The Arab Mind: Raphael Patai Part I February 13, 2008 http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2008/02/the-arab-mind-p.

html#more Introduction: Everyday the incompatibility of the Western world view and the Arab (Islamist) world view becomes clearer. Read the newspapers, watch the talk shows and the news readers, survey the blogs, and you can only come away with the impression that we do not understand our enemies (and this doesn't even include all those who do not even realize we have enemies) and our enemies, though they manipulate us well at times, do not understand what makes us who we are. Culture is the sum total of the character traits of the people who constitute that culture. Character evolves from an infantile neurological set of tendencies (what Stella Chess referred to as temperament) through a complex interaction with the primary caregivers, usually the Mother, later expanding to include the Father (especially important in the formation of the Superego), and finally shaped by interaction with the greater, existing culture. As a result, cultures typically evolve slowly. In the West, most notably in Europe, we can see how the culture that has been brought into their midst by Muslim immigrants has interfered with assimilation (not that the Europeans have made assimilation easy or appealing) and is increasingly asserting itself in muscular and often violent ways. Over the last 40 years my appreciation of Arab culture and the Arab mind has evolved. After the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israel Wars, I believed that the Arabs were "just like us" and that through dialog of equals and some give and take, peace would come. My knowledge of Arab culture and character was gleaned primarily from Television news and newspaper; it did not occur to me for many years that the depictions of the Arab that was all I was privy to were superficial and distorted by blindness and deception. After 9/11, when understanding our enemies became much more of a pressing concern, I discovered that there was a dearth of open source material pertaining to such issues as Arab child rearing practices, values, sexual norms and proclivities, etc. Time limitations, including daily blogging and the exigencies of the real world of work and family, made a systematic exploration of the topic impossible. However, I believe I have gathered enough data to begin to make some inferences and offer some understanding. To that end, I am going to be presenting over the next few weeks, perhaps months, at irregular intervals, my interpretation of the Arab Mind. My primary source material, supplemented by various open source data and private communications I have found over the last several years, is The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai; the book and author deserve some introduction. Raphael Patai, 1910-1996, first published The Arab Mind in 1973, shortly before the October 1973 war, a war immediately and to this day hailed as a great victory by the Arabs. The book was re-issued in 1976 and 1983 (with new forwards by Patai), 2002, and finally, 2006, with a forward by Norvell B. DeAtkine, Colonel U.S. Army (Retired.) Colonel DeAtkine describes the book as invaluable: (page x) I congratulate Hatherleigh Press on their reprinting of this much needed and incisive study of Arab culture. In particular, these congratulations are warranted given the avalanche of ill-informed or sometimes malicious aspersions cast upon this seminal work. Not only is it one of the finest books ever written on Arab culture, it is the only one in English that delves deeply into the culture, character, and personality of the Arab people. From Wikipedia: Raphael Patai (1910-1996) was a Hungarian-Jewish ethnographer and anthropologist whose life spanned most of the twentieth century. He was born Ervin Gyorgy Patai in Budapest, Hungary on November 22, 1910. His parents were Edith Ehrenfeld Patai and Jozsef Patai His father Jozsef was a prominent literary figure, author of numerous Zionist and other writings, including a biography of Theodore Herzl. He was founder and editor of the Jewish political and cultural

