Like Turkey or Iran, the Maghreb does not practise female excision but everywhere else in the Muslim world it seems to be universally observed. Together with circumcision, it defines, where it is practised, membership of the Islamic community, expressed in such phrases as ‘We the circumcised. . . .’ ‘We the excised. . . .’
And yet circumcision is an act that, according to the fiqh, is in no way compulsory. It is a sunna act,20 that is to say, one that is strongly recommended. The excision of girls is even less obligatory. It is a makruma: a pious practice, like removing a stone from the road, clearing a public drain or maintaining a collective watertap. The question is so secondary that even the longest books of fiqh devote very little space to it. The fatāwa hindiyya, which stretches to almost three thousand pages, devotes only a third of a page to it. Al-Ghazali deals with the question in exactly seven lines in that summa of over two thousand pages known as the Iḥya. As for the great commentary of Aini on the Bokhari tradition, it is, in spite of its nine thousand pages, absolutely silent on this matter. The Quran says nothing about it. And Sidi Khalil, the great Malekite jurist, admits that collective prayer may quite validly be conducted by an uncircumcised man.
Indeed we do not know in what conditions the Prophet himself was circumcised. He must have been so since the act is a sunna, that is to say, an imitation of the Prophet, yet biographers attentive to the slightest details of the life of the Messenger of God have little to say about his circumcision. It is said that he was circumcised by his grandfather when he was forty days old. According to other traditions he was born already circumcised – by angels in his mother’s womb. On the other hand tradition does tell us how his heart was purified (taṭhīr). Since we know that circumcision is also commonly called ṭahāra (purification), it may be possible to establish a correlation between the two notions. When Muhammad was being fostered by the Beni Saāds and was not yet four years old two angels took him and weighed him in order to determine his metaphysical value. They split open his chest, took out the heart, opened it, and removed the ‘speck of black blood’, which is the sign of the shaiṭān. They washed the heart with water from the sacred zemzem well contained in a golden bowl. They placed sakīna, ‘peaceful quietude’, which was like the face of a beautiful white cat, in the heart. They then put everything back in place. Lastly they placed between his shoulders the seal of prophecy (khātam al-nubwa).21 The surgical operation had, of course, a very precise metaphysical meaning. It was intended to protect Muhammad’s heart from any tendency to evil.
‘Circumcision’, says Ghazali, ‘is practised by the Jews on the seventeenth day. We must differentiate ourselves from them and wait until the child’s hair has begun to grow.’22 The fatāwa hindiyya advocate the period between seven and twelve years. There was much concern about the circumcision of the adult who had become converted to Islam. Canonically an old man in weak health could be dispensed from it, but not others. Preferably he would circumcise himself; otherwise he would pay a concubine who was specialized in this sort of operation to perform it. Indeed she alone was permitted to see and touch her master’s penis. Any other person ran the risk of breaking the rules concerning ‘aura. In extreme circumstances the manager of the hammam would be allowed to perform the operation.23
It should be noticed that Islam distinguishes carefully between khitān, circumcision in the strict sense, which consists in the circular section of the foreskin, and khaṣi, which is castration obtained by the total or partial removal of one or both testicles. The latter is strictly prohibited by the fatāwa hindiyya,24 whereas Qādhi-Khan25 merely declares it to be blameworthy.
Excision of girls, as we have said, was a widely tolerated practice. In principle, it ought to concern only the removal of the lower part of the cap. In fact, as we know, what is involved, except in abnormal cases, is only the semi-prepuce, which covers only the lower part of the clitoris. The excision of girls (khifāḍ) must not therefore be confused with clitoridectomy. The former is tolerated, the latter strictly prohibited. Indeed it is the only indication provided by tradition. One day the Prophet, seeing Um ’Attya operate on a girl, said to her: ‘Circumcision is a sunna for men and only a makruma for girls. Just touch the surface lightly and don’t cut deep (ashmī wa la tanhikī). Her face will grow beautiful and her husband will rejoice.’26 One certainly senses through these texts that the Prophet felt a certain reticence towards excision, which he wished to give a character more symbolic than mutilating.
