Embodying Transition: FGC,Displacement,and Gender-making for Sudanese in Cairo

Introduction

Social identity, particularly in the Arab world, is often enacted through gendered norms of behaviour and bodily modifications. For Arab Muslim Sudanese, the practice of infibulation ¹ is paradigmatic of the cultural concept of the ‘enclosed,’ and therefore fertile, female body (Boddy, 1982). Scholars have noted the stubborn perseverance of infibulation and other less severe forms of female genital cutting in Sudan despite awareness campaigns, rapid social change, and most recently, a government ban. However, the continued displacement and exile of Sudanese from their country to Egypt and, for many, to final resettlement in the West, has led to significant challenges to cultural norms, particularly as these intersect with gender. For many Sudanese in Cairo, whose disrupted histories and newly imagined futures are represented here by way of ethnographic fieldwork, cultural identity is no longer unimaginable without reference to the rite of passage that previously defined not only fertility and sexuality but an essentialized Sudanese morality.

This article is a qualitative interpretive analysis of the transition of gendered embodiment of Sudanese ethnic identity in a situation of political and social flux. Specifically, I explore the meaning of FGC for several Sudanese communities residing in Cairo in the context of changing gender norms brought about by displacement. I present this process using the anthropological notion of embodied culture (Csordas, 1994) and drawing heavily on the multiple ways gender is negotiated by women and men. I interpret ethnographic data gathered through two different research processes; fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation and a collaborative research project under the aegis of the Population Council. I suggest that the process of rethinking gender roles and relations among Sudanese is reflected in the debate over FGC that opposes ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition,’ and that FGC has become a contested boundary marker for Sudanese ethnic identity in Cairo.

Sudanese Ethnic Identity in Egypt: Gender, Propriety, and Displacement

Displacement has become a feature of life for growing numbers of Sudanese over the last twenty years, with hundreds of thousands of forced migrants from Sudan's enduring civil war joining existing communities of labour migrants in several capital cities in Africa and the Middle East (Fábos, 2001). Cairo, long a destination for Muslim Arab Sudanese (and more recently for African-identified Sudanese) for study, medical treatment, summer holidays, and business, has more recently become a center for the Sudanese opposition movement and a cultural and political hub of the far-flung Sudanese diaspora in general. The ease with which Sudanese traditionally entered and resided in Egypt reflects the long history of entanglement between Egypt and Sudan, but tensions in political relations have created widespread uncertainty and resentment in the various Sudanese communities. This instability has led to a unique identity discourse that I have termed elsewhere ‘ambiguous ethnicity’ (Fábos, 1999).

Muslim Arab Sudanese in Cairo share broad cultural similarities with Egyptians, who officially assert that Sudanese are their brothers in a unified Nile Valley. Yet in fact Sudanese nationals are not able to attain Egyptian citizenship and, since the 1990s, have lost many of their previous legal and political privileges due to deteriorating relations between Egypt and Sudan. These negative experiences, which call into question the state rhetoric of Sudanese-Egyptian unity, have led both Sudanese settlers and recent immigrants to use the cultural concept of adab, or ‘propriety’ – a concept shared by their Egyptian hosts – to construct an ambiguous ethnicity that allows them to assert both unity with and difference from the Egyptian mainstream according to circumstances. Of special import in this discourse are notions of proper gender relations and the debate over ‘traditional’ values such as sexual modesty, and specifically the related practice, in both Egypt and Sudan, of female genital cutting.

No term for the practice of surgically removing some or all of a woman's external genitalia – a profoundly political act – is neutral. However, the Sudanese who shared their experiences with me used a broad range of terms that reflected their stance toward the practice. On one end of the spectrum was the term sunna, a term for that which is sanctioned by Islamic tradition which, in Egyptian and Sudanese cultural discourse has long included the practice of cliterodectomy. On the other end is the concept of ‘female genital mutilation,’ a term coined by non-African activists who associate the practice with causing harm. My own stance is closer to the notion of the latter, though I believe that we should consider the individual choice to circumcise with sympathy and understanding even while viewing the hegemonic cultural discourse as harmful to women. Thus I have chosen to use either ‘female genital cutting’ (Lane and Rubinstein, 1996) or the Arabic (but no less political) terms tahara (purification), khitan (circumcision), or khitan al-anaath (female circumcision).

