I was in my kitchen getting my children ready for the school run when my phone pinged. I glanced at my friend’s message: “Maybe of interest...!” I paused on seeing the news report she’d sent – a High Court ruling against a Muslim father’s wish that his two young sons be circumcised. The children in the case were to decide for themselves when they were old enough to do so. I felt stunned. Like the mother in the case, I’m from the UK, with a background in which male circumcision is no longer routine. Like the father, my ex-partner is Muslim and wished to have our sons circumcised according to his cultural and religious beliefs. The boys in the High Court case were a similar age to our sons, too – mine are now seven and five. The court’s decision felt extremely close to home.
I took the children to school. On returning home, I sat down to re-read the all-too-brief news report. I cried tears of sadness, relief and remaining fears. While our family has managed to avoid taking our conflict over circumcision to court, the issue has been a major factor in the break-up of our marriage. It also remains alive for us as we negotiate the upbringing of our children. It is something I never imagined would affect me – I’m not Jewish or Muslim and think most parents in the UK don’t for a moment consider circumcising their sons. When you know it is not medically necessary, that it is painful and that there is no other reason to, why would you?
I was living in Istanbul when my husband and I learned I was pregnant with a boy. I had already become aware of male circumcision being routine in Turkey, grounded both in religious tradition and the widespread belief that it is more hygienic and protects against sexually transmitted diseases. And I knew that my husband believed circumcision to be healthy and the “right thing to do”. On holiday back in the UK and in conversation with my husband, he was adamant our son should be circumcised. I disagreed, arguing it would hurt our child. I asked whether washing was not better than cutting off part of the body to be clean and whether it could be dangerous to believe oneself safer from STDs. As the argument became more polarised, I played for time. I knew my husband to be open-minded, and while his religious belief was strong, he did not follow all the basic Islamic prescripts. I believed he would rethink, and I wanted to trust that both of our opinions and the rights of our child would be important in the decision. I wanted our family to stay intact, as well as my son’s body. We finally agreed on a compromise that our son would, at an age when he could be aware of all the issues, decide for himself.
For my husband this was a compromise of timing on one level – sünnet is usually performed at around six or seven years of age in Turkey. It was also about him losing the role to choose this for his son, and in consequence facing the reactions of his immediate and extended family, his home community, work colleagues and many of his friends. We shared with each other our mutual thought that no one would be likely to freely decide to be circumcised. But he insisted he was glad about our decision. Respecting my husband’s beliefs and intention – that he wanted what was best for our son – meant a huge compromise for me because in the future I would have to discuss circumcision as an option with our son. But I believed that in this compromise our child had at least been given his right to choose.
Our lives continued. Work dominated my husband’s waking hours, as our son’s needs filled mine, and our home was close to his work to make our lives together more practical. During his breaks from work, we would meet and walk around the centre of Istanbul. We learned each other’s languages, met friends, tried out street foods and local cafés. The old city is beautiful, containing the vast structures of the sixth-century Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace. It has the open space and green parks lacking in many other areas of the sprawling yet condensed and concreted megacity.
One day we were walking by the seafront of the Bosphorus, with the edge of Asia and the Princes Islands in sight over the bright blue water. Holding our son’s hands to support him as he began standing on his feet, my husband brought up the topic of circumcision, and his eyes flashed in anger. He claimed my stand against it was because I was dissatisfied with him. I wanted to keep the decision about our son separate, not argue in front of our child, and not complicate the issue. I said it was a decision about our son’s body, health and autonomy, not his. As our argument over the possible effects of the operation deepened, he finally thrust our son into my arms saying: “There. Go. Take your baby.”
My head was spinning. I thought about leaving for the UK. I could pick up our passports and take a plane and be out of the situation for good. I didn’t want the fighting or the insecurities, but I also didn’t want to leave so suddenly in such a sad way. I wanted to believe that, in time, our relationship could heal. Again, the difficulty of the moment seemed to pass. I visited family and friends in the UK a few months later, taking our son for his first birthday. I returned to Turkey and not long after became pregnant with our second son.
In the sweltering heat of Istanbul, our son would often toddle naked around our home. I overheard my husband joking with him one day about his future circumcision. “Let’s cut it, won’t that be fun!” Disturbed, and seeing our son disturbed, too, I immediately objected. I also realised children must be psychologically prepared by their adult carers to undergo circumcision. I would often see sünnet celebration parties on the streets of Istanbul. Boys may be nervous, but they also become objects of pride. They are fêted by their families, dressed up in shiny white, fur-trimmed costumes and given gifts of money and gold. Circumcision is seen as a rite of passage towards becoming a man.
Attempting to prepare our son for circumcision felt like a betrayal of our compromise that our son would be free to choose for himself. When he started to wake up crying, talking of nightmares of being cut, I objected more strongly to any discussion of the matter until he was older. I told my husband of our son’s nightmares and obvious confusion and fear. I sought to reassure my child that no one would hurt him, that his baba had only been joking and would stop.
The idea of being cut, however, had stuck in my son’s mind. He asked questions and my husband wanted to answer. When my husband asked me to research male circumcision to understand the benefits, I agreed. At one level, wishing the tensions within our family might be resolved, I was open to finding out whether the claims of benefits might be true. But turning to the internet, what I found was an overwhelming amount of information supporting remaining intact.
