When I was a member of a Muslim women's forum, many of whom were in the UK, they would talk about seeing a doctor to have a small 'v' cut out of their labia, as a sort of symbolic act, in line with some hadith.
Why there is a need to mess with perfectly fine bits of anatomy is totally and utterly beyond me.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her book Infidel : my life describes the circumstances around having FGM done to her and her sister in Somalia, when they were ~6 years old, I think. She was older than her sister at the time. Her parents were progressive people, they did not want it done to them. Her father was arrested and her mother was trying to provide for them, and while she was away, her grandmother arranged for it to be done.
Reading her experience left me feeling hollow and outraged for months, and I couldn't finish the book.
She recounts that other girls who had it done would tease girls who hadn't by saying their bits would grow and dangle down to their knees.
A Sikh friend on another forum, who grew up in Africa, recounts one of her school friends begging her mother to let her have it done.
My money is on the practice being cultural, not Islamic, but it is a sheer shame it wasn't forbidden outright, and instead enshrined as OK in hadith, thus removing some of the impetus to fight against it.
And that women now have elective surgery to symbolise it? I can't fathom their mindset.
