/ 7 June 2013

Ten things about circumcision

Ten Things About Circumcision

1. Last month, 28 youths died of wounds sustained at initiation schools in Mpumalanga. The ritual period can be as long as three months, isolated in a remote area, usually in winter.

2. The origins of circumcision are obscure. The earliest record is from ancient Egypt, 25 centuries ago: a bas-relief in the sixth-dynasty tomb of Ank-Mahor at Saqqara shows what seems to be an adult or adolescent circumcision. About a century later, a written record tells of a mass circumcision (120 men) and the writer’s pride that none showed pain.

3. The ritual still takes this form in East Africa, where boys making the transition to men are circumcised in a public ceremony. They are expected not to flinch or cry out.

4. Jewish people circumcise male children soon after birth, for religious reasons: the founding covenant with Abraham involves circumcision (Genesis 17: 9-14; the same text is treated by Muslims as an injunction to circumcise).

5. Moses also made a covenant with God, but God tried to kill Moses “as they camped overnight” (Common English Bible) and he was rescued by his wife Zipporah, who seized a flint and chopped off her son’s foreskin, throwing it at Moses’s feet (Exodus 4:24-26).

6. There are three forms of Jewish circumcision: milah, periah and metsitzah, in order of increasing amounts of prepuce and surrounding tissue of the penis to be removed in the operation. Milah is the oldest form, with periah introduced in the second century AD. Metsitzah was ordered by the rabbis in the Talmudic period of the sixth century AD, the earlier forms being deemed insufficient.

7. The Catholic Church declared circumcision a mortal sin in 1442.

8. Infant circumcision increased in the Anglophone world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not clear why. Rationales, later debunked, include the idea that it reduced masturbation (thought to lead to insanity) or risk of disease. As late as the 1890s, it was believed retention of the foreskin could lead to “hernia, bladder infections, kidney stones, insomnia, chronic indigestion, rheumatism, epilepsy, asthma, bed-wetting, Bright's disease, erectile dysfunction, syphilis, insanity and skin cancer” (Maurice Clifford, Circumcision: Its Advantages and How to Perform It).

9. Today, some studies suggest circumcision may reduce the risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, but the evidence is uncertain.

10. Circumcision was stopped as a cultural practice by the Zulu king Shaka. He replaced it as a rite of passage with the youths’ graduation through age-grouped regiments (amabutho) of his army. The present Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, recently recommended circumcision for lowering the Aids risk.