Mutilation – or safeguard?
“female circumcision” / health considerations / Scriptural aspect
THERE is a sizeable body of opinion that male circumcision is mutilation. It is my firm view that this is a
mistaken and confused way of looking at things.
In the first place, it is confused because it appears to go hand in hand with the very proper revulsion that most people of any decency have towards what is known euphemistically as female circumcision.
The word circumcision mean “cutting around” – the person circumcising cuts around the foreskin (also called the prepuce) to remove it, frequently after having placed a metal bell over the glans penis. Or at any rate that is how it works in a great many cases. In others the foreskin is simply pulled forward and sliced.
This is not always done properly. Every year in South Africa there is an outcry against traditional circumcisers (or iingcibi, in isiXhosa) who take too much off, or who cut badly, and against amakhankhatha (traditional nurses) who fail to keep the wounds clean.
Badly run circumcision schools produce abakwetha (initiates) who do not emerge as amadoda (men) but instead have lost their manhood, be it the tip of the penis, the entire penis, or the testicles as well, either because of the initial damage or because of sepsis.
Far too many young men do not survive the ritual – deaths were rare in times past.
But when there is an outcry against abuse, chiefs and paramount chiefs (nowadays called traditional leaders and kings) dismiss all criticism by saying that it is improper for outsiders and women to interfere, even when the women in question are medical doctors with a concern for the health of young men.
This kind of practice certainly is mutilation. But it is not circumcision as it is intended.
However, even if circumcision is carried out cleanly and properly, the circumcision schools are in desperate need of reform, since the abakwetha are taught a highly sexist outlook on life that demands service from women, both of a sexual and a non-sexual nature.
Traditionalists refuse to discuss what is taught in these schools, regarding it as sacred. But it does seem as if the high rape statistics in South Africa have a great deal to do with what is taught there.
Christian churches generally avoid involvement in the circumcision ritual, yet the circumcision schools are a major means of enforcing a pagan mindset in young men, and churchgoers are under immense social pressure to send their sons to such schools.
Youths who obtain medical circumcisions are derided as not being real men.
Among Bantu-speaking societies in Southern Africa, the majority do circumcise, a practice traditionally carried out when a boy is going through puberty, or has completed that phase. In practice many do this later, but traditionally a man is forbidden to marry or otherwise to engage in sex before he is circumcised.
A significant exception are the amaZulu, among whom circumcision rituals were abandoned under King Shaka in the early part of the 19th century as a means of getting his men battle-ready sooner.
The circumcision or incircumcision of Bantu-speaking men is not nowadays something readily visible, thanks to the imposition on Bantu-speaking society of Western values.
But a century and a half ago the majority of black men, women and children in South Africa would go about their ordinary daily business naked. Not that they would describe it in these terms, since teenagers and adults would wear beads or other kinds of decoration, and would only regard themselves as naked when stripped of all decoration.
But their genitalia were exposed, and it was apparent to all whether a young man had been circumcised or not. If he had not undergone the ritual (and was not Zulu), he was laughed at as being someone not worthy to court members of the opposite sex.
Important men (notably chiefs) and older women might well wear some kind of genital covering, but ordinary young folk did not, and it was regarded as improper for them to do so.
Married women who had borne children (genteelly referred to in the anthropological literature as matrons) were expected to cover their breasts, but it was indecent of a childless woman not to go bare-breasted.
There are a good many instances on record of black men living in proximity to white communities little more than a century ago – in some cases, considerably less than 100 years – who were prosecuted for indecency because they saw no wrong in being unclothed, particularly when cleansing themselves in a river.
And when the first carriage of mail between King William’s Town and East London took place in the 1830s, the runner
(carrying letters in a cleft stick)[1] certainly was naked (or at least, his genitalia were exposed).
When this event was re-enacted 150 years later, the man taking the part of the runner had to engage in an anachronistic indecency, wearing an animal-skin loin-covering so as not to offend “civilised” society.
Female mutilation
Southern
African Bantu-speakers do not practice the abomination euphemistically called
“female circumcision”. This is an aberration of peoples much further north in
Africa, and its exact mechanisms vary.
Common in Egypt is the practice whereby a mother will take her daughter, aged 11 or 12, to a male barber. Without anæsthetic he will carry out a clitorectomy[2] on the screaming girl right there in his barber’s shop while her mother holds
her down, afterwards leaving the child to walk home with blood dripping down
her legs.
Elsewhere far worse barbarisms are carried out: the outer vaginal lips might be cut away, or the inner lips as well. Among Somali-speaking peoples it is common for the vagina also to be sewn shut.
In all cases this kind of “circumcision” is carried out with the intention of diminishing or eliminating a woman’s sexual pleasure, humiliating women and gaining greater control over them, whereas male circumcision enhances sexual pleasure.
These female mutilations, as they are more properly called, are seen as necessary to ensure a girl’s purity, and to preserve the honour of her family. A mother will see herself as having disgraced her family if she has not ensured that her daughter undergoes the process.
