, as a wife and as a mother. Every claim of a medical benefit is, simply, a claim without any support in medical science.

Here the most dangerous illusion in this file must be demolished: the illusion of "safe circumcision" at a doctor's hands. Moving the crime from a folk practitioner's hand to a hand holding a sterilised scalpel does not make it a medical act — it makes it graver. That is precisely why Egyptian law increases the penalty when the perpetrator is a doctor or a member of the medical professions, and why the profession's own regulations prohibit it. A doctor who performs it is not practising medicine; he is borrowing the profession's authority to justify a harm the profession itself unanimously rejects.

In religion, the decisive word has come from the very institutions Egyptians trust most: Al-Azhar and Dar al-Iftaa have declared, in repeated statements and fatwas, that FGM is an inherited custom with no basis in true religion, and that performing it — its harm being established — is religiously impermissible. The Egyptian Church has likewise declared its categorical rejection. So whoever practised this custom as a precaution for their faith may rest assured: the faith they sought to protect is innocent of it, and the institutions that have devoted themselves to serving that faith are the very ones calling on them to abandon it.

In law, no room for interpretation remains: Egypt criminalised FGM in the Penal Code in 2008, then toughened the penalties in the 2016 amendment that made it a felony, then toughened them again in 2021 — until, in aggravated forms, the punishment reaches long terms of rigorous imprisonment. The law reaches the person who performs the procedure, the family members who request it, and those who facilitate it; it bears down hardest on medical professionals and strips them of the right to practise. The legislative message is unmistakable: the Egyptian state regards this act as a crime, not a family choice.

Nor has the state stopped at the penal text. Over the years it has launched national awareness and response campaigns and formed a National Committee for the Eradication of FGM bringing together the bodies responsible for health, social solidarity, childhood and motherhood — with door-knocking campaigns crossing villages and hamlets to talk with families in the language of closeness, not intimidation. That is the right road, because a centuries-old custom is not defeated by a legal text alone; it is defeated by the conviction of a father and a mother.

Let us pause at the moral heart of the matter — the heart of this whole section: the girl subjected to this act was never consulted and never consented; she cannot object; and permanent, irreparable harm falls upon her by a decision taken on her behalf by the people closest to her and most obligated to protect her. What moral scale anywhere on earth permits inflicting certain, irreversible harm on a child's body to appease suspicions and inherited notions that medicine and religion have jointly declared baseless?

We know the custom's last line of defence: "What will people say?" — the family's fear of community talk, and of the girl being taunted for not having undergone it. That argument, precisely, is what every household must face with courage. People's talk heals no harm and restores no sound body. A society does not change all at once; it changes house by house — with a father who said "no," a mother who stood by him, and a grandmother who rethought what she had inherited once she learned that religion and medicine both stand on her granddaughter's side.

What we ask of every family: protect your daughters with one clear word inside the home, and say it aloud before the extended family if need be. Arm yourselves with what Al-Azhar, Dar al-Iftaa and the doctors have said — it is support from the highest pulpits. And whoever hears of an intention to subject a girl to this act should remember that reporting it through the Child Helpline is not informing on anyone; it is a rescue, and the law stands with the one who reports.

What we ask of the state: keep one hand extended in awareness and the other firm with the law — no leniency toward those who perform FGM, above all members of the medical professions, and no winding down of awareness campaigns on the excuse that the law has been passed. A law protects when people know it exists and see it genuinely applied to those who break it.

In this section we have written about an occupied sidewalk, a reckless car, a sleepless café — all of them assaults on the citizen in public space. Here, the assault falls on the weakest citizen of all: a little girl, in her own home, at the hands of people who love her. That is exactly why we place it at the head of everything that must disappear from our national scene. That's just wrong — wholly wrong, with no halfway — and the right is for every girl in Egypt to grow up whole in body and dignity, protected by her country's law, her religion and her family together.