This article looks at shifting Sudanese attitudes toward female genital cutting, finding that both conservative and transformative rhetoric stem from changes in gender norms. For Sudanese in Cairo, gender norms and gender relations are a fundamental expression of propriety. Both mainstream Egyptians and Sudanese draw their concepts of propriety from the same pool of cultural knowledge, their shared Islamic heritage and Arab identity. Propriety for Muslims and Arabs is a dynamic set of norms that is constantly, contextually, and consciously negotiated and renegotiated. However, cultural norms are situational as well, and in Cairo Sudanese have transformed these norms into an ethnic vocabulary used privately to distinguish themselves from Egyptians, while publicly calling upon meta-narratives of shared identity to include and be included by Egyptians. The common bonds of history, religion, language, and other building blocks of this shared identity also shape gender ideology for Sudanese and Egyptians. While gender and propriety are not synonymous, propriety – like other cultural concepts – is gendered and is often expressed in terms of gender ideals for men and women.

I use the term ‘gender’ to refer to systems of culturally constructed roles for men and women and relations between men and women, keeping in mind that these categories are never absolute and dichotomous and that gender and gender construction are fluid processes (Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994). ‘Making’ gender (Ortner, 1996) refers to the culturally specific ways in which ideals of femininity and masculinity are enacted, challenged, and held up for inspection through social interactions and relationships. Sudanese absorb and express the attributes of propriety that sustain their identity through gendered relationships with each other. During my research in Cairo, Sudanese enacted and reinforced propriety norms through child rearing, rituals and ceremonies, religious practice, and daily conventions such as meals and visits at the household level. Sudanese continue to perform and transform cultural understandings of propriety as courting couples, husbands and wives, children and parents, and through other types of gendered relationships embedded in a broader social, economic, and political context. As gender intersects with other processes, such as fragmentation of households and shifting economic opportunities for women and men due to displacement, changes to gender roles have thrown propriety norms into confusion. This has had the effect of rendering ‘proper Sudanese behaviour’ even more central to Sudanese identity in Cairo.

Though not monolithic, shared gender ideals, and the common norms of propriety they imply, bring Sudanese and Egyptians together while serving as a moral counter for Sudanese identity. Experiences of displacement and diaspora have altered Sudanese gender relations. Propriety norms, while represented by Sudanese as an unchanging ideal, have also been affected by these changes, and so represent lines of conflict and contention among and between Sudanese communities as well. I specifically examine conflicts involving men and women regarding sexuality and morality in the current crisis situation. Through personal narratives, I show how individual Sudanese are reinterpreting propriety by challenging gender norms and in the process, reinterpreting their identity. Exploring changing attitudes toward the cultural practice of FGC gives us insight into the shifting balance of power between women and men in the Sudanese diaspora, and ultimately the negotiation of Sudanese identity itself.

Displacement and Changing Gender Roles

Women and men of different generations, educational and class backgrounds, and length of stay in Egypt have all experienced changes in their lives due to the crisis in Sudan and their relocation in Cairo, albeit of varying degrees. The instability and increasing hardships affecting northern Sudanese in Cairo have challenged social ideals and the structures invested with maintaining ‘proper traditions,’ such as kinship relations and gender roles. Networks of kin increasingly extend over long distances. People's economic circumstances in Cairo are deteriorating. Opportunities for work and study have fallen off drastically since the early 1990s. For Sudanese who remain in Cairo, expectations that men provide financial support and women maintain responsibility for the domestic realm are increasingly overwhelmed by such circumstances. As gender roles shift, expand, and transform to accommodate fragmented households, unreliable finances, and social interactions that bring men and women together in ‘non-traditional’ ways, the core values that comprise Sudanese propriety are subtly – and not so subtly – undermined.

Perhaps the most obvious challenge to Sudanese gender relations and the order they impose on behaviour is the concept of gender ‘complementarity’ outlined by Boddy (1989: 6–7). This mainstream Sudanese ideal draws on Islamic prescriptions of separate but complementary gender roles in families, stereotypically portrayed as the father/husband earning the household income and the mother/wife keeping house and rearing the children. The ‘natural’ differences between men and women have been a focus for much of the Islamist rhetoric coming from the regime, and as such are already being resisted by Sudanese still living in Sudan (Gruenbaum, 1992; Hale, 1992). In Cairo, the unstable situation and infrequent opportunities for people to improve their lives propels women and men into new roles. Sudanese male graduates of Egyptian universities, for example, have resorted to labour migration to the Gulf as a way to contribute to the finances of their parents, siblings, and, if married, their wives and wives’ families. For Sudanese exiles, labour migration also offered employment possibilities to men, but with restrictive travel laws in and out of Egypt and the diminishing of contracts in the Gulf, many Sudanese men in Cairo have spent months or even years living on remittances from a family member, refugee subsidies from the United High Commissioner, or whatever they are able to scrounge from associations with NGOs, friends, and the like. Women's employment opportunities in Cairo, on the other hand, have not been as severely affected. In Ain Shams, a neighbourhood in Cairo where many long-term Sudanese immigrants reside, I met many young Sudanese women who had received university degrees and found jobs as secretaries, schoolteachers, and receptionists despite the Egyptian labour laws restricting the number of foreign employees in an office or institution. Young men from this community asserted that they were much less likely to find work in Egypt despite similar educational backgrounds. Not only do these new circumstances influence gender relations, but they also lead to challenges to older ways of doing things from the younger generation.

