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Early one evening, as we were relaxing with our hot mint tea, Um Ahmed’s 19-year-old daughter suddenly said:‘Never let your daughter go through circumcision, yâ Mariam! It is very bad’. Um Ahmed became very angry with her daughter and shouted to her that circumcision was indeed necessary. A lively discussion followed. Um Ahmed claimed that circumcision was essential because an uncircumcised woman would always be asking her husband for more sex and would never be sexually satisfied. A proper woman was expected to be ‘in the middle’or balanced in terms of sexual lust. Um Ahmed turned to me and added:‘We do circumcision because this makes the woman complete when she meets her husband.’Her daughter continued, but now in a completely different tone, saying that she herself had only good memories of her own circumcision, which she had undergone when she was 11. This was during the …