journal Mult es jovo, [Past and Future] (1911-1944), a journal that was revived in 1988 by Janos Kobanyai in Budapest. Jozsef Patai also wrote an early History of the Jews in Hungary, and founded a Zionist organization in Hungary that procured support for the settlement of Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine. Raphael Patai studied at rabbinical seminaries in and at the University of Budapest and the University of Breslau, from which he received a doctorate in Semitic languages and Oriental history. He moved to Palestine in 1933 (his parents joined him there in 1939) and received the first doctorate awarded by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1936. He returned briefly to Budapest where he completed his ordination at the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary. During the late 1930s and early 1940s Patai taught at the Technion and the Hebrew University. He founded the Palestine Institute of Folklore and Ethnology in 1944, serving as its director of research for four years. He married Naomi Tolkowsky, whose family had moved to Palestine in the early twentieth century; the two had two daughters, Jennifer (b. 1942) and Daphne (b. 1943) In 1947 Patai went to New York with a fellowship from the Viking Fund for Anthropological Research; he also studied the Jews of Mexico. Patai settled in the United States of America, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1952. He held visiting professorships at a number of the country's most prestigious colleges, including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Princeton University, and Ohio State University. He held full professorships of anthropology at Dropsie College from 1948 to 1957 and at Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 1952 he was asked by the United Nations to direct a research project on Syria, Lebanon and Jordan for the Human Relations Area Files. Patai's work was wide-ranging but focused primarily on the cultural development of the ancient Hebrews and Israelites, on Jewish history and culture, and on the anthropology of the Middle East, generally. He was the author of hundreds of scholarly articles and several dozen books, including three autobiographical volumes. Reading the book is a bit like entering a time capsule. Patai writes with sophisticated and carefully observed naivety, (ie, without preconceptions) untainted by Politically Correct Multiculturalism. Patai had many close friends among the Arabs, especially in Palestine, and was privy to details of cultural proclivities that simply do not appear in modern scholarship about the Middle East and the Arabs who live there. At times, he uses language that shocks, primarily in contrast to the level of fastidiousness with which such topics are approached in our current climate of intimidation; such language today would be branded racist or Islamaphobic by the language police, and the ideas encapsulated in the language banned from public discussion. Yet his ability to reference source work in the original Arabic (among the several languages with which he was conversant) and his breadth of knowledge of his field of ethnography/anthropology make him a superb reporter. Patai was quite aware that the "Arab Mind" is an abstraction, yet he also was quite clear in describing how he discerned those character traits which imprint most powerfully on Arab culture. I will finish today with two quotes from The Arab Mind, the first from Patai's Preface to the 1976 Edition: ... The Arab conflict proneness (pp. 232 ff.) has not diminished as a result of the October War and the Israeli-Egyptian disengagement pacts. On th contrary: these events have sharpened the conflict between the "moderate" Arab countries, led by Egypt, and the "radical" Arabs, headed by Syria, Libya, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Equally pronounced has been the conflict within Lebanon between the largely rightist Christian Arabs and the predominantly leftist Muslims; these two factions have been engaged in intermittent fighting which in the last two years claimed thousands of casualties and with which, at the time of this writing, the Lebanese government seems unable to cope. In other parts of the Arab world, too, internal as well as external conflicts flare up periodically, so that, all in all, except for Northern Ireland, the "Arab nation" comprises today the most strife-torn peoples of the world. ...

The Arabs' hatred of the West, on the other hand, which was virulent until 1973 (pp. 314 ff) has visibly abated since the Arabs have moved from the camp of the poor nations, to whom the West doles out charity, into the thin ranks of the rich, who can, and do, buy anything that strikes their fancy-real estate in the choicest locations of England, France, and the United States, factories, banks, works of art-and can, and do, hire the best Western experts to work for them. One does not hate those from whom one can buy what one wants and whom one can employ to do what one wishes. One out of two will have to suffice. Colonel DeAtkine, too, offers a mixed picture in his Foreword: ... the Arab intelligentsia continues to chase chimeras. Earlier it was Pan-Arabism, represented by Gamal Abdul Nasser who dragged his country into several disastrous wars. The it was Saddam Hussein who insisted he had defeated thirty-four nations of the Coalition in the first Gulf War, while his own nation crumbled around him. With the recession of Arabism has come political Islam offering cut and dried answers to all life's problems and, from Khomeini to Nasrallah, demanding public adulation of megalomaniacs who use Islam to build their castles of power. This too will inevitably lead to failure. ... One point is certain. The West cannot change the Arab world; only the Arabs can do that; but there is nothing inherent or preordained that permanently consigns the Arab world to authoritarian government. All over the Middle East, especially in Lebanon and Iraq, there are pockets of people risking their lives to confront the forces pulling the Arab world backward. As long as this is true, there is hope. Only by understanding those forces which shape the Arab Mind and, in complex interactions, are shaped by and shape the greater culture, can we hope to find ways to help (or force) the Arab world come to terms with their myriad failures. Cultures change slowly because people change slowly, yet certain ideas can reach a critical mass and lead to rapid change, on the order of one or two generations. By tolerating, and effectively enabling, the worst aspects of Arab culture to be established in the West, we are doing a terrible disservice to the Arab cultures and to our own culture.

