FGM

Here's a shocking statistic: Approximately 500,000 young girls in the U.S. have been subjected to FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) or are at risk of being mutilated. The practice was banned by federal law in 1996, but it's still being done in mostly Muslim communities. It involves the painful excision of most of a young girl's external genitalia so that she will be sexually "pure" as an adolescent and adult.

Apologists for Islam argue that it is not an Islamic practice, that it's also practiced in majority Christian countries and is relatively rare in Islamic countries outside Africa. These claims are misleading, as an article by Julie Roys in The Federalist points out.

Roys notes that although the problem may not be exclusively a Muslim problem it is surely primarily a Muslim problem:

To truly determine whether FGM is a Muslim problem or not requires careful statistical analysis. Dr. Oliver Scott Curry, a senior researcher at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, has conducted this analysis using data from the World Health Organization, the Pew Research Center, and Wikipedia.

Dr. Curry found that there is a “large significant positive correlation between the percentage of women subject to FGM and the prevalence of Islam.” Interestingly though, there is an almost equal negative correlation between the percentage of women subject to FGM and the prevalence of Christianity.

Dr. Curry reported his findings using something called the “Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient” (rs), which measures the statistical dependence between the ranking of two variables. He found that Spearman’s correlation between FGM and Islam was rs = .54 (p=.003). This means that we can be very confident (due to the low “p” value) that countries that rank high in their prevalence of Islam will rank fairly high in their prevalence of FGM.

However, Dr. Curry found that the correlation between Christianity and FGM was actually negative: rs = -.48 (p=.01). This means that we can be confident (due the slightly higher “p” value) that countries that rank high in their prevalence of Christianity will tend to rank low in their prevalence of FGM.

The Christian gospel of John (8:32) quotes Jesus as saying that those who believe in him will know the truth and the truth will make them free. One of the things that Christians are apparently liberated from are horrific practices like FGM. Roys goes on to quote Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali born woman who was herself mutilated as a young girl.

“In Muslim communities there is the demand that women, girls, should be virgins and a woman’s sexuality is to be controlled and (FGM) is an effective and brutal way of doing that,” said Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, a Somali-born American citizen and activist who was subjected genital mutilation as a child. Ali heads the AHA Foundation, a group dedicated to protecting women and girls from FGM. According to the foundation, some 500,000 women and young girls in the U.S. have suffered genital mutilation or are at risk of being mutilated.

Sadly, the politics surrounding FGM has resulted in deafening silence on this issue, especially from the left and feminists who should be outraged. FGM became illegal in the U.S. under a federal law in 1996, but 26 states still do not have laws criminalizing FGM.

“The left can easily and comfortably condemn the misogyny of white men, but not of men of color, not of Muslims,” Ali said. “They are afraid of being shunned. They’re afraid of being put into a basket of deplorables. So they’re silent.”

They're more concerned, apparently, with being politically correct than with speaking out on behalf of those 500,000 young girls.

There's more on this in Roys' column. Check it out.