Sounds like your old boss had the money, and the language skills to make a move to America possible.

I guess all the millions of cash poor Iranians are just too 'insane' to get their act together.

The point he was making was that, pre-911, there was a lot of opportunity for people to come here and get educated. The ones with money and power don't want to see change over there.

Half of the people I work with while I'm attending school are foreigners, and they are all either getting financial aid or scholarships of some sort.

Female circumcision comes in many degrees from complete removal of all external genitalia (inner labia, outer labia, clitoris...the lot) to taking a symbolic snip of labia.
What Mohammad was preaching (in that little excerpt) was to take as little as possible, to preserve the womans pleasure, yet still follow to tradition.

exactly how much of the labia and clitoris can be cut off of a conscious woman before it is considered abusive?

you forgot totally unanesthetized.

Don't they do the adolescent male circumcisions with only a mild contact anesthetic, or is that just bullshit via Alex Haley?

i don't know. i was just aware of the female version because it was a great topic of discussion when i was in saudi.

of course, while i was there i learned some great methods for showing my wife how much i value her. let's see, putting your sheep in the front of the truck but making your wife ride in the uncovered bed, that's a good one. but let's not forget the roving mutawa (sp) - the nice guys that beat women with sticks if they are showing too much skin on a public street. they were pretty cool.

i forgot to mention the best part. the british professor at the university in riyadh, explained how the bedouins take the female circumcision one step further. they also sew the vagina up except for an extremely small opening - just large enough to urinate. that way on the wedding night the women of the family wait outside the "bridal suite" and listen for the screaming as the groom tears his way through. if there is not enough screaming or blood left on the bed the marriage is anulled and she is cast out - because obviously she wasn't a virgin

These people need HBO or something... a gameboy even...

a photographer traveled with the bedouins a few years back to capture this shit on film and she had to use a manual camera, because the sound of auto focus scared them. i'm guessing that a gameboy would send them right into convulsions.

Yeah, from what I read, there's an old lady who goes around from village (Or whatever it is that nomads live in) to village. She's got a piece of stone, not sure what it is, but it's sharpened, and not necessarily clean. That's what the clitoridectomies are done with, and then she does the whole sewing up thing. The entire thing is done without any anesthesia; the girl is held down by several female relatives.

Also from what I've read, the whole reason for the operation is so that women cannot feel sexual pleasure at ALL. Since women are supposed to be "fallen," it's supposed that if they can't feel pleasure that they won't cheat on their husbands.

Of course, the information I got, I got from a book written by a high-ranking Saudi woman who'd escaped to America. She'd seen all this firsthand. So, other than her word, I have no proof of any of this.

She also said, though, that while some of the higher ranking and royal families in Saudi no longer approve of the operation, it's still extremely common among the lower classes.


Sidhe

I'll look this one up when I get home; moved on Tuesday, so no internet just yet. I've got a book (An Introduction to Islam, Frederick Denny) that, IIRC, has a fairly thorough explanation of the how and why of circumcision. Both sexes. I seem to recall that there isn't much/any anesthetic, though. Probably varies.

This is more thorough than anything I could come up with: http://www.islamfortoday.com/womensrightsbadawi.htm


But, in addition, there are a number of passages which directly refer to believers as being both male and female:

I seem to recall reading something of a creation story paraphrasing the old "everybody created equal" thing, but I'm running out of battery power, need to turn in my last assignment of the term, and have been known to misremember things. Poke around a bit; there are lots of articles arguing both sides of every issue that's been brought up in this thread, many of them written by far more reputable sources than I. Failing that, you could just read the Qur'an yourself or something. ;)

Well, just as extreme christians don't always follow what the bible says (like to be tolerant, for example), neither do the extreme muslims always follow what the koran says. Like all extremists, they twist it to fit what they want it to mean.


Sidhe