Displacement and job shortages mean that family members may live in two or more different countries. Young men leave their wives and children in Cairo to work in the Gulf while their parents remain in Sudan. Individuals or several members of a family may be offered asylum in the USA or Canada while their relatives or fiancé(e)s may be left behind in Egypt or Sudan to wait for a visa. The fragmented nature of the Sudanese community in Cairo makes it less likely that a person will live in an arrangement that supports the ideal of gender complementarity. In the small sample of Sudanese families in Cairo with whom I have relations, I know of married Sudanese men in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United States, Canada, Asmara, and Addis Ababa who are supporting their wives and children living in Cairo. Since children most often go to Egyptian schools and see their fathers only rarely, the burden of socializing children to be ‘Sudanese’ falls to these mothers.

Displacement in Egypt and its effect on children's identity has recently become a topic of some interest to members of the exiled community. Salim, a lawyer with an interest in displaced children, described Egyptian manners as ‘not honorable’, something that he hoped Sudanese children would avoid. He told me ‘girls have more problems, because they see Egyptian girls behaving in a ‘dishonorable’ way. The families are all very worried and scared for the girls’ sake.’ At least three separate projects to open schools for northern Sudanese children with northern Sudanese teachers came to my attention during the period of my fieldwork, and at this writing at least one has been established. This is one of the many strategies employed by Sudanese in Cairo to preserve what they feel to be Sudanese values in the absence of stereotypical role models based on gender complementarity.

Dislocation and mobility also make finding marriage prospects for men and women problematic. I had long discussions with Layla, a 30–something secretary at a private firm, who yearned to get married but felt caught between Egypt and Sudan. Layla had spent ten years working in Sudan. I asked her, ‘Why didn't you get married there?’ She said, ‘Really, there were many, many suitors, but God was not smiling on me. Either they were old, or they had a first wife and children, or if they were young they did things like drink alcohol,’ implying that this was unacceptable behaviour. All she was asking for, she said, was ‘a normal man, not too rich, just a regular guy.’ In desperation, she returned to Cairo, where she was born, to seek a husband, but rejected most of the displaced Sudanese men she met as economically unsuitable. I asked Layla, ‘Why aren't you successful here?’ She responded, saying, ‘Well, for ten years I haven't been in Cairo and haven't been working on [developing] relationships.’ The closest she came to betrothal, in the time I knew her, was a flirtation with her elderly Sudanese boss, who was divorced and had several children with families of their own.

Northern Sudanese men, particularly those with more formal education, feel that working as labourers, peddlers, or domestic servants means an unacceptable affront to the respect they hold in the eyes of the Sudanese community. Some Sudanese in Cairo have begun to talk about the phenomenon of young educated men who make it to Egypt only to ‘ga'ad fil bayt’ (stay at home). In essence, this is a gendered insult, since according to the gender norms that Sudanese share with other Arab societies, women should ‘stay at home’ while men provide the family's income. I knew several married men who could not find work ‘in their field’ and instead lived off the income of their wives. Maisoon, a lawyer and political activist, remarked that these men were ‘not serious. Women are more serious than men. Men here have a problem of sleep and drunkenness – they get up at 12 pm, have nothing to do,’ and spend their time watching television and drinking with friends. The fact that so many men ‘stay at home’ further undermines the gender complementarity ideal espoused by Sudanese society. Wives of unemployed men are often able to find work as hennanas (women who decorate brides and married women with henna paste) or in other, less ‘respectable’ professions in order to support the household financially. Yet this strategy opens the possibility for tension between husband and wife. Not only is she providing for her husband, thus undermining the masculine ideal, she is also forced into situations that compromise her own respectability – visiting the houses of strangers at a late hour, for example.

Propriety as a Discursive and Cultural Concept

In Egypt and Sudan, the Arabic word adab pertains to ‘good manners, politeness,’ which includes the notion of morals and morality for both men and women (Badawi and Hinds, 1986). In my interactions with both Egyptians and Sudanese in Cairo, I have understood their usage of the term adab to mean ‘propriety’ in a holistic sense. Therefore, the concept is not only limited to ideals of sexual propriety. Adab, in my interpretation, is closer to Nordenstam's definition of an individual's ethics of virtue as ‘the sum total of his conceptions of what one should be and have and do in order to be good in the different roles one comes to play in life’ (Nordenstam, 1968: 74).