That was when I knew I had to try to persuade him we couldn’t circumcise our son. I began by bringing up the most obvious negative argument of resulting harm. My husband maintained it was far safer in medical clinics than the rural homestead in which he had been circumcised. (I had seen a sepia-faded photograph, a large crowd of men surrounding him on what looked like a hot and dusty day to witness his circumcision as a young child.) I suggested he read a Muslim site which contained some of the most extensive and detailed medical research I had found together with Islamic religious argument against circumcision. He flatly refused. After some time, I tried to share more of the information I’d found. But I felt I was talking to a wall – he simply did not want to discuss it further. And circumcision, he said, was going to happen.
Our marriage suffered increasingly and circumcision seemed to have cracked its foundations. I told my husband that I wanted us to move as a family to the UK, believing we could all be happier there. I wanted our sons to start school there, and my father was in growing need of home care. The nearing threat of circumcision had become a pushing factor, too, though one I felt I could no longer safely voice.
It was late summer 2011. We had been walking through the Egyptian bazaar and had picked up some spiced salad wraps to eat in Gülhane Park. Our eldest son was sleeping in his pushchair, while I carried my youngest, just a couple of months old, in a sling. We were discussing a trip to my husband’s village to visit his family. Through rarely seen tears he began to explain how important circumcision was, that it was about belonging, and that, in effect, if his sons were not circumcised, they simply would not be his. I replied there was so much more to being a father that created a sense of belonging. And that in a way he was right – our children’s bodies and lives were not “his” to make such a decision over.
I was disturbed by his emotions and the extremity of his statement, recalling the time he told me to take the baby and go. I refused to accept responsibility for his feelings about whether he felt his children were his or not. It seemed his family’s views and his social status in connection with them were more important than our relationship or our children.
It sounds perhaps obvious that I should have left earlier. On the other hand many people, I know, would think I should have stayed and consented to my sons’ circumcision for the sake of my marriage, the vows I took, social harmony, community and family belonging. But I never agreed to it, and never expressed a wish to become Muslim. Even if I had, I would argue that I had the right to change my mind, and that Islam has space for pro-intact arguments on health and religious grounds. I wanted to create a good relationship with my husband, I wanted our children to have both of us bringing them up. But with each argument and the intensity of them stacking up, together with refusal on his part to read the evidence against circumcision and for staying intact, I found it increasingly impossible to trust him. I began to worry he might just take them and have the operation done. I had to balance my growing fears with a mix of reasoning that he hadn’t yet done this, he wouldn’t want to damage our relationship further, that he would want the ceremony around the occasion were it to happen, that it was too early, that I did 99.9% of the physical caring for our children, that there was little practical opportunity for him to take them.
Our lives grew more separate on an everyday basis. He stayed overnight at work, and we met to do food shopping, or I would take the children to meet him for breakfast or lunch. I had my date set for leaving Turkey for the UK and was open about keeping to it. We arranged a visa to the UK for my husband. I hoped he might join us after we had settled there – once he had visited a few times and could see opportunity for work or creating a business. In private, I counted down the days, growing desperate to leave and be safely back home.
In the end, my husband remained in Istanbul. We’ve since separated and though we work to keep our relationship positive for our sons’ sake it has been hard to do.
As soon as we were in the UK, my husband tried repeatedly and angrily to persuade me to visit. Without him expressing a wish to join us to live in the UK and with his angry outbursts over circumcision, I saw this as threatening. I needed to retreat from direct contact and continued to let the children talk with him on Skype, supervising from a distance. He visited and, as it became more difficult, with his demands that I take them to Istanbul or put them on a plane or take them to London so that he could take them, I made it clear this would not happen until they were older. It wasn’t only about circumcision by that point, though that was enough reason. I also began to fear that were they to go to Turkey I might never see them again.
The mirror situation was not lost on me – it is difficult and expensive for many Turks to travel to the UK and his family is large. They are missing seeing our sons grow up.
Time passed and anger again cooled. Now my sons’ father visits the UK two to three times a year to spend time with them. In between visits they talk and laugh on Skype, exchange voice, emoticon and text messages. We each value their happiness and wellbeing, and want them to grow aware of their Turkish heritage and family. But I do not feel free to build trust on behalf of my children that they would not be circumcised given some opportunity for it to be done, in the UK or elsewhere.
In Turkey, I would not have a legal say either way. Over the phone, I also explained I felt unsafe going to Istanbul, where my consent or presence was not required for our sons to be circumcised. He said “of course mothers attend the operation and you would be there”. As much as I could not accept it would happen, he still seemed to think it unimaginable it would not, that I simply needed reassuring that I would be there to care for my children. My husband agreed to read some of the research on circumcision that explained its negative impacts and why staying intact was healthier. He re-agreed on our original compromise, saying he did not want to hurt us. But trust is hard and slow to rebuild.
The High Court ruling, upholding the rights of two children to choose upon maturity, and the rights of both parents to be heard, offers some reassurance. It also throws up a lot of questions. Were the dissenting parent also Muslim it is not at all clear which way the law would fall. The UK also allows pretty much anyone to circumcise boys pretty much anywhere – it’s almost completely unregulated despite well-known medical risks. How could the law be effective in preventing someone determined to have their child circumcised? And how can I ever feel that my sons will be safe?