February 20, 2008 The Arab Mind: Part II

"Give me a child until he is five and he is mine forever." (Various attributions) Arab Child Rearing Practices A culture's Child rearing practices transmit the culture from one generation to the next. Because of the complex interplay of child rearing, character formation, and culture (the sum total, and emergent characteristics, of the character of the members of the culture), child rearing practices and the culture so engendered evolve slowly. Contact with a new culture often accelerates evolutionary change in cultures that are relatively open to such change; at the same time such contact often provokes significant reactionary movement, but without such encounters, culture is very stable. Cultural norms and trends reinforce and/or stigmatize various child rearing tendencies, often with surprising results. In the last 100 years in America, corporal punishment of children has gone from an unquestioned norm ("spare the rod and spoil the child") to a cultural and legal transgression. While many bemoan the the loss of discipline that has accompanied the changes of which this is emblematic (permissive child rearing has become the norm in much of the American middle class) such changes also

have had significant positive effects. For example, children raised in our permissive environment tend to have more curiosity, are more strongly individualistic, and are less inhibited (mentally, ie more creative, as well as in other ways.) Arab culture has been static for a very long time. Arab child rearing practices reinforce those character traits which tend to support stasis. In this post and a number to follow, I will discuss details of Arab child rearing practices and how such treatment effects character. Arab boys and girls are treated so differently, from birth, that to describe child rearing requires two completely separate treatises. I will start with some basics and then go into more detail for both boys and girls. [Unless otherwise specified, all quotes are from The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai.] Traditional Arab child rearing starts with the overvaluation of the infant boy and the utter devaluation of the girl. It is complicated by the high value placed on discipline and obedience to the authority of the father. It can come as no surprise, considering how women are treated in the most religious Muslim communities, that a women's status is based almost exclusively on her relation to the men in her life. She is subservient to her father and brothers early in life, then to her husband, and once married her value depends on her giving birth to a boy. The birth of a daughter is treated as a disaster, shameful, at best ignored by all, while the birth of a son is met with celebration and joy. With each pregnancy, the stakes are raised for the woman who has not yet had a son. (This forms part of the central core of the recent novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghani author. Phyllis Chesler has written quite movingly about her experience in purdah at her Blog and in her recent book, The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for Women's Freedom.) Thus, from the moment of birth a child in the Arab world is given a positive or negative valence. And from that moment, their experiences are quiet distinct in ways that would shock even the most sexist of American parents. Of equal importance, the two parents have distinctly different roles in the family, and again the sexual dimorphism involved would be surprising to those who have grown up in a more egalitarian culture: (pp. 27) Local and individual variations aside, the general situation in the Arab family is that it is the father who is severe, stern, and authoritarian, while the mother is, by contrast, loving and compassionate. This difference between the attitude of the the parents is so often referred to in Arabic literature, including proverbs, and in studies dealing with Arab communities, that one cannot doubt its widespread occurrence. It is because of this difference in treatment of the child that the latter, while respecting and even fearing the father, develops a more affectionate attachment to the mother. In the lives of both sons and daughters the love for the mother remains important, even after marriage. The combination of the strict differentiation between the parents and the concomitant differences in value of the child are expressed throughout childhood. Arab boys are typically breast fed for 2 to 3 years while girls are weaned after only 1 year. There are complicated reasons for this including the folk mores that support pampering the nursing infant and the belief (which has some truth to it) that the mother will become pregnant more easily (in order to have a son) after the infant is weaned. Arab mothers practice demand feeding. The girl is thus weaned well before the development of significant language and once weaned, her needs are relatively neglected. The young boy, on the other hand, continues nursing until long after the establishment of language. He is able to verbalize his desires and is instantly gratified when he desires the breast, which comforts and arouses as well as nourishes. As per Patai: (pp. 33) ... the verbalization of the one major childhood desire, that for the mother's breast, is followed, in most

