BOSTON — John pulled his cab over when he heard Dr. Nawal M. Nour on the radio. The Sudanese American physician was describing the clinic she runs for women who have undergone female circumcision -- women like his wife, Miriam -- and John wanted to learn all he could.
"Other doctors, they didn't know our culture," said John, a Somali immigrant who did not want the family's full name used. "Sometimes we felt, my wife and I, like people were looking at us differently. They know we are different, because of the circumcision. It looks to them like a surprise -- like 'What has happened to this woman?' "
To Nour, 38, female genital mutilation, as she and many other critics refer to the practice, is repugnant, but by no means baffling.
It was her familiarity with the medical and social implications of this cultural tradition that led her to start this country's only clinic dedicated largely to women who have undergone the procedure, in which all or part of the clitoris is removed. In the most radical forms of female circumcision, all external genitalia are removed. Nour launched the African Women's Health Practice at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital in 1999, and last year won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship to help her continue the work.
According to the World Health Organization, about 140 million girls and women worldwide have either already undergone some form of female genital excision or will have before reaching adulthood. In the United States, Nour said, about 170,000 girls and women are "at risk" or have had the procedure, even though it was outlawed by Congress in 1997.
In Sudan, Nour said, "there was something that happened when I was younger to the girls I knew in Khartoum. Almost casually, they would say, 'Oh, I got circumcised. Did you?' "
She did not. Nour's American mother and her Sudanese father, a Cabinet minister, opposed the custom, the origins of which are murky. They saw no merit, Nour said, in the belief that circumcision made a daughter marriageable, helped promote a lifetime of cleanliness and stifled promiscuity by reducing sexual pleasure.
Nour went to high school in London, then to Brown University in Providence, R.I. She wrote her senior thesis on the emancipation of Egyptian women and, after graduation, went to work for the United Nations.
Later, with a medical degree from Harvard University, Nour's fluency in Arabic became her calling card. Patients sought out the obstetrics and gynecology resident, who became known in the growing immigrant community here as "the African physician."
