Mohammed Moussaoui, the newly elected head of France’s Muslim council CFCM, has lost no time in criticising the case of a Muslim husband who had his marriage annulled because his wife had lied about being a virgin. The “virginity lie” case caused uproar in France, where critics warned against letting religious issues creep into civil law. Under public pressure, Justice Minister Rachida Dati (herself a Muslim who had a marriage annulled), dropped her original positive assessment and had the decision overturned. The couple remains married until September, when the case will be considered again.

Asked about the case, Moussaoui told the Paris daily Le Figaro: “These people confuse customs and religion. Chastity is recommended for the man and the woman, but it is not a condition for a Muslim marriage. A man loves a women as she is, virgin or not.”

National Muslim leaders in France were notably silent about the issue when it flared up. One of the few who did say anything, Fouad Aloui of the Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF), was the main rival to Moussaoui in the recent election as CFCM president. All he said was: “This is not a religious case. It is a legal decision based on the law, so it is up to the judge to decide.” That sounds like an indirect approval of the decision, although it must be said he sounded quite reluctant to talk about it at all (here France Info audio in French).

If the CFCM does get more active, as Moussaoui has pledged to do, it might be logical to call him to testify at the appeal. That could be interesting because his statement could be interpreted in two ways. By saying a preference for virgins is a custom and not based on Islam, he could be called by the defence lawyer who argued religion should play no role in the court’s deliberations. But by saying virginity is not a condition for a Muslim marriage, he could equally testify for a prosecutor arguing the man had no right to an annulment based on the idea that virginity was an “essential quality” of a bride.

The appeal is coming up in late September. Watch this space.

A French Muslim who blocked a male doctor from performing an emergency caeserian on his wife has lost his bid to sue the hospital because his son was born handicapped, according to French press and radio reports. The court also ordered him to pay the court costs — €1,000 ($1,550) — because he kept the doctor from “performing the tests that could have prevented the serious neurological complications” that occurred. Coming shortly after the “virginity lie” controversy, this case has once again raised the question of if and how to accommodate religious demands from Muslims in France.

The law in French state hospitals is clear. Women can request women doctors and probably get them most of the time. But if the attending doctor that night is a man, as happened in this case, the woman — and in this case, her husband — have to accept that. When this woman went into labour in November 1998, the couple rushed to a hospital in Bourg-en-Bresse and a midwife examined her. She recognised a complication and called the doctor, but the husband physically blocked him for half an hour because he did not want a strange man touching his wife. By the time he gave in, it was too late for a caeserian and the baby had to be delivered by foreceps. Little Mohammed is now 100% handicapped.

The father sued the hospital for €100,000 in damages and €10,000 in personal compensation. The court rejected this and blamed the father, saying: “The child’s state is totally attributable to the attitude of Mr. Radouane Ijjou.”

The issue of Muslims demanding exceptions at state hospitals has been an issue in France since 2003, when the Stasi Commission (whose hearings led to the headscarf ban in state schools) heard doctors say a growing number of Muslim men refused to let male doctors treat their wives. There were stories of fistfights between husbands and doctors — including one non-fatal stabbing — and husbands driving from emergency room to emergency room searching for a female doctor to treat a wife in desperate need of medical attention. But while these stories appeared from time to time in the media, it was hard to get clear facts on specific cases. My impression was that there was a definate problem, with some very worrying cases, but it was not as widespread as the French media seemed to say it was.

This is a clear case that has gone through the legal system. I think the judge was 100% correct in not only rejecting this suit but throwing the blame back on that irresponsible father’s shoulders. He — and his wife, and especially his son — is the victim of a kind of folk Islam that confused cultural traditions with faith. Several Muslim scholars and chaplains I spoke to while researching other cases said they could have given him a litany of Koran quotes to prove that his wife’s and son’s health came first. One doctor I met once had the Paris Grand Mosque fax over a fatwa to convince a Muslim couple to perform an emergency abortion.

Have you seen cases of faith vs. health care clashes in your local media? Do they look like hearsay or are they well sourced? I think this is less serious than it’s made out to be, but when it’s serious — like in this case — it can be tragic.

The “virginity lie” case gripping France for the past two days has given French politicians the opportunity to indulge in one of their favourite pastimes — expressing indignation. There’s been much more heat than light in this story since it broke last Friday.

If you haven’t been following it, the story is about a French Muslim couple who got their marriage annulled after the husband complained the wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be. Since he could not have cited either religion or the traditional Muslim preference for virgin brides as valid reasons for annulment, the husband’s lawyer argued the wife had lied about an “essential quality” necessary for the marriage. Under French law, a marriage can be annulled if, for example, one partner found out only after the wedding that the other had lied about a previous marriage or a criminal record.

Politicians, feminists and human rights activists immediately demanded the ruling be overturned. The critics vied to issue the most ringing denunciation. “A real fatwa for women’s liberation … (like) a ruling handed down in Kandahar” was a memorable one from Fadela Amara, the state secretary for urban affairs who comes from an Algerian Muslim family. Here are many more in French. By Monday, Justice Minister Rachida