Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies

5. Female Circumcision in Southeast Asia since the Coming of Islam

124 w i l l i a M g . c l a r e n c e - S M i t h Female Circumcision in Southeast Asia since the Coming of Islam The current program to eradicate female circumcision in Islamic Southeast Asia is weakened by ignorance of its history. It is argued here that female circumcision is not a pre-Islamic custom but was brought to the region with Islam. The scriptural bases for the practice are weak, but so-called orthodox Muslims of the Shafii school of law, which predominates in Southeast Asia, consider female circumcision to be obligatory. Nevertheless, Southeast Asian Muslims have generally followed the Prophet’s alleged command to cut sparingly . Syncretist Muslims, who are numerous on Java, have been more hesitant to adopt the procedure. All significant Islamic movements have been unable to agree on the issue since the 1910s. Recently, some Muslims have called not only for all women to be circumcised, but also for deeper cutting, and at an earlier age. Female circumcision is frequently portrayed as a custom predating the advent of world religions, but the practice almost certainly arrived in and spread throughout Southeast Asia with Islam, beginning in the thirteenth century. 5 f e M a l e c i r c u M c i S i o n i n S o u t h e a S t a S i a 125 Female circumcision has been more or less as widespread there as in other Muslim societies that adhere to the Shafii school of Sunni Islam. However, the procedure in Southeast Asia has traditionally consisted of a mere nick, producing a single drop of blood, and has sometimes been reduced to a symbolic gesture that draws no blood at all. The impact on women’s bodies has been far less severe than in the Nile Valley or the Horn of Africa, where midwives remove the whole clitoris and a large part of the labia and infibulate (sew up) a woman’s orifices (Boddy 2008). Thus, the expression “female circumcision” is more appropriate for Southeast Asia than “female genital cutting,” let alone “female genital mutilation.” However, current trends, including the rise of fundamentalist or literalist Islam, are influencing the practice in Southeast Asia, leading to more radical surgery, at a younger age, and in a more public and collective manner. The conclusion to this chapter argues that reformists probably need to step back from the World Health Organization’s zero-tolerance approach, which results in head-on confrontations with devout believers, and should rather work along the grain of reformist Islam. While this chapter considers Muslim communities in Malaysia, southern Thailand, and the southern Philippines, the principal focus is on Indonesia because it contains the great majority of Southeast Asian Muslims, some 200 million in all. Indeed, this sprawling island country boasts the largest number of Muslims of any nation in the modern world. The island of Java is of special importance to the story, partly because about two-thirds of all Southeast Asian Muslims live on this fertile volcanic island, and partly because many of them practice syncretic forms of Islam. Preexisting animism (paganism), Hinduism, and Buddhism have heavily influenced syncretic Islam, known to foreign scholars as Javanism and to locals by a variety of names, including kejawen. Syncretism, which may have more practitioners than orthodox Islam across Southeast Asia, is strongest in east and central Java, where the Javanese language is predominant. Beginning in the 1750s, this region was divided between the two most powerful precolonial Islamic states of Southeast Asia, based in Yogyakarta and Surakarta. These two states were retained by the Dutch to the end of the colonial era and have often been represented as bulwarks of syncretism, although they were also centers of reformist Islam. Syncretist Muslims also existed elsewhere, notably in Lombok and South Sulawesi in Indonesia, and among the Cham of Vietnam and Cambodia. l aw a n D c u lt u r e 126 Bastions of Islamic orthodoxy were scattered around Southeast Asia. The Sundanese-speaking western part of the island of Java and the Maduresespeaking island of Madura were the most significant. In the larger but less populated island of Sumatra, the torch of orthodoxy lay in the hands of the Minangkabau of the west and the Acehnese of the north, both speaking their own languages...