MEDIA RELEASE – Virginian Imam Should Face Prosecution for Inciting Criminal Female Genital Mutilation

MEDIA RELEASE
For immediate release – Tuesday 6 June 2017
Virginian Imam should face prosecution for inciting criminal female genital mutilation

Virginia Imam Shaker Elsayed has been slapped on the wrist by the directors of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church this week for encouraging worshippers to subject their daughters to female genital mutilation.

The Imam advised cutting “the tip of the sexually sensitive part of the girl so that she is not hypersexually active.” This is textbook ‘female genital mutilation’, the practice of cutting or removing a girl’s clitoris, and in some cases sewing her genitals closed, to curb her sexuality.

Imam Elsayed warned his Virginian congregation that “in societies where circumcision of girls is completely prohibited, hypersexuality takes over the entire society and a woman is not satisfied with one person or two or three.”

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a barbaric form of child abuse outlawed in the United States.

“Worryingly, Virginia’s anti-FGM legislation carries the weakest penalties of anywhere in the country,” says Amanda Parker, Senior Director of the AHA Foundation. “Many states across the US are tightening their laws criminalizing female genital mutilation as this otherwise hushed up practice comes to light in their communities. Virginia should follow suit and increase its penalties for FGM.”

“Imam Elsayed should be charged by Virginian prosecutors for inciting criminal conduct,” says Amanda Parker.

“There is no religion that mandates female genital mutilation, and if Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center’s Board of Directors truly rejects FGM, they should terminate Imam Shaker Elsayed to make sure that message is clear. There is no religion or culture that justifies curtailing the human rights of another,” says Parker.

“Americans must wake up to the scale of this problem. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 513,000 girls are at risk of FGM in the United States, more than 30,000 of whom live in Virginia, making it seventh in the nation in terms of numbers of women and girls at risk of or who have undergone FGM.”