Nordenstam posited that the main components of Sudanese ethics are ‘the ideas of courage, generosity and hospitality and a cluster of subtly interrelated notions of honour, dignity and self-respect,’ and a good Sudanese is thus ‘a man [sic] who exemplifies these virtues to a high degree’ (1968: 75). In Cairo, Sudanese will say of a person whose behaviour is perceived as improper that he or she has no manners, ma fi adab, or that the person is ma muaddab or muaddaba (feminine), impolite. Through analyzing Sudanese identity discourse in Cairo, I have come to understand that ‘proper’ behaviour comprises a set of related ideals – hospitality, generosity, modesty, dignity, respectability, and social equality that are expressed at all levels of social interaction. Though the interrelated characteristics of propriety are gendered, the concept as a whole encompasses generalized behaviour that pertains to upholding the virtues of Sudanese society. In the following discussion, I suggest that gender ideals for Sudanese in Cairo, as self-identified members of the Arab world, extend from this broader meaning of propriety.

For the purpose of this article, however, I focus on the aspect of ‘modesty’ as it incorporates ‘proper’ gender roles for women and men. Modesty, often thought of in terms of sexual propriety, is not solely a concern for women, despite overt gender symbols like female modesty garments and the social expectation that holds women accountable for maintaining social and physical distance from unrelated men. Sudanese men are expected to be discreet about their personal wealth, family connections, and success. Both men and women in Cairo's Sudanese communities consider modest dress an Islamic prescription, and assert that drawing attention to oneself in any way is a breach of modesty. By defining Egyptians as ‘immodest,’ Sudanese go beyond modesty as a function of a woman's behaviour to viewing it instead as a fundamental marker of Sudanese identity. It is in this context that the Sudanese debate over FGC is being framed.

Over the course of my research, I began to recognize the northern Sudanese propriety ideal through the behaviour, commentary, and transgressions of the people in the two communities with whom I was working. The Sudanese represented by my study were generally in agreement about the main, idealized tenets of propriety drawn upon the cultural and religious norms outlined above. Problems in their communities and changes in Sudanese–Egyptian relations that conflicted with their understanding of proper behaviour were a common topic of conversation – indeed, the adab discourse loomed large in my interactions with Sudanese in Cairo, and I believe I am representing an acknowledged cultural ideal. I realized, however, that while members of both long-established expatriate and more recent exile communities wholeheartedly embraced the propriety ideal characterizing their behaviour as Sudanese, some exhibited contradictions and deviations from the standard Sudanese propriety discourse. Although I did observe gender differences in the expression of ‘proper behaviour,’ both men and women shared many of the Sudanese behaviours and beliefs around propriety in Cairo. As I will demonstrate, the use of propriety as an ethnic boundary marker has profound implications for the continued practice of FGC.

Gender and Propriety in the Sudanese Diaspora: ‘Tradition’ versus ‘Change’

Gender ideals for both Egyptian and Sudanese Muslims draw heavily on Islamic concepts/norms linking modesty with sexual propriety and Arab cultural beliefs associating honour with marriage ability, particularly for women (Boddy, 1989; Malti-Douglas, 1991; Ahmed, 1992). As a social category, gender in the Arab world shares certain themes, glossed as honour and shame, patrilineality, polygyny, and gender segregation (Abu-Lughod, 1993; Tucker, 1993; Joseph, 1994), that have customarily been the focus of scholars and lay persons alike. These themes permeate the adab concept as well, since proper behaviour for Arabs and Muslims often hinges on their social interactions as men or women.

Anthropologists of northern Sudanese communities have identified gender ideologies that relate Sudanese behaviour, especially that of women, to specific cultural codes of modesty, chastity, hospitality, and dignity (Gruenbaum, 1979; Ismail, 1982; Cloudsley, 1983; Boddy, 1989). Boddy in particular links gender norms and the enactment of propriety with her informants’ ‘firmly moral sense of identity’ (Boddy, 1989: 48). Her analysis of the symbolic underpinnings of reproduction and human fertility as the framework of this identity is based on her understanding that her informants see men and women as wholly complimentary, and that the social structure binds men and women together on the basis of kinship. The main expressions of this cultural logic, according to Boddy, are combined in marriage, as a central framework for the production and reproduction of gender ideologies. She writes that, ‘Hofrayati's world is suffused by gender: gender constructs permeate the fabric of meaning and inform the idioms of daily life’ (1989: 57). Boddy suggests that propriety is a key concept for the Sudanese community she studied, since transgressions of propriety ‘subvert the complementarity of men and women’ (1989: 96) and thus undermine society.