cases at least, by instant gratification. And, what is psychologically equally important, the emphatic verbal formulation of the wish carries in itself, almost automatically, the guarantee of its fulfillment without the need for any additional action on the part of the child. This experience, repeated several times a day for a number of months, cannot fail to leave a lasting impression on the psyche of the boy child. It may not be too far-fetched to seek a connection between this situation in childhood and a characteristic trait of the adult Arab personality which has frequently been observed and commented upon: the proclivity for making an emphatic verbal statement of intention and then failing to follow it up with any action that could lead to its realization. It would seem that - at least in certain contexts and moods - stating an intention or wish in itself provides a psychological satisfaction which actually can become a deterrent to undertaking the action that is averred. In addition, we now know that insufficient frustration in early life, ie imperfect and occasionally delayed gratification, is an essential component of a healthy character. Children who receive too much gratification, just as those who receive insufficient gratification in early life, are prone to developing narcissistic and borderline character traits, such as, among others, poor frustration tolerance, poor affect control, and over-reliance on the environment to help regulate internal mood states. Thus far I have just touched the surface of Arab child rearing customs. With the caveat that there are always going to be many exceptions and that even children raised under pathogenic circumstances can grow up to be happy, psychologically healthy adults, we can already discern some patterns that are troubling. The extended period of instant gratification, nursing on demand, predisposes Arab boys to be demanding, with poor frustration tolerance, little ability to delay gratifications in the interest of long term goals, and poorly empathic. Although I have so far focused primarily on the Arab boy, the impact of her experiences are equally signifcant for the Arab girl. Treated as a shameful creature from birth, weaned early and neglected emotionally, Arab girls pay a high price for the "crime" of being born the wrong gender; I will elaborate more on their experiences in a future post. There is a great deal more to explore about Arab child rearing and its effect on the development of the Arab mind.

February 27, 2008 The Arab Mind: Part III

"Give me a child until he is five and he is mine forever." (Various attributions) Arab Child Rearing Practices: Boys In Part II I began to describe the early experiences of children in a typical traditional Arab family with an emphasis on the different approach to boys and girls and especially, the effects of late weaning on boys. This post, and the following in the series, will focus on the development of boys through latency and puberty; a future post (or posts) will discuss the continuing development of girls through latency and puberty. Throughout the first four years of his life, the boy is almost exclusively involved in his relationship with his mother. The father is a distant, relatively uninvolved figure. The mother believes in pampering her son and attending to his every need and desire. It is worth quoting an extended passage from Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind, on one particular aspect of the pampering: (pp. 34) The prolonged period of lactation also impresses into the mind of the boy child a special image or archetype of the male-female relationship. For a period of up to three years, the mother was unfailingly at his beck and call. Her breast, his greatest source of pleasure and gratification, was his for the asking.

