All's Fair? Part 1

So, I look through the Times website last night and I find this article on the page- a small, out of the way link that was glaring at me like a neon light- and I'm not sure what to think. My first and predictable reaction was to shake my head in dismay. Now, don't get me wrong. This is not to pass judgment on the women who have this procedure performed, and the head-shaking isn't at them. It's at the fact that this kind of thing needs to happen at all.

I have enough faith in my friends to leave out all the relevant disclaimers about Islam being a profound and moral religion, but let's face facts- there's a reason you'll find the Quran on the Eastern Religions shelf at Barnes & Nobles despite the fact that Moses is mentioned in it more than Muhammad is. It may be part of the Judeo-Christian corpus, but most predominantly Muslim countries are former colonies and fall under the loosely defined category we call the "third world". Most of these countries have skipped over the industrial revolution altogether and are trying to find a place in the digital one with varying degrees success, but whether you're the more fortunate Turkey or UAE or mired in the there-but-for-the-grace-of-Allah hardships of Somalia or Afghanistan, you're going to deal with the fact that you just skipped over a period of your historical evolution that Europe and the Americas got to enjoy four whole centuries of. One of the nice parts of that package is that you have a sense of your culture, history and community in a way that's hard to find in the former colonial powers; I (and even Muslim Indians) grew up immersed in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and I have a relationship with them that not many people in the west have with the Iliad or the Poetic Edda or even the Bible. My relationship with the old epics is in no small part responsible for my love affairs with both philosophy and literature. But one of the dark sides of that connectedness with history is that the archaic elements of your past cling to you as tightly as the civilized ones, and a puritanical sexual morality is no small part of that. It can tear families apart.

So it's honestly hard to be judgmental of the women who get this procedure. It's hard to even think of them as being stodgy or conservative, coming from the culture that I'm from. Indian culture, and especially my generation of Indian-Americans is pretty often caught in that thorny briar patch between the old world and the new. We take half of our moral instincts from Nehru, Tagore and other progressive revolutionaries of the independence struggle, and another half from rural village ethics that give us a sense of conscience and community at their best but at their worst are willing to compromise human rights for family honor (See: Sati and the caste system). And this is despite the fact that the first world has been good to my family. Culture shock to us involves pain, fear, struggle and disorientation, but it usually lacks the bitter edge it often has for African, Middle Eastern and Latin American immigrants.

So we have a sense of what it's like to feel like your culture and your morality is in periodic conflict with the western world, but not every third-world culture is as fortunate as ours has been. Most third-world countries have had a Nehru, Atatürk, Locke or Jefferson to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern, but not all of them have. I can only imagine what it's like to be an immigrant from one of those cultures, and I don't think I'd have the courage to take a stand if I was a second-generation immigrant woman from one of those cultures. A white lie, a surgical procedure and a minor compromise of your integrity seem like a small price to pay to not be alienated from your family and community (though a well-deserved kudos and god bless to the women who do stand up).