Thread: Surgery offering illusion of virginity draws Muslim women

June 11, 2008, 1:23AM
Surgery offering illusion of virginity draws Muslim women
Many in Europe caught between freedom, tradition


By ELAINE SCIOLINO and SOUAD MEKHENNET
New York Times


PARIS — The operation in the private clinic off the Champs-Elysees 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 thin vaginal membrane that normally breaks during 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.


Pull of tradition
As Europe's Muslim population grows, many young Muslim women find themselves caught between the freedoms that European society affords and the traditions of their parents' and grandparents' generations.

Gynecologists report that in the past few years, more Muslim women are asking for 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 cheaper.

"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 the subject of 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 takes a road trip to Casablanca for the operation.

"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."


Importance of virginity
The issue has been particularly charged in France, where a renewed 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 discovered his bride was not the virgin she had claimed to be.

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 sexual equality.

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






http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5830251.html

So it's OK to lie to your husband in Islam in front of the Koran ... a big lie to start a marriage of one big Illusion

So who lies on the virgin certificates