This experience cannot fail to become a contributing factor in the general mold to which the boy will eventually expect his relationship to all women to conform. ... This expectation is further reinforced by another childhood experience of which many male infants participate in the first years of their lives. In contrast to a girl, whose crying evokes little attention - since one is not supposed to pamper a girl - a male infant who cries is picked up and comforted. This comforting and soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his genitals. Mother, grandmother, other female relatives and visitors, as well as his older siblings, will play with the penis of the boy, not only to soothe him, but also simply to make him smile. Among the fellahin of Upper Egypt, the mother may attempt to prepare her son gradually for the circumcision operation "by caressing his organ and playfully endeavoring to separate the foreskin from the glans. While doing this, she would hum words to the effect that what she is doing will help to make him to become a man amongst men." * Since circumcision in Upper Egypt is usually performed any time before a boy attains maturity, this motherly caressing of the boy's penis may well go on at an age from which the boy retains distinct memories throughout his adult life. (* Quoted from "Growing Up in an Egyptian Village", Hamed Ammar, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954.) With the usual proviso that there is little information I have been able to find to determine how widespread such activity actually is, what evidence there is presents a clear picture in the extant literature that such intimate caressing continues for significant periods of time in the young boy's life. This has significance for both the boy's psychosexual development and the girl's psychosexual development. All parents search for ways to calm a crying and distressed baby. In America there is a tendency to search for ways in which the baby can soothe himself. Pacifiers are ubiquitous components of American child rearing practices. This not only frees up the parent to attend to other business, including the American preoccupation with offering the child intellectual stimulation from the earliest age, but it also places the means for calming within the purview of the child himself. The child learns at an early age that he has the ability to calm himself when distressed; when used judiciously, this helps to establish from an early age the child's autonomy and self control. We elevate independence and autonomy to ideals in our culture and though there can be problems associated with such child rearing practices, the gains would clearly seem to outweigh the losses. [Children who learn to soothe themselves by sucking their thumb have an additional advantage in not requiring any outside agency to help soothe them. The resulting habit can be difficult to break and its derivative, nail biting, can become a lifelong problem in some children, but on the whole the idea that a child can control his inner states through ministrations under his control is a very beneficial development. Thumb sucking and the pacifier can be misused in that it can come to partially replace the parental interest and care that are necessary for the child's emotional development, but for most children with "good enough" parents, such emotional deprivation is rarely the case.] Genital manipulation in boys does soothe and amuse. Boys typically "discover" their penis within the first year of life and take great delight in playing with it and exploring its attributes. They proudly show it off to whoever will look and take great pride in being able to pee standing up and making it change shape as they become aroused. Most boys must be taught that their penis is private and for their use and display only. This approach to the boy's sexuality, in a way very similar to the availability of the pacifier (or thumb), but much more intimately, reinforces the boy's sense of self and his own autonomy. As with many habits or tendencies, boys who use masturbatory activity to soothe themselves inappropriately may be struggling with problematic anxiety and this can reflect developmental conflicts, but in general, young children in exploring their bodies find ways to soothe and amuse themselves and this is unexceptional and even, dare we say, "healthy." Contrast this description with the practice described among the Arabs. In Arab culture, the practice of genital manipulation of boys would be considered a form of child abuse in the West and creates significant problems for the developing psyche. First of all, while caressing the boy's penis may well amuse him and soothe him, it also arouses. Further, it establishes from an early

age that he can be aroused through no activity of his own. In fact, when distressed, or even just for the amusement of the women in his life, he can be erotically charged. The act of sexual arousal, always in tenuous control for the male of the species, is even more uncertain for the Arab male. This is clearly reflected by the Arab cultural identification of the woman as the dangerous arouser of men. Arab men are expected to become uncontrollably aroused at the sight of an unenshrouded woman. Rape of a scantily clad woman in Arab communities in the West is considered the fault of the woman for exciting the men. This seems to be a clear derivative of the structure developed in early childhood. A second way in which such genital caressing and arousing is problematic is that when a particular practice is associated with ameliorating anxiety and distress, anxiety itself can become libidinized. In other words, the association between anxiety and arousal is established very early and in the future other situations that provoke anxiety can become sexualized. Of even greater significance, the reaction to poorly controlled arousal, especially in young men who do not have acceptable sexual outlets, can include anger at the object of arousal for making the young man feel out of control (as in the rape situation mentioned above) or, alternatively, severe asceticism and religiosity as external structures to help control unacceptable sexual thoughts and feelings. When the ascetic religion offered is a version of radical Islam, the tendency toward Islamic terror has been facilitated. [Please note, feeling or being "out of control" is a signficant part of the traumatic situation. Some Arab men behave as if sexuality itself is traumatic; for such men, the source of the traumatic experience, the temptress, must be strictly controlled lest the "out of control" experience be repeated. Consider my post on Ayman al-Zawahiri and how such childhood experiences could have contributed to his severe sexual asceticism.] We can see then that certain child rearing practices have established for the young boy that his relationship to his mother is, on the one hand, an idyllic one based on instant gratification and the sexual soothing of anxiety. Women thus are the font of all that is good, with the father a distant storm on the horizon. Yet at the same time, the seeds have been planted for a psychosexual crisis. The boy is not the master of his own body; his arousal depends upon and is caused by the women who are clearly inferior to the father, the master of all he surveys. As the boy approaches the Oedipal phase, that time when he begins to see himself as a rival of his father, he must renounce his mother and the Paradise she built for him and place himself under the strong arm of his father, a father he fears and must compete with. Furthermore, and far more powerfully than in the West, the association of anxiety and sexuality has already become deeply entrenched by the time the boy is ready for his next developmental milestone. That milestone is yet another extremely significant hurdle he must surmount, alluded to in the passage from Patai and deserving of a post of its own.