That it exists at all witnesses to a society where women have no freedom of any kind, and where men dominate totally.
It is unlikely that evidence of such mutilation will be readily visible, since the victims seldom escape from the repressive societies in which they are the norm.[3]
A few Somali women have escaped and now live in freedom in Western society, but for a variety of reasons it is unlikely that they would be attracted to the naturist lifestyle.
Health considerations
On the other hand, the circumcision of males, whether baby boys, teenagers or adults, may have a directly sexual connotation, but it is also a matter of cleanliness.
Advocates of the abolition of circumcision claim that this is a side issue, and that in the modern world it is always possible for a man to wash adequately.
But men who have undergone military service in a warm or hot climate will know that their uncircumcised comrades were inevitably the ones who stank after a day or two out in the bush, or in the desert.
There is also a more disturbing aspect. Statistics on cervical cancer[4] – a disease that solely affects women – reveal that its origins have a great deal to do with men.
The statistical breakdown reveals firstly that women who have remained virgins (notably nuns) virtually never have the disease.
Among married women, certain groups show a very low incidence of the disease: Jewesses, and, in South Africa, Xhosa women.
By contrast, the wives of Zulu men show a very high incidence.
The principal difference? The married women most at risk are those wed to uncircumcised men.
Two groups of women are most at risk: those who began engaging in sex at a young age, and prostitutes.
Unusually for a cancer, this variety appears to be triggered by a virus, the human papilloma virus (HPV),[5] which is also responsible for raising warts (or at least certain kinds of warts, called plantar warts) on people’s hands and feet.
The occurrence of HPV in the cervix appears to be very closely linked to a woman’s having an uncircumcised man as a sexual partner – and the risk appears to be considerably higher if there are
multiple partners.
Sad to say, there is nowadays such a strong body of prejudice in the medical profession against circumcision that these statistics have been discounted, concealed and even attacked as being “unscientific” – chiefly, it would appear, to avoid any questioning of the ideology that male circumcision is “mutlilation” and “a bad thing”.
Opponents of circumcision fall into a variety of ideological camps.
There are Jews who practise circumcision among their own people, but refuse to carry it out on Gentiles.
There are even some atheist Jews who refuse to practise it themselves.
There are Christians in a variety of denominations who believe that circumcision is forbidden to those in the Church.
On the other hand there are Christian families that do practise it, and have done so for centuries.
And there are Gentile atheists who believe simply that to circumcise is old-fashioned superstition, and that it is wrong to make any change to the human body.
Ironically, these same anti-circumcisionists will often be men who shave their faces daily, women who shave their legs and armpits, people who have their earlobes or other body parts pierced for the insertion of jewellery, or people with tattoos.
Let’s look at what the Scriptures have to say about circumcison:
It is first mentioned in Genesis, where God makes a covenant with Abram.[6] The Almighty promises this childless man, already aged 99, that he will be “the father of a multitude of nations”.[7]
This patriarch-not-yet receives a new name, Abraham, and is told:
“This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between Me and you and your descendants after you: every male among you shall be circumcised.
“And you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you.
“And every male among you who is eight days old shall be circumcised throughout your generations, a servant who is born in the house or who is bought with money from any foreigner, who is not of your descendants.
“A servant who is born in your house or who is bought with your money shall surely be circumcised; thus shall My covenant be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.
“But an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people, he has broken My covenant.”[8]
There are references to Abraham cutting with a knife in this chapter, but is is highly likely that he had no metal knives or blades.
We read in the Book of Judges that the only smiths in the Holy Land in that time, several centuries later, were Philistines, and that they made every effort to prevent the Israelites from having access to metal blades.
This pagan invader people did not want the Israelites to have metal swords and spears to resist the domination of their armies.
We read that Zipporah the Midianite, the wife of Moses, circumcised her son Gershom with a flint,[9]
and that when the Israelites were circumcised after entering the Promised Land, the LORD[10] spoke to Joshua saying: “Make for yourself flint knives and circumcise the sons of Israel the second time.”[11] This he did at Gibeath-ha’araloth.
Some people are horrified at the use of flints, but clearly they were the only blades available to Abraham and his descendants until much later on.
Roland de Vaux comments: “. . . flint knives were used, which shows how ancient the custom is; later, however, metal instruments came into use”.[12]
The Scriptures are very specific in several places about circumcision taking place on the eighth day after birth. Modern medical researchers have established that at this time (between seven and nine days after birth) the child’s blood clots most readily, making it the ideal time for such an operation.
Not only did the Israelites circumcise their own sons, as well as their servants and any man wanting to join their community, but in the time of the Maccabees (the 1st century BC), when a successful Jewish revolt established the rule of the Hasmonean[13] kings over Israel, all males in the territories they conquered were forcibly circumcised.
These included many Greeks living in Galilee and the Edomites or Idumæans, descendants of Esau. Herod the Great was an Idumæan whose family had been made Jewish in this fashion.
