Female Circumcision Predates Islam says Imam Basiru Drammeh
Imam Basiru Drammeh (c) Paradise TV
By Edward Francis Dalliah
Imam Basiru Drammeh of Latrikunda Central Mosques revealed that Female Genital Mutilation / Circumcision (FGM/C) predates Islam and is not associated with Islam during a panel discussion organized by the African Commission for Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) on 17th May 2024.
Currently, FGM/C is criminalized and banned by the Women’s Amendment Act 2015 which penalizes offenders with a fine of D50,000 and or three years in jail. However, since last year the FGM/C Ban has been at risk of being repealed by a Private Members Bill tabled by Hon Almami Gibba of Foni Kansala. The FGM/C ban has faced significant opposition from the former Imam of State House Imam Fatty and the Gambia's Supreme Islamic Council (GSIC).
Speaking at the ongoing hybrid 79th Ordinary Session of the ACHPR Imam Drammeh highlighted that there is a line “between the great spread of FGM and the rise of Islam in Africa”, referring back to the history of slavery in the Muslim world in the context of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade.
According to Imam Drammeh, the practice was used as a tool to reduce the risk of pregnancy amongst slave girls before being sold in the slave market, thus “is it not at all difficult to see why Africans Muslims [have] the belief that FGM and Islam are together”.
Our research has unearthed a publication by the Center for Economic Policy Research titled Female Genital Cutting and The Slave Trade which interrogates the origins of FGM/C in Africa. The study revealed, “that FGC was connected to the Red Sea slave trade route, where women were sold as concubines in the Middle East and infibulation was used to ensure chastity”.
Further studies were conducted on the “relationship between exposure to the Red Sea slave route and contemporary prevalence of FGM/C separately for different types of FGM/C, focusing in particular on infibulation – the form most directly related to the practice performed on female slaves”.
The research highlights that “women belonging to ethnic groups whose ancestors were exposed to the Red Sea slave trade are significantly more likely to be infibulated in general, circumcised today”.
However, in contemporary Gambia, the GSIC issued a Fatwa – an Islamic Ruling – back on 14th March 2024 stating that “Allah has decreed female circumcision, and it, therefore, condemns quarters and individuals who denounce the practice and calls on the authorities to hold them accountable”.
The statement also notes that “the legal form of female circumcision involves cutting off only a tiny upper part of the clitoris without removing it or touching any part of the labia, which runs contrary to what is known as (Female Genital Mutilation) and does not entail the removal of the genital organ, or what is known as Pharaonic circumcision”.
In addition to this, the GSIC statement highlights that “Muslim Jurists have agreed that this type is illegal because of the harm it inflicts on women. In this context, the GSIC calls on the government of The Gambia to reconsider the law criminalizing female circumcision and to hold anyone who practices such accountable because, as Muslims, religion is the most precious thing we have in this life”.
However, several religious leaders such as Imam Baba Leigh, Imam Basiru Drammeh and several Islamic scholars both inside The Gambia and abroad have stated that “the practice is not Islamic”, and have argued that the Hadith supporting FGM/C is weak. Many Islamic leaders who oppose the practice highlight that “none of the wives of Prophet Muhammed PBUH, nor his daughters, or his companion's family are reported to have undergone the practice”.
According to Imam Basiru Drammeh, “if FGM/C was an honourable -- act of worship as the proponents would like us to believe, the Holy Quran would have alluded to it at least once out of the six thousand thirty-eight verses. [Moreover], the Holy Prophet would have made sure that female members of Islam have done it before anybody else”.
He highlighted that “it was probably because of all this evidence and many others in the Islamic literature that compelled the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) of The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), at the end of its meeting in Jeddah Saudi Arabia on the 6th of February 2024, to make the following declaration on FGM”.
