Princess Sultana's Daughters

infrequent, with each tribe
following a different custom. Just this past year, I had read a
book my son had purchased while in London. The book was titled The Empty Quarter , by St. John Philby, a respected British
desert explorer. With assistance from my grandfather, Abdul Aziz Al
Sa’ud, the founder and first king of Saudi Arabia, St. John Philby
had carried out extensive explorations in Arabia in the 1930s.
    I had taken the book from my son’s room and
derived great pleasure from reading this man’s history of the Arab
tribes that make up the population of Saudi Arabia, until I came
across a section of the book that told of the Englishman’s findings
concerning female circumcision. I had imagined the brutalization of
my own sisters and had cringed and cried out when reading about a
conversation Philby had documented with the Arab men of the
desert:
    But his strong subject was sex, and he loved
to poke fun at Salih by dilating on Manasir practice in the matter
of female circumcision. “Take it from me,” he said, “they let their
women come to puberty with clitoris intact, and when a girl is to
be married, they make a feast for her circumcision a month or two
before the wedding. It is only then that they circumcise them and
not at birth as do the other tribes— Qahtan and Murra, Bani Hajir,
ay, and ‘Ajman. Thus their women grow up more lustful than others,
and fine women they are too and that hot! But then they remove
everything, making them as smooth as smooth, to cool their ardor
without reducing their desire. The girls are dealt with in their
tents by women who know their business, and get a dollar or so for
the job. They are expert with the scissors, the razor, and the
needle, which are all used for the operation.”
    I could not help wondering at this
information. It struck me as strange that men thought of complete
women as lustful, yet condoned the barbaric procedures performed on
these women in order to “cool their ardor.” From my own readings, I
had learned that female circumcision caused women to dread any
intimacy with their husbands, and I came to the conclusion that
there is no rational thought or pattern when it comes to the
mutilation of females.
    My grandfather, Abdul Aziz Al Sa’ud, was a
man who was ahead of his time, and he looked for better ways in all
matters. Coming from the Najd, he did not believe in the
circumcision of women, or in the flaying circumcision of men, which
was as terrifying as female circumcision.
    In the flaying circumcision of men, the skin
is removed from the navel down to the inside of a man’s legs. On
witnessing such brutality, our first king forbade the practice. But
in spite of my grandfather’s decree, the old ways died slowly, and
people were willing to risk punishment to carry on with what they
had been taught by the ones who came before them.
    While some tribes forbade circumcision of
their women altogether, others excised the hood of the clitoris
only. The cutting of the hood of the clitoris is the least common
method, and is the only procedure that is analogous to male
circumcision.
    Then, there were those poor women who
belonged to tribes in Arabia that removed all of the clitoris,
along with the labia minora. This is the most common method of
female circumcision and is comparable to removing the head of a
man’s penis. My own mother paid no heed to the new ruling, and
three of her daughters were subjected to the cruel practice of
female circumcision. The remainder of the women in our family had
been spared the rite of circumcision due to the intervention of a
Western physician and the insistence of my father to my mother that
circumcision of females was nothing more than a pagan practice that
must be stopped. Strangely enough, it is the women in Muslim
countries who insist upon the circumcision of their female
offspring, fearing that their daughters will otherwise be scorned
for being different, resulting in husbandless futures. On this one
topic regarding female sexuality, educated men have advanced beyond
their women.
    There is another, more atrocious and
dangerous method of female circumcision, named the pharaonic
circumcision. I could scarcely imagine the pain experienced by the
women who received the pharaonic circumcision. This process is the
most extreme, and after the rite is completed, a girl is left
without a clitoris, labia minora, or labia majora. If such a
procedure were done on a male, it would involve amputation of the
penis and