When we turn to the New Testament, we find that Luke (a medical man) records not just one but two circumcisions.
Firstly the son of Elizabeth and Zacharias the priest is circumcised[14] on the eighth day.
Zacharias, who had been struck dumb after his disbelief at being told that he would have a son, is still unable to speak, but writes insistently on a tablet (on hearing that they wanted to name the boy Zacharias) that his son should be called Yochanan, or John, as it is given in English translations. Having written this, he is then suddenly able to speak once more, and confirms it verbally.
Then Luke writes also that the Christ Child was circumcised on the eighth day,[15] and likewise named. English translations of the Bible give His name as Jesus. In Hebrew this is Yehoshua, and in the Aramaic of his day, Yeshua.
The Gospel of John records an instance where Jesus uses a point taken from circumcision to underline an argument.
Speaking on the occasion of the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem, and following an incident where he had healed a man on the Sabbath, He asks:
“Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you carries out the law? Why do you seek to kill me?”
On being told by the crowd that he has a demon, Jesus responds:
“I did one deed, and you all marvel. On this account Moses has given you circumcision (not because it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and on the Sabbath you circumcise a man. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath that the Law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made an entire man well on the Sabbath?”[16]
Circumcision did not become an issue until some years after the crucifixion, when the Good News was taken to peoples who were not circumcised[17] – first a group of Romans, baptised by Peter, and later also Greeks, chiefly under the teaching of Paul.
A faction arose in the Church that sought to force all those who had been baptised to follow the Mosaic Law strictly, beginning with circumcision.
Peter came under the influence of this faction, which angered Paul.
It might have been thought that Paul would support circumcision, since he was a Pharisee trained in the Law under Gamaliel, and initially so zealous for the Law that he had scores of Christians arrested.
But his conversion experience on the road to Damascus (where he had been sent to arrest more Christians) and his career as an apostle subsequently led him to re-think the issue.
After the Damascus road experience, he had spent three years east of the Jordan, and then several years in his home city of Tarsus, before being called to help in the Church of Antioch.
Meditating on Christ’s words about the Law and working practically among Gentile believers brought him to the conclusion that, while Jewish believers should strive to maintain the Law, the Law itself was a cause of sin.
To impose it on Gentiles was an intolerable burden.
So he argues in his letter to the Romans:
“You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonour God? ‘For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,’ just as it is written. For indeed circumcision is of value, if you practise the Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.
“If therefore the uncircumcised man keeps the requirements of the Law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision?
“And will not he who is physically circumcised, if he keeps the Law, will he not judge you who though having the letter of the Law and circumcision are a transgressor of the Law?”[18]
Writing to the Corinthians, he asks:
“Was any man called already circumcised? Let him not become uncircumcised. Has anyone been called in uncircumcision? Let him not be circumcised.
“Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but what matters is the keeping of the commandments of God.
“Let each man remain in that condition in which he was called.”[19]
And in closing his letter to the Galatians, he writes in his own hand (the rest of the letter having been written to his dictation by a scrivener):
“Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel you to be circumcised, simply that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For those who are circumcised do not even keep the Law themselves, but they desire to have you circumcised, that they may boast in your flesh.
“But may it never be that I should boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”[20]
Many Christians take these arguments as an outright denial that Gentile believers should ever circumcise at all. But these arguments must be seen in context together with Acts 16:1-3, where Paul chooses to circumcise Timothy.
While Timothy was himself half Jewish (through his mother), any rigid, doctrinaire rejection of circumcision on Paul’s part would have obliged him to leave Timothy uncircumcised, as Titus was.[21] (Titus’s parents were both Greek.)
Paul’s point was that the ritual of circumcision played no part in Christian salvation.
Since few Christian families, if any, observe ritual circumcision – it is an entirely medical procedure carried out in hospital, in most cases – this cannot be compared with the formal ceremony that is enacted in Jewish homes following the birth of a son.
Equally there can be no criticism directed towards Jewish families for circumcising, whether baptised or not.[22]
Jesus and Paul both had regard for those who observed the Law – their condemnation was reserved for those who failed to follow the Law to its full, or who forced obligations on others not able to bear them.
In closing:
While I believe I have presented an adequate case here justifying the practice of circumcision, my position is by no means one of compulsory circumcision. Rather, it is a plea for tolerance, for a philosophy of live and let live.
While my brothers and I and my son are circumcised, as were our father and grandfather before us, and we expect that further sons born to the family also will be circumcised, it is not for everyone.
There are a few men for whom circumcision has not been beneficial. Such a man will have such a high degree of sensitivity in his glans penis that he finds it uncomfortable to be clothed, whether with soft underwear or with no underwear.
Fortunately, there is no need for the painful surgery practised in Classical times by which the foreskin was restored. Modern plastic surgeons can accomplish this without the pain and suffering undergone by Jewish men who wanted to participate in pagan Greek sports.
– Strandloper