March 05, 2008 The Arab Mind: Part IV Arab Child Rearing Practices: Girls Where boys are favored, idealized, gratified in all wants and needs in their early life, girls learn from an early age that their importance is directly tied to their relationship to the important men in their lives. They have no independent value and exist to serve men. Their sexuality is dangerous and threatening to men and their individuality is directly and overtly denied. The Niqab, the favored form of covering in the most conservative of Islamic societies, exemplified by Saud Arabia, the keeper of all things traditional in Islam, exemplifies the institutionalized, religiously sanctioned assault on women done in the name of Islam. The Niqab allows for no color, no individual flair, no joi de vivre, to be expressed; it homogenizes all women, rich and poor, young and old, into a faceless, sexless, amorphous mass. It may protect the women from the predations of men (though any women in public by herself is treated as "fair game") but at the cost of her freedom.

Even in the more moderate and modern Muslim nations, where women are treated well, the subtext of their second class status is reinforced constantly. A reader, a Western expatriate living in just such a moderate Arab country wrote in to describe her experience. I am reproducing her note, which came to me via a third party, with her permission, in full, though without identifying details at her request: Regarding that article you wanted me to look at on Arab child-rearing practices, it is not like that in _____. In _____, women are treated pretty well--I would say in some ways, more respectfully than in (the West) ... What you describe here sounds very much like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and countries around that area. Even in _____, however, most girls in the family are taught to be deferential to the boys, serving them, etc. The mother behaves that way, too. In my opinion, this comes from Islam, where boys inherit twice as much as girls, and women are never fully emancipated (can't get married or get a passport without the approval of a male relative, no matter what your age; a woman's word is only worth half a man's in court, etc.). I think if inheritance were made equal, all this deferential behavior would stop. But it never will be made equal, no matter how much Islamic countries modernize, because it's mandated by the Koran. In the best of cases, Arab girls must develop in an environment, social, cultural, legal, and familial, in which they are inferior. In the worst cases, they are nullified. Neglect is often even more destructive to character formation than abuse (with the additional caveat that most often, neglect is interspersed with abuse.) When a child's basic needs for nurturance and love are neglected, the result is a damaged sense of self which can form the core of pathological narcissism. The damaged young girl sees herself as unworthy of status and lives in a milieu that grants her no status for her potential as a human being but merely for her potential as a bearer of children (preferably male children) and a constant, potential source of shame should she rebel against her chains and attempt to self-actualize. (I will expand on some of these ideas in a later post; for a more developed discussion, Leonard Shengold's Soul Murder remains one of the most insightful explorations of the psychological effects of abuse and neglect.) By the time the young Arab child is approaching the crucial Oedipal phase of development, their early development has predisposed him or her to be burdened by a damaged self. The Oedipal phase, colloquially thought of as the time when the young boy gives up his primary attachment to his mother for fear of his father's retaliation (castration), is actually a much more complicated time of life. It is that period of life in which the child is beginning the long term process of detaching from his primary emotional attachment to his mother, beginning to work out his relationship to the heretofore less significant father, and preparing himself to leave the protected circle of the home for the larger world outside. Almost all societies recognize the importance of this phase and most societies do not start formal schooling until after age 5 o 6 because of a recognition that prior to that age the child's emotional investment in school is too attenuated for formal education to take place. The boy, who has inadequate experiences of frustration, defective self-control and self-soothing mechanisms, and a locus of sexual arousal external to himself (see Part III for more on these developmental trends), enters the Oedipal phase with a fragile, yet grandiose, sense of self which is in need of constant affirmation from the environment lest catastrophic despair and humiliation evoke the rage that is always available when frustrations or insults occur. The young girl enters the Oedipal phase with the overt and constantly reinforced message that her self is of no consequence and no importance except for her usage by dominant males.

There remain two factors that further complicate the young child's ascension to latency and ultimately prepare him/her to enter the adult world. The first important complication relates to overt child abuse, physical and to a less quantifiable extent, sexual, which remain common experiences for Arab children. Such abuse has powerful impact on development as might be expected and will be explored in a future post. The second factor, about which little has been written is circumcision, which is universal for male children and only slightly less common for female children (although FGM is slowly becoming less acceptable in many Muslim communities). The complex meanings and the experiential and ceremonial aspects of circumcision deserves further explication, as well.