Why marriage is reviving female genital mutilation in Egypt

On her wedding night in a village in rural Giza Governorate, Egypt, 25-year-old university graduate Hind watched her marriage collapse within minutes. Her husband recoiled when he discovered she was “not circumcised.” Though she confirmed her virginity, he told her he “couldn’t stay with a woman whom he cannot trust,” she said, and demanded she undergo female genital mutilation (FGM). Days later, under pressure from her mother and grandmother, who feared “shame”, Hind was forced into a procedure she had spent her life resisting.

Human-rights groups say cases like Hind’s reflect a growing pattern of married women and brides-to-be being pushed into FGM as a condition for marriage. “We know of thousands of adult women across the country pushed into FGM every year,” says Mai Saleh, a board member at the Egyptian feminist civil-society organisation New Woman Foundation who specialises in gender-based violence. Official data are lacking, however, and the number of unreported cases is likely to be high. “Most of the women who have been through this would not talk about it,” Mai Saleh adds.

Egypt has one of the highest FGM rates in the world

Despite decades of state-led campaigns, FGM remains deeply embedded in Egypt’s culture. Since the 1980s, the country’s authorities have run media and community awareness efforts. The practice was criminalised in 2008 in the Penal Code, with penalties of up to seven years in prison for practitioners and three years for families who request it. National initiatives, including the National Strategy to Combat FGM and the National Committee to Eliminate FGM, have sought to eradicate the practice. Yet Egypt still has one of the world’s highest rates: the 2021 Egyptian Family Health Survey found 86 % of married teenagers and women aged 15-49 had undergone FGM. Inter-generational beliefs like Hind’s grandmother insisting “a girl can’t be left wild (sexually aroused)” and the rise of medicalised FGM fuel its persistence, with 84 % of procedures now done by doctors or nursing staff. Psychosexual therapist Aya El-Bahaqeri says many women accept it because “they already learn to associate their bodies with pain and obligation, not pleasure or autonomy.”

Not all women are forced by their spouses. Safaa, who lives in a village in rural Giza, narrowly escaped childhood circumcision despite repeated attempts by her mother. “All the girls in our family were circumcised,” she says. “The midwife used to gather five or six girls at once and circumcise them. I spent years running away and begging my mother to leave me alone. She always felt something was wrong, that my reputation was at risk. If it weren’t for my father, I would have ended up like the other girls.”

But the pressure resurfaced when she became engaged. A neighbour who knew Safaa had avoided circumcision raised the issue with her mother, warning that sending her to her groom “like that” would be a scandal. 

Although Safaa’s fiancé never raised the subject, her mother insisted on the procedure. “My mother came to me and said, ‘You will disgrace us if you go to your groom uncircumcised,’” she recalls. “I talked to my father, and he rejected my mother’s idea, but when the neighbours talked to him directly and warned him that it would disgrace the family, he asked me to do it.” 

Safaa sought help from her uncle in Cairo. “He called my parents and accused them of being crazy,” she says. “He warned them not to touch me and frightened them by saying the operation could kill me.” Yet the intervention couldn’t stop the procedure. 

While mothers’ attitudes toward their daughters appear to be shifting – only 13 % of mothers now say they intend to circumcise their daughters, down from 35 % in 2014 – marriage has become a new pressure point. As Mai Saleh explains: “Since 2008, more and more mothers have stopped circumcising their daughters. These daughters are now getting married, and we are witnessing a new phenomenon where men strictly reject uncircumcised women, pushing them back toward a practice the country spent decades trying to end.”

Ahmed Dahaby is an Egyptian journalist and writer based in Cairo.  
ahmeddahab050@gmail.com