However, in addition to assertions of cultural ideals by northern Sudanese and other self-identified Arabs, the particular histories, contexts, and processes that may shape gender as well must balance these themes. Scholars have warned of the dangers of conceptualizing Arab societies, and their gender norms, as uniformly shaped by ‘gender segregation, tribalism, and Islam’ (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 281) because of the real possibility of neglecting equally important local specificities. Certainly, the tendency to gloss Arab culture as dichotomized into male/female; public/private; traditional/modern; orthodox/heterodox, and other appositions overlooks the diverse experiences and strategies of Arab men and women (Hale, 1983). Yet in the case of Sudanese in Cairo, the reality of rapid change and dislocation gives added weight to the importance of Sudanese ‘traditions,’ including FGC and other aspects of propriety. As in all situations of flux, the tension between real and ideal gender roles increases the potential for conflict.

Gender is not a fixed construct even in stable times, since political, economic, and social processes at national, regional, and even global levels constantly interact with gender systems. Through the impact of war, labour migration, new technologies, and ideologies of social change, ‘traditional’ roles men and women play may change in subtle or dramatic ways. The literature on gender and migration in the Arab world illustrates the various and sometimes unexpected results of large-scale population movements on gender roles and household decision making (Taylor, 1984; Morsy, 1985; Andezian, 1986; Singerman and Hoodfar, 1996), which often affect norms of propriety. In Egypt, for example, educated women make a trade-off between securing their family a place in the middle class by working outside the home – ideally constructed as the male domain – even while losing the power associated with control of the domestic – female – arena (Hoodfar, 1996). Establishing their sexual propriety through Islamic dress was one way these women could present themselves as unambiguously feminine even while departing from the widely held female ideal in Egypt.

The term ‘family’ needs to be problematized, not only in response to the current situation of flux. Tucker (1993) points out the need to contextualize families in history, since our ideas about the importance of family in the daily construction of traditional gender roles and relations are rarely questioned in discussions of change. For the study at hand, readers should be alert to the historical construction of the Sudanese family. The peoples of northern riverain Sudan continue to participate in the dramatic changes that have swept the Region in the twentieth century, including war and conquest, changes in labour opportunities both locally and abroad, and natural disasters like floods and drought. Sudanese families have had to cope with the effects of these changes and cannot be uniformly characterized despite folk assertions of unchanging and continuous family structures.

As I noted earlier, Sudanese in Cairo derive their propriety ideals from the interaction between social norms transmitted through learned roles and actual examples against which to measure their own behaviour. Sudanese women and men have learned codes of behaviour through the social institutions – the family, the household, marriage, and the mosque, among others – accorded the responsibility for producing and reproducing gender. These institutions, as well as the norms they transmit, are idealized by Sudanese, despite the dynamic circumstances of Sudanese displacement in Cairo. The specificities which have shaped Sudanese choices around living arrangements, employment, raising and schooling children, and so forth often work against ideal patterns of behaviour ascribed to ‘proper’ men and women. This is exemplified by changing norms surrounding FGC among Sudanese in Cairo.

Propriety, FGC, and Mobility

Sudanese women and men play a variety of social roles – daughter, son, wife, husband, friend – over the course of their daily routines in Cairo. Their ideals of femininity and masculinity are enacted, challenged, and held up for inspection through their interactions and relationships with one another and with members of Egyptian society. Propriety, or more precisely, the bundle of norms that Sudanese believe mark their identity in Cairo, has become the language of social relations and the standard against which they can measure their behaviour. But changing circumstances due to displacement and the political and economic hardships brought on by ongoing crisis have affected gender and other social relations, with consequences for propriety as a Sudanese ideal.

This is especially apparent in changing attitudes toward FGC. Challenges to Sudanese gender ideals emanate from a complex mix of factors including displacement, reverberations from the Islamist consolidation of power in Sudan, and public campaigns in Egypt and Sudan like those against female circumcision. Generational tensions, including those presented by the opening of new opportunities and the passing of older ones, have also challenged gender norms, particularly in terms of employment and marriage. Sudanese are both accommodating and resisting these changes, and their personal strategies in Cairo often call on ‘our traditions’ while creating space for challenging them.

FGC in Sudan as a Paradigm of Embodied Morality

The literature on female genital cutting has long viewed Sudan as the paradigmatic case of embodied morality. If morality and sexual propriety are fundamental to a Sudanese woman's gendered identity, then female genital cutting represents the embodiment of those cultural ideals. Csordas (1994) describes embodiment as a process in which meaning is taken upon the body, where the body should not be viewed as an object but as a subject that embodies lived experience (1994: 10).

It is important to note that gender norms for Sudanese are not monolithic, and that many cultural ideals exist in this nation of diverse ethnic and religious identities. However, FGC is associated with the dominant élite of Sudan and accordingly, has become a marker of ethnic belonging and class status for Sudanese minorities (Doornbos, 1988: 671) even as official efforts to eradicate it gather steam. As recently as the mid-1990s, an estimated 89 per cent of people in the Muslim Arab north of Sudan practiced FGC (Williams and Sobieszczyk, 1996: 626).