Is it, as has sometimes been said, simply a survival from an earlier period? This is the opinion of Mazaheri, who writes: ‘Christianity rejected this semitic custom and replaced it by baptism, which is of Zoroastrian origin; but Islam, believing that it is following in the supposed footsteps of the “prophet” Abraham, preserved the semitic practice of circumcision for both sexes.’27 The explanation of survival is very convenient, but not very satisfactory, for in the Maghreb, the Berbers appear not to have known it and even the Phoenicians gave it up, it seems, when they settled in Africa.28 It was introduced in the seventh and eighth centuries by the Arab conquerors. Indeed it is difficult to speak of survival for a practice so profoundly rooted in the collective life of the Arabo-Muslim societies. Circumcision provides an opportunity for familial ceremonies that are exceeded in scope only by wedding festivities. It is a solemn festival. It is not surprising if no prayer accompanies it, since it has no canonical character. But the child is dressed in his finest clothes, always new, almost always embroidered. Everyone goes off to the marabout, or shrine, of the holy protector of the town or family, Sidi Mehraz in Tunis or Imam Shafi’ī in Cairo. There is always a procession through the town.
When the moment has come, the uncle or grandfather takes the child in his arms and a barber (ṭahhār) performs the operation, which lasts only a second or two with a razor or sharp scissors. Then the wound is sealed with a little wood ash, spider’s web, alum or other haemostatic. Just at the moment of the operation, a large red or black cockerel must be killed and the ṭahhār takes it away as payment. Just as the cut is being made, new pitchers must be broken by throwing them violently on the ground. Meanwhile, in front of the door, the child’s friends from the kuttāb, or traditional quranic primary school, bellow out litanies, accompanied by a deafening din of drums, bagpipes and fanfares. The important thing is to make a noise, a lot of noise.
Then everyone comes in to congratulate the newly circumcised boy and give him sweetmeats, toys or coins. Then there are celebrations. Rich people, of course, make more of a show, spinning the festivities out to a week or more. There are concerts, known as ḥafalāt ṭarab in the Middle East or ‘auāda in the Maghreb. Some of these celebrations have gone down in history: there were those of Jahya, the grandson of al-Ma’mūn of Toledo, for example, or those of the son of al-Moizz Ibn Badīs of Kairwan.
As for the mutilated child, he could do nothing but cry out in pain and weep in shock at the violence done to his body. This wound in his flesh, these men and women torturing him, that gleaming razor, the strident oohs and ahs of inquisitive, indiscreet old women, the jugs smashing on the floor, the cry of the cockerel, struggling and losing its blood, the din outside and finally the endless stream of people coming to congratulate the patient on ‘his happy accession to Islam’, that is what circumcision means to a child.
One should mention too the obsessional anxiety of the ṭahhār, kept up before, during and after the event, and the painful wound, so often slow to heal; sometimes long, painful weeks were necessary, sometimes, too, accidents caused more serious complications; infections, haemorrhages, cutting through the artery or even right through the penis, removing part of the glans.
