Sayyid Azim/Associated Press
Masai girls join hundreds of Kenyans during the Anti-Female Genital Mutilation run in Kilgoris, Kenya, on April 21. At least 2 million girls are at risk of undergoing the mutilation practice each year. The process may have lifelong health consequences.
By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY The Associated Press
June 2, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
NAIROBI, Kenya — Trying to stop a bloody ritual undergone by millions of Muslim women in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world.
“The guiding factor is always Islam,” says 34-year-old Maryam Sheikh Abdi, who grew up in a region of northeast Kenya where 98 percent of girls are believed to undergo the procedure, a genital mutilation sometimes called female circumcision. Women believe “the pain, the problems, the bleeding — they are all God’s will.”
With age-old cultural roots, female genital mutilation is practiced today in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt and other parts of the Arab world such as Yemen and Oman.
Ibrahim Lethome, legal adviser of Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, said
“I have met a medical doctor who allows” the procedure, he said. “Even educated people believe Islam demands it.”