Scholars writing on FGC as a rite of passage focus on the cultural paradigm of gendering androgynous children. Boddy, for example, analyzes FGC in Sudan as the need to inscribe female identity on the body by cutting off the clitoris so that it cannot turn into a penis (Boddy, 1988: 748). This cultural belief is prominent in other societies practicing FGC, including Egypt (Lane, 1996: 525; Ghannam, 1997). Scholars have asserted that the gendering of both women and men according to biological sex is essential to all interaction in an Islamic society (Bauer, 1985; Early, 1993; Ghannam, 1997). Sanders, for example points out that in medieval Islamic societies:

However, Ghannam notes, as substantiated by the anthropological and sociological literature, that the female body rather than the male body is central to gender distinctions in the Middle East.

FGC has often been presented as an issue of more immediate concern to women than to men in societies that practice it. Indeed, Wassef and Mansour (1999) in their study of male sexuality and FGC, find the literature very thin indeed on the topic of men's attitudes toward the practice. This is often due to the observation that women are by and large the main decision makers around FGC as a ‘rite of passage,’ determining the age at which their daughters or granddaughters are to be circumcised and deciding on what form the operation should take. It should be noted that most of the practitioners of FGC – whether dayas (midwives) outside the realm of biomedicine or nurses within it – are women.

Modesty and Sexual Propriety: Sudanese Discourses on FGC in Displacement

In my experience, expectations of a Sudanese woman's behaviour often hinges on her ideal domestic role and her sexual propriety. In a mixed gender household, women take responsibility for preparing food and beverages for men and guests, even if they are employed outside the home. In their public interactions with men, women ought not to express sexual interest; their clothing should not be revealing (though head coverings are a personal choice) and they should not linger in public places frequented by men nor return home alone late at night. The modesty ideal for women requires specific behaviour and comportment aimed at sexual propriety. Dress seems to be a less important component of female modesty than ‘appropriate’ interaction with men, along with an awareness of the male gaze as a restraint on ‘inappropriate’ behaviour. Modest dress, in the Islamic sense, is a highly personal decision, and among Sudanese women in both settled and exile communities, dress runs the gamut from the completely covered young married woman on her way to study at an American university, through long skirts and long-sleeved blouses accompanied by varieties of head coverings including the ‘Egyptian-style’ hijab and the tarha, a filmy piece of colored material loosely draped over the head and shoulders, to western-style jeans and T-shirts.

Modest behaviour for women, on the other hand, derives from the cultural norm of segregation by sex, though Sudanese in Cairo by no means practice this in a regulated way. Rather, it involves selecting the venues where one will be seen, and not being overly forward with men. The Sudanese do not feel that ‘brazen’ behaviour in men's presence, such as talking in a loud voice or obvious flirting is appropriately modest, since it calls attention to oneself and undermines a woman's respectability.

Female genital cutting, khitan, is a particularly gender-specific tenet of propriety. Although northern Sudanese have expressed multiple cultural explanations for the continued practice of female circumcision (Oldfield Hayes, 1975; Cloudsley, 1983; Boddy, 1989; Lightfoot-Klein, 1989; Toubia, 1993; El Nagar et al., 1994; Williams and Sobieszczyk, 1996), including hygiene and beauty, religion, and chastity, its role in maintaining women's sexual propriety accounts for much of the continued cultural pressure to operate. The explanation most common in Ain Shams, where I conducted research on female circumcision among settled Sudanese (Fábos, 1997), was maintaining sexual propriety. Hanin, a young woman from the neighbourhood, told me, ‘They [parents] say that it prevents excessive sexual feelings, that taking away just a little helps a girl control herself and behave properly.’ Many Sudanese believe that uncircumcised women are more likely to engage in immodest behaviour, since their natural sexual appetite has not been ‘tamed’ through the operation. This is reflected in jokes and teasing aimed at uncircumcised girls, that it drives them to talk with boys, for example.

However, there are other discourses surrounding the issue of FGC as it regards propriety, sexual or otherwise. The upper-class Sudanese women studied by Bukhari (1997) maintain a fundamentally different attitude toward sexuality, and oppose the practice of FGC as a matter of pride in their cosmopolitanism. While they are familiar with mainstream expectations of Sudanese women's behaviour, they are scornful of the notion that their morality is related to their sexual behaviour. Their dismissal of sexual propriety as a function of an ‘outdated’ Sudanese tradition is reflected in their active rejection of FGC. Women interviewed for this study were adamant about the harm that FGC had caused them in their own sexual life and were determined that their daughters should not repeat the experience. Unlike the Sudanese women in Ain Shams, these cosmopolitan women did not plan to circumcise their daughters. While this group explained their rejection of FGC as being tied to their education and experiences in western countries, it is important to note both that there are indigenous voices of dissent in the Sudanese FGC discourse and that these voices are still a minority.

