“Female genital mutilation (FGM) is an Islamic practice.”
Short answer
FGM has no basis in the Qur'an, and mainstream Islamic scholarship across the majority of the Muslim world condemns it as a harmful cultural practice, not a religious requirement. It predates Islam and is concentrated in specific regions, practiced by some non-Muslim communities there too.
FGM is not mentioned in the Qur’an, and the practice predates Islam, associated with specific regional cultures in parts of Africa (and some non-African communities) rather than with Islamic teaching as such — it is also practiced by some Christian, Jewish, and other communities within those same regions, further indicating a cultural rather than specifically Islamic origin.
Major Islamic institutions, including Al-Azhar University, have issued rulings condemning FGM as harmful and inconsistent with Islamic principles protecting the body from unnecessary harm. The practice is concentrated geographically rather than correlating with Islam generally — many Muslim-majority countries have no meaningful prevalence of FGM at all, while it persists in some non-Muslim communities within affected regions.
This is a case where cultural practice is sometimes wrongly conflated with religious teaching — a pattern this site addresses across several topics.
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