The depressing news: Talking about women’s rights isn’t doing much to stop female genital mutilation.  The good news: Reminding people that it’s not required by the Quran does seem to be effective.

Not that this should be surprising.  As Samhita at Feministing points out, the feminist movement has always suffered from a PR problem: people see it as the province of privileged white Westerners, so they reject it out of hand.  Oddly, this seems to be echoed in the West via the right-wing rejection of feminism as the province of privileged nanny-obsessed navel-gazers—a rejection often accompanied by complaints that the movement doesn’t care enough about the Third World, despite exactly the kind of anti-FGM work that’s currently being rejected by sub-Saharan Africans as too Western—but I digress.  Feminism has always dealt with these kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” issues, and it’ll always get around them.  The point is, when you talk to devout people in the language of their religion, they’re more likely to listen.