(Page 3 of 4)

While the Muslim response to the study has not garnered as much public attention, some worry that Muslims and others who are circumcised will take the study’s conclusions as a green light to engage in higher-risk behavior. While, there is little sign that the study has generated much interest among Muslims in India—for whom discussion of sex is perhaps even more culturally taboo than Hindus—rumor and misinformation could suggest to Indian Muslims that they are “immune” to HIV, with tragic consequences. When communities misinterpret valid data, the history of public health makes clear, the results can be at least as damaging, if not more so, than when communities lack data altogether.

Circumcision has had a fleshy history in South Asia. The practice seems to have been unknown to the ancient Hindus—there is no Sanskrit word to describe the procedure, and the term used in modern-day colloquial Hindi and Urdu, khatna, is a loan from Arabic by way of Persian. Some suggest that the Hindus remained firm in their opposition because linga worship, the religious practice of anointing a phallic pillar as a means of worshipping the god Shiva, would cast the removal of the foreskin as an inadmissible blasphemy.

But an entirely foreskinned subcontinent was not to be. Circumcision came to South Asia with the arrival of Islam, and Muslims in India practiced circumcision with a reverence equal to that of Muslims in the Middle East—the circumcision of Akbar, who would become the greatest of the Mughal emperors in India, was observed with seventeen days of feasts and celebration. So close is the relationship between Islam and circumcision in South Asia, that in the colloquial Bengali spoken in Bangladesh (but not in the Indian state of West Bengal, with a much larger Hindu population), the word for circumcision, mussalmani, is derived from the word “Muslim” itself.

From time to time, in South Asia as in Europe, the foreskin has become a tragic focal point of religious conflict. Tipu Sultan, the revered Muslim “Tiger of Mysore,” and his father, Haider Ali, both practiced forced circumcision on Hindus in their eighteenth century kingdom, seeking to Islamicize even the non-Muslims in the state. Two centuries later, in the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh by the Pakistani Army, soldiers would routinely check their Bangladeshi victims for foreskins, killing all the uncircumcised Hindus and Christians.