Chantal Zabus' Between Rites & Rights is an important addition to the body of literature on female genital mutilation, a practice that has affected at least 140 million women and girls. It contributes to the subject by compiling and analysing women's experiential literature on the practice (which Zabus terms ‘excision’). The analysis turns on ‘what women really feel and know as opposed to what they are supposed to feel and know’ (p. 3).

This work is an important intervention into the debate over which human rights are most important. There has been a great deal of writing on the tension between cultural rights and other human rights in recent years, and the topic of female genital mutilation is an example, with elements of several different human rights including the right to culture. As human rights law has evolved, there has been a greater emphasis on cultural rights yet, at the same time, there has been a corresponding increase in the recognition of other human rights such as women's and sexual rights.

Zabus understands this issue of tension between human rights, but mediates it not by endorsing any one category of rights as supreme (for example the right to health should trump the right to culture), but by removing the issue from the debate altogether. According to Zabus, ‘imaginatively enter[ing] the space of other women's experience via the texts they wrote’ avoids the need to choose sides in the debate (p. 3). Using experiential texts allows the reader to see the issue through the eyes of those actively affected.

Through excerpts from experiential texts, Zabus draws attention to an oft overlooked piece of the debate over female genital mutilation, namely the problems non-excised women face because of their intact genitalia. According to Zabus, ‘the African woman is sitting between a rock and a hard place’ (p. 211). The experiential texts described in Zabus' work portray in vivid detail the predicament of uncircumcised women. The rite of female genital mutilation is seen as a blessing ensuring femininity (p. 39), affecting a woman's reputation and marriageability (p. 63). The texts also illuminate the humiliation and psychological conflict faced by uncircumcised women (p. 70), with some of them pointing out the belief that an uncircumcised woman would cause the death of her husband or children (p. 75). By explaining through examples the predicament uncircumcised women may find themselves in, Zabus illustrates how non-African activists, though well-meaning, are ineffective in their efforts to end female genital mutilation, coming across as neo-imperialist, possibly driving more women to the procedure. Zabus points out why the practice is so important to various cultures by framing it in terms of reactance, a backlash against colonialism (p. 35). According to Zabus, ‘female excision is inextricably linked with the survival of an ethnic group, its social order, and even history … forbidding the custom … is construed … as an attempt to eradicate an ethnic group’ (p. 38).

Because the book is explicit in describing women's experiences with female genital mutilation, it is a difficult read, yet woven through the stories is a message of hope, as Zabus notes that the rise of experiential texts is a sign that the practice is on its way out, noting that ‘rites are indeed like proverbs; they are committed down to writing when they are on the verge of extinction’ (p. 265). Its weakness is that its organisation is a bit disjointed, and the text at times tedious; however, this is outweighed by the substantial contribution it makes to the body of scholarship on female genital mutilation as a cultural right or rite.