This assertion is amply demonstrated by the research of Muhammad Osman Al-Obeid, who interviewed a group of displaced Sudanese men, largely students or older professionals, over a period of a year (1997). Most of these men, when queried directly about khitan, felt that FGC was a marginal issue compared to others facing Sudanese communities. Yet when discussing their own sexuality and masculine identity, a different story emerged. Several of the men interviewed expressed their personal opposition to the practice but felt that the peer pressure surrounding feminine propriety, male sexual prowess, and cultural traditions were too much to bear. Only ‘if I am going to live with my family somewhere else like Florida surely I am not going to circumcise my daughters, but as far as I am going to live among my relatives there is no question about circumcising them,’ said one man (Al-Obeid, 1997: 14). Others were concerned that by not circumcising their daughters, they would be considered ma kwayisat (bad girls) in the eyes of fellow villagers. Others confessed to a realization that greater sexual pleasure was to be enjoyed from sexual intercourse with non-circumcised women, but that they did not want their sons-in-law to enjoy such sexual pleasure with their daughters and therefore intended to circumcise them (1997: 13). Finally, since sexual penetration of an infibulated woman is physically difficult, a discourse of sexual prowess is tied to the continued circumcision of women. One interviewee expressed this concern, saying, ‘What does it mean someone's daughter is being circumcised? Are you not man enough to reopen her?’ (1997: 16).

This anxiety with emasculation is significant as well when considered together with the emasculating effects of displacement for Sudanese men.

One might expect that a similar kind of anxiety as that expressed by Egyptian men (Wassef and Mansour, 1999) regarding their potential impotence in the face of the perception of an all-powerful female sexuality might be magnified by the social problems facing Sudanese men due to loss of their breadwinner role in the household. Furthermore, the growing sense of alienation and embattled identity among Sudanese living in Cairo might lead us to conclude that FGC, as a clear marker of sexual propriety, would not only be maintained but actually promoted as a marker as well of an ethnic boundary between Sudanese and their Egyptian hosts. Surprisingly, this does not seem to be the case among Sudanese in Cairo. Indigenous voices of dissent appear to find fertile ground among Sudanese of all social classes for whom the decision to perform FGC on their daughters is a choice made under social duress.

Living in Cairo makes it easier to overcome social expectations that Sudanese girls should be infibulated or even subjected to cliterodectomy. Assia, a woman who had fled Sudan with her husband and two daughters told me that, had she stayed in Sudan, family and social pressure for her to circumcise them would have been too much for her to resist. Despite her opposition to the operation, Assia told me, ‘maybe in Sudan there would be pressure from my mother and grandmother, so here in Cairo I'm free of that kind of pressure.’ The cosmopolitan women of Cairo's upper-class Sudanese women also acknowledge the importance of the absence of family and neighbourhood pressure in maintaining their stance against FGC. The willingness of these women:

Morphological Change in the ‘Language’ of FGC

One of the questions asked in the course of research on changing Sudanese attitudes towards FGC was, if women have not been circumcised by their relatives, who are they and how have they been able to maintain their Sudanese identity outside ideal norms of propriety and gender? A cross-section of these women reveals a wide variety of reasons. Some have grown up outside of their communities, or have lived in societies that do not practice khitan. Others had ‘enlightened’ parents, or had one parent who came from a culture where khitan was unknown. Overall, these women reported that they are happy with themselves, with their marital relationships, and felt able to withstand the peer and social pressure they experienced ‘back home.’

An important group of Muslim Arab Sudanese who do not circumcise their daughters as a matter of ideological commitment are the Republican Brothers, a progressive Sudanese Muslim movement established in the 1930s by the charismatic religious leader Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. Mai, a young mother who had not been circumcised by her Republican Brother parents, was a staunch believer in the right of a woman to sexual pleasure, and described her marital relations as ‘very, very good.’ Nevertheless, Republican Brother families are susceptible to the same social pressures as other Sudanese, and one woman descended from Taha himself still found it easier to stick to her anti-circumcision beliefs far away from relatives and neighbours in Sudan.

Growing up at a distance from the cultural borders of Sudanese society may not free a woman from social expectations entirely, but in the case of Salwa her youth in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait is one reason she gives for her parents’ decision not to circumcise. They never raised the issue, but she grew up believing that being uncircumcised was normal. Salwa learned about khitan on visits with relatives, where she grew to associate the word with pain but also thought that there must be a good reason for why it is practiced. She remembers being frightened when her circumcised cousins told her, during her visits to Sudan, that she would be unable to have children, and she has had periods of doubt when she thought perhaps it would have been better if she had been circumcised, but they passed.

