Muslim Women and Virginity: 2 Worlds Collide

[West Maghreb Dialogue]

Muslim Women and Virginity: 2 Worlds Collide
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and SOUAD MEKHENNET
New York Times, June 11, 2008

PARIS - The operation in the private clinic off the Champs-Élysées
involved one semicircular cut, 10 dissolving stitches and a discounted
fee of $2,900.

But for the patient, a 23-year-old French student of Moroccan descent
from Montpellier, the 30-minute procedure represented the key to a new
life: the illusion of virginity.

Like an increasing number of Muslim women in Europe, she had a
hymenoplasty, a restoration of her hymen, the vaginal membrane that
normally breaks in the first act of intercourse.

"In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt," said the student,
perched on a hospital bed as she awaited surgery on Thursday. "Right
now, virginity is more important to me than life."

As Europe's Muslim population grows, many young Muslim women are
caught between the freedoms that European society affords and the deep-
rooted traditions of their parents' and grandparents' generations.

Gynecologists say that in the past few years, more Muslim women are
seeking certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in
turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen
replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected
and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The
service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages
are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.

"If you're a Muslim woman growing up in more open societies in Europe,
you can easily end up having sex before marriage," said Dr. Hicham
Mouallem, who is based in London and performs the operation. "So if
you're looking to marry a Muslim and don't want to have problems,
you'll try to recapture your virginity."

No reliable statistics are available, because the procedure is mostly
done in private clinics and in most cases not covered by tax-financed
insurance plans.

But hymen repair is talked about so much that it is the subject of a
film comedy that opens in Italy this week. "Women's Hearts," as the
film's title is translated in English, tells the story of a Moroccan-
born woman living in Italy who goes to Casablanca for the operation.

One character jokes that she wants to bring her odometer count back
down to "zero."

"We realized that what we thought was a sporadic practice was actually
pretty common," said Davide Sordella, the film's director. "These
women can live in Italy, adopt our mentality and wear jeans. But in
the moments that matter, they don't always have the strength to go
against their culture."

The issue has been particularly charged in France, where a renewed and
fierce debate has occurred about a prejudice that was supposed to have
been buried with the country's sexual revolution 40 years ago: the
importance of a woman's virginity.

The furor followed the revelation two weeks ago that a court in Lille,
in northern France, had annulled the 2006 marriage of two French
Muslims because the groom found his bride was not the virgin she had
claimed to be.

The domestic drama has gripped France. The groom, an unidentified
engineer in his 30s, left the nuptial bed and announced to the still
partying wedding guests that his bride had lied. She was delivered
that night to her parents' doorstep.

The next day, he approached a lawyer about annulling the marriage. The
bride, then a nursing student in her 20s, confessed and agreed to an
annulment.

The court ruling did not mention religion. Rather, it cited breach of
contract, concluding that the engineer had married her after "she was
presented to him as single and chaste." In secular, republican France,
the case touches on several delicate subjects: the intrusion of
religion into daily life; the grounds for dissolution of a marriage;
and the equality of the sexes.

There were calls in Parliament this week for the resignation of
Rachida Dati, France's justice minister, after she initially upheld
the ruling. Ms. Dati, who is a Muslim, backed down and ordered an
appeal.

Some feminists, lawyers and doctors warned that the court's acceptance
of the centrality of virginity in marriage would encourage more
Frenchwomen from Arab and African Muslim backgrounds to have their
hymens restored. But there is much debate about whether the procedure
is an act of liberation or repression.

"The judgment was a betrayal of France's Muslim women," said Elisabeth
Badinter, the feminist writer. "It sends these women a message of
despair by saying that virginity is important in the eyes of the law.
More women are going to say to themselves, 'My God, I'm not going to
take that risk. I'll recreate my virginity.' "

The plight of the rejected bride persuaded the Montpellier student to
have the operation.

She insisted that she had never had intercourse and only discovered
her hymen was torn when she tried to obtain a certificate of virginity
to present to her boyfriend and his family. She says she bled after an
accident on a horse when she was 10.

The trauma from realizing that she could not prove her virginity was
so intense, she said, that she quietly borrowed money to pay for the
procedure.

"All of a sudden, virginity is important in France," she said. "I
realized that I could be seen like that woman everyone is talking
about on television."

Those who perform the procedure say they are empowering patients by
giving them a viable future and preventing them from being abused - or
even killed - by their fathers or brothers.

"Who am I to judge?" asked Dr. Marc Abecassis, who restored the
Montpellier student's hymen. "I have colleagues in the United States
whose patients do this as a Valentine's present to their husbands.
What I do is different. This is not for amusement. My patients don't
have a choice if they want to find serenity - and husbands."

A specialist in what he calls "intimate" surgery, including penile
enhancement, Dr. Abecassis says he performs two to four hymen
restorations per week.

The French College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians opposes the
procedure on moral, cultural and health grounds.

"We had a revolution in France to win equality; we had a sexual
revolution in 1968 when women fought for contraception and abortion,"
said Dr. Jacques Lansac, the group's leader. "Attaching so much
importance to the hymen is regression, submission to the intolerance
of the past."

But the stories of the women who have had the surgery convey the
complexity and raw emotion behind their decisions.

One Muslim born in Macedonia said she opted for the operation to avoid
being punished by her father after an eight-year relationship with her
boyfriend.

"I was afraid that my father would take me to a doctor and see whether
I was still a virgin," said the woman, 32, who owns a small business
and lives on her own in Frankfurt. "He told me, 'I will forgive
everything but not if you have thrown dirt on my honor.' I wasn't
afraid he would kill me, but I was sure he would have beaten me."

In other cases, the woman and her partner decide for her to have the
operation. A 26-year-old French woman of Moroccan descent said she
lost her virginity four years ago when she fell in love with the man
she now plans to marry. But she and her fiancé decided to share the
cost of her $3,400 operation in Paris.

She said his conservative extended family in Morocco was requiring
that a gynecologist - and family friend - there examine her for proof
of virginity before the wedding.

"It doesn't matter for my fiancé that I am not a virgin - but it would
pose a huge problem for his family," she said. "They know that you can
pour blood on the sheets on the wedding night, so I have to have
better proof."

The lives of the French couple whose marriage was annulled are on
hold. The Justice Ministry has sought an appeal, arguing that the
decision has "provoked a heated social debate" that "touched all
citizens of our country and especially women."

At the Islamic Center of Roubaix, the Lille suburb where the wedding
took place, there is sympathy for the woman.

"The man is the biggest of all the donkeys," said Abdelkibir Errami,
the center's vice president. "Even if the woman was no longer a
virgin, he had no right to expose her honor. This is not what Islam
teaches. It teaches forgiveness."

Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting from Paris, and Elisabetta
Povoledo from Rome.



Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company