Circumcision, secondary from a religious point of view, would not seem to be explicable from a physiological point of view either. Though sometimes necessary in treating phimosis, nothing can justify its systematic use, especially without anaesthetic. It involves enormous dangers, on both the physiological and psychical plane. It is hardly surpr
ising if some commentators see it as a barbarous, traumatizing practice.29 A French dictionary of sexology speaks uninhibitedly of ‘bloody sacrifice’ and goes on to say:
By exposing the glans permanently, circumcision often allows it to be covered by a skin that makes it lose much of its sensitivity. The merits of this semi-anaesthetic are often praised: the man needs a larger number of coital movements to reach orgasm, thus giving the woman the advantage of prolonged excitement. One must indeed have very little self-control to require such a surface anaesthetic.30
In view of all this, one may well pose the problem of the significance of circumcision in Islam. In Judaism this meaning is more or less clear. Indeed Genesis says quite explicitly:
And God said to Abraham, ‘As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your descendants after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. . . . So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumrised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.’31
The meaning of Jewish circumcision is perfectly obvious. It is a sacrificial rite. It seals the covenant with the Eternal, by offering him a bloody part of one’s own body. It may be seen as a substitute for a more radical human sacrifice, a purification of the pleasures of the flesh, an initiation trial through endurance, courage and mortification, a subtle way of increasing sexual pleasure, or on the contrary, as Philo maintained, a way of directing oneself away from lechery.32
In a more general way, ethnologists and sociologists, comparing Jewish and archaic societies, have given vent to their theories. There is a good discussion, followed by an excellent summing up by Marcel Mauss that concludes: ‘For me circumcision is essentially a tattoo. It is a tribal, even national sign.’33
Without embarking further on a theoretical discussion of such a widespread practice, we ought perhaps to say that the initiatory meaning of the rite is undeniable.
This is evident in the extraordinary passage in Exodus that describes Moses’ circumcision. After living among the Midianites, Moses, who, in the meantime, has married Zippo‘rah and had a son by her, returns to Egypt. There then follows an episode that has embarrassed Jewish and Christian commentators for centuries:
At a lodging place on the way the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zippo‘rah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it, and said, ‘Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!’ So he let him alone. Then it was that she said, ‘You are a bridegroom of blood,’ because of the circumcision.34
Not having been circumcised Moses had been excluded from Abraham’s sacrificial ritual. Returning among his people and consummating his marriage, he had to regularize his situation, that is to say, seal his covenant with God. So he did this by substitution. Zippo‘rah cut off the foreskin of their common son and touched Moses’ parts with it. Moses then becomes for her ‘a bridegroom of blood’. Their son’s blood may be regarded as Moses’ own blood. In his fine book, L’initiation sexuelle et l’évolution religieuse, Pierre Gordon rightly concludes that circumcision is ‘a communion with the divine universe. . . . On the road from Egypt, the operation is carried out by a sacrosanct man, a man bearing the title of Yahweh, and who collaborates with God to bring the Prophet to his mission so that he may be better prepared to carry it out.’35 The initiatory character of Mosaic circumcision would appear to be established beyond doubt.
Approaching the question from the Jewish tradition, Maryse Choisy eventually reaches a similar conclusion, while emphasizing the archetypal symbolism of the ritual of circumcision as exemplified in the incident concerning Moses. Having reached the Nile delta, Moses is almost swallowed whole by a python. Only his legs are left visible in the dragon’s mouth. Zippo’rah guesses at once what God requires. Quick as a flash, picking up the first stone to hand, she circumcises her second son. With the blood from the foreskin, she anoints his legs.
‘You are for me a chathan dammin,’ she says.
A voice rises from the Nile:
‘Spit him out! Spit him out!’
Then the serpent spits out Moses.36
Stressing the idea that ‘the sacrifice of Abraham is the archetype of all evolution’,37 Maryse Choisy brings out the two fundamental characteristics of the ritual of Moses’ circumcision; that it is performed by a woman and in a bloody manner. ‘When the Bible translates chathan dammin by “bridegroom of blood”, it loses the richness of meaning in the ritual. It stresses blood and female initiation.’38 And Maryse Choisy concludes: ‘In Genesis . . . the initiatory value [of circumcision] is not in doubt. A circumcised child is to the children of Israel what a baptized child is to Christians. A personal soul, has been awakened in that spark of life. Through this sign he will survive the destruction of the flesh. By this sign he distinguishes himself from the pre-Adamites, from wholly mortal animals, which lack the divine light.’39
It can certainly be said that Jewish circumcision is a covenant with the Lord in the sense that it is a rite and a sacrifice intended to raise consciousness in the group and community. It is an initiation rite effecting a double passage from adolescence to the community of mature men and from the state of nature to the state of man, fertilized by the divine light and belonging to a chosen people privileged enough to maintain a dialogue with the divinity.
It is impossible not to be attentive to this Jewish constellation of the symbolism of circumcision. For Christianity was to deprive circumcision of this meaning. Apart from the Church of Ethiopia, which still practises circumcision, all the sects and Christian churches keep to the terms of St Paul’s epistle to the Galatians:
It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that would compel you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For even those who receive circumcision do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may glory in your flesh. But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.40
So the symbolism of circumcision is explicitly rejected by the Gospels. Baptism came to replace circumcision. Communion with Christ took the place of the bloody covenant with the Lord.
So where does that leave Islam? Are we to believe that in restoring what Christianity had abolished, Islam was quite simply returning to a Semitic tradition? I do not really think so. Canonically and theologically, circumcision has no privileged status. It is not one of the five pillars of Islam (profession of faith, prayer, alms, fasting, pilgrimage to Mecca). It is merely a sunna. The ritual surrounding it is loose, imprecise, and more spontaneous than organic. It is accompanied by no prayer. The age at which the operation is performed is not fixed in any strict way and may take place at any time between one and twelve years. The fiqh is hardly concerned with it and the Quran not at all. Furthermore there is a systematic concern on the part of Muslims to distinguish themselves from the Jews on this matter, whereas in other cases the imitation of Jewish practices is hardly stressed in so systematic a way. For instance, a Muslim may eat meat killed according to the Jewish ritual; whereas, among the few recommendations given by Ghazāli is that not to practise circumcision at the age of seven days, ‘in order to distinguish ourselves from them by postponing it’.41 In Islam the seventh day of birth is marked only by a simple ceremony of presentation to the family and to the ‘people’ of the household, by which is meant the djinns. At Damascus, as at Cairo or Marrakesh, the child, bathed, scented, oiled, dressed in a thousand and one propitiatory amulets, is wrapped in a sheet. The midwife (qābila ū dāya) presents him at all the doors of the house by knocking on each one three times. She throws grilled chick peas, raisins and sweets on the ground, crying: ‘The house is ours, the
children are ours, here is the Prophet come to visit us.’
Circumcision, like excision indeed, is more a practice of Muslims than a practice of Islam. By that I mean that its sociological aspect, its social significance, is quite obviously more important than the clearly secondary sacral aspect. It is a question of marking membership of the group. The words ‘We the circumcised’ define a relationship of inclusion within the community. It is this that explains, it seems to me, the tenacity with which ‘Muslims’ and the less ‘Muslim’ cling to this practice. The festivities surrounding it are in fact ceremonies by which young children are admitted to the group. Hence the relatively advanced age at which it is practised. Circumcision is a passage to the world of adults and a preparation, carried out in blood and pain, and therefore unforgettable, into an age of responsibilities. In terms of Muslim society and religion, it exists at the same level as the practices of the hammam.
Looked at more closely, from a different point of view, in terms of the celebrations around it, it is difficult not to regard it as a sort of repetition of the wedding ceremony.42 The two ceremonies are structured in the same way and some of the days bear the same name. The day before the eve of the day of circumcision is called in Tunisia, like the wedding night, wuṭya, from waṭa-a, to coit. The ceremonies of laying on henna, of washing in the hammam, of the visit to the hairdresser and even the day of rest (rāḥa), which separate them from the act itself, have much in common in each case. It is as if circumcision were only a mimicry of marriage and the sacrifice of the foreskin an anticipation of that of the hymen, the importance of which we shall examine in a later chapter. It is as if circumcision were a preparation for deflowering and indeed is it not a question of preparing oneself for coitus, of sensitizing oneself to the genetic activity, of valorizing in a sense the phallus, which is thus in turn purified and placed in reserve? The sexual significance of circumcision cannot be in doubt. And if anyone is still in any doubt on the matter, let him remember the traditional song sung in Tunisia on this occasion:
Sexuality in Islam Page 22