Moving away from the relatives and neighbors who see their responsibility as upholding traditions such as khitan seems to have been a significant reason for some of the women we spoke with not to circumcise their daughters. One family, seeking refugee status in the West, has two daughters who are nearing the age where, had they lived in Sudan, circumcision would be the norm. Being away from the pressure exerted by grandmothers, in particular, was an important reason cited by this and other families who did not circumcise their girls. Had they been in Sudan, they asserted, they doubted that they would have been able to resist. Even in Ain Shams, the Cairo neighborhood settled by Sudanese in the 1940s, khitan is the norm. But campaigns and publicity carried out by activists, NGOs, and the Egyptian government about the harmfulness of FGC have clearly reached the settled Sudanese population as well. I came into contact with several women who made it quite clear to me that their Sudanese identity, with its acknowledged focus on propriety norms as ethnic boundary markers, was by no means inconsistent with their firm belief that girls should not be circumcised. Heba, a television director, was raised in Ain Shams but moved out of the community to an Egyptian neighborhood where many professionals live. Heba has strong feelings against FGC and has not circumcised her daughter, a decision she says she came to by herself. She remained active in a Sudanese NGO promoting women's empowerment until her untimely death in 1997. Abeer, a woman in her twenties who still lives in Ain Shams, is, like Heba, university-educated, but maintains that she has questioned the importance of FGC since she was a young girl. She has placed women's empowerment at the center of her work on behalf of the Sudanese community in Cairo. She has no plans to circumcise her future daughters, and is a forceful voice against FGC among her Sudanese peers in Ain Shams.

These women and their families are at the vanguard of the social change that other Sudanese suggest is inevitable. There is clearly a relationship between geographic or cultural distance from a social environment that shapes and perpetuates people's attitudes toward khitan. There are examples of the effect of mobility on the practice of FGC for other groups. Izett and Toubia cite anecdotal evidence suggesting:

Despite the tension between a Sudanese identity discourse that promotes propriety as an ethnic boundary marker and the apparent relationship between displacement and the declining practice of FGC, creative and empowering options for women do seem to be included in the circumstances of Sudanese displacement.

Conclusion

The characteristics that underpin Sudanese identity in Cairo, expressed through the propriety discourse, have gained more importance for this community in crisis in being harder to fulfill. It is more difficult, and thus more respected, to extend hospitality to guests when one's pockets are empty and when one's neighbours are living in equally straitened circumstances. Ideals of modesty are harder for working women to maintain when their jobs keep them late or force them into contact with ‘immoral’ activities such as brewing or drinking alcohol. A Sudanese person who is able to maintain his or her ‘Sudaneseness’ in Cairo through adherence to the propriety ideal contributes to the belief that Sudanese are different from Egyptians and have a unique identity that is worthwhile preserving.

At the same time, Sudanese in Cairo have a certain freedom to buck social norms. A political exile and concerned father of two, Yousif had been waiting for resettlement to Canada for over a year. He told me that even if Sudan became safe again, he would not return for the simple reason that his 5-year-old daughter might choose to be a ballerina, a profession that would be unacceptable for girls in Sudanese society. He wanted to ensure that she could make choices unavailable to her in Sudan that did not conflict with her ‘respectability.’ The cultural concept of propriety is not unique to Muslim Arab Sudanese; indeed, the propriety discourse in the contemporary Middle East, which traces its roots back to pre-Islamic times, developed in conjunction with Arab and Muslim cultures over centuries of interaction. In the Region, it also enjoys popular recognition among diverse societies as an idiom for good manners and proper behaviour.

Propriety also encompasses gender norms, though is not limited to the concepts of sexual propriety, honor, and other shared aspects of ideal behaviours for men and women drawn from the same pool of cultural knowledge. Nevertheless, despite the similar characteristics of both gender expectations and propriety norms in the Arab world, variations of cultural practices and beliefs arise as prescriptive ideals interact with and rub against specific circumstances.

In this article, I have dealt with both generalized propriety as a boundary marker of Sudanese identity in Cairo, and gendered attitudes toward morality and FGC as a fundamental aspect of that boundary. Sudanese have been profoundly affected by the ongoing political crisis in their home country, by the displacement triggered by political and economic collapse, and by their deteriorating legal and social status in Egypt. The dramatic changes in the circumstances of Sudanese residence in Cairo have challenged the cultural norm of gender complementarity as men ‘stay at home’ for want of work while women seek and find new opportunities for themselves. This unstable situation has led Sudanese to place more emphasis on ‘proper’ ways of behaving and being, an assertion that helps define the ethnic boundaries of the Sudanese community in Cairo. Finally, I have demonstrated the discrepancies between discourse and reality through ethnographic data while analyzing how Sudanese have found new ways of asserting their identity and resisting the practice of FGC.