Free Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb Page B

“You get terrible infections otherwise.”
    I watched his large hands do their work, thinking how different he was from anyone I’d ever met. So plainspoken. No awkwardness, no metaphors, no proverbs or quotations and the assumption that I understood, though he was using words I’d never heard before. Words in English.
    “There is a great deal of resistance,” he said. “The mothers want to see their daughters suffer. They believe that girls must pay this price to be guaranteed the reward of marriage. They fear that no man will want to marry their daughters otherwise, and they’ll remain a burden on their parents for the rest of their lives.”
    “And is that true? Does that happen?”
    “Well, yes,” he admitted. “But it’s largely the midwives who perpetuate this idea. As soon as they deliver a girl they start pressing her mother, saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for this burden of a girl that has been delivered to you. Don’t worry, I will return when she is old enough to make sure she remains pure.’ This is their livelihood,” Dr. Aziz said with a dismissive wave. “They make considerable money this way, and the more radical absuma pays much more than the simple removal of the clitoris, so of course they have a vested interest in continuing the practice.”
    “But they say you are not a true Muslim if you don’t have absuma,” I said hesitantly.
    “Yes, they say a lot of things, but it is custom, local custom, which they attribute to Islam in order to justify it. There is nothing in the Qur’an that suggests this is necessary. Or even desirable.”
    Perhaps he was right: I had never heard of anything like absuma happening in Morocco. I had had a flicker of worry that perhaps this business was alluded to in some section of the Qur’an the Great Abdal and I had neglected to explore in serious depth. There were certain parts he was more comfortable skimming over—the whole matter of women’s courses, for instance.
    The first time I’d had bleeding, I told the Great Abdal. He sent me to the Berber woman in the village who washed our clothes, and she bleached my skirt with lemon juice and left it to dry in the sun. She gave me a cup of green tea and tore a cotton sheet into strips. She said I was to return the used cloths to her and she would boil them in a special pot so they would be ready for the next month.
    When I returned to the shrine from the Berber woman’s house, the Great Abdal told me that I needed to study the fourth chapter again, Al Nisa’, “The Women,” but I could not touch the book until the bleeding stopped and I was clean. It was then that I understood the implications.
    There was no suggestion of absuma in the holy book as far as I knew, though might it just be a matter of certain words being interpreted differently here? “It’s not just the words,” I said to Dr. Aziz, “it’s how you read them. Sometimes there is more than literal meaning. You can go beneath them to discover batin.”
    “Batin?”
    “Hidden meaning. Inner meaning.”
    “I’m not familiar with this,” he said, looking at me directly.
    “Perhaps it is a Sufi philosophy,” I said, looking down self-consciously.
    “Are you a Sufi?”
    “Not in practice. But I have been influenced by the thinking. My teacher, the Great Abdal, was both a great scholar in the orthodox tradition and a Sufi philosopher. He showed me that if you probe beneath the words, you can often illuminate truths that are not apparent when you simply read them.”
    “I admire your scholarship, but I suppose you could say I am more literally minded,” said Dr. Aziz. “Forgive me, but I’m a scientist. I look at what’s presented to me.”
    “But no,” it occurred to me, “you also look beneath. A patient comes to you with certain symptoms. You can diagnose their origin, what disease might be at the root. How else could you know what the cure should be?”
    He nodded slowly and rubbed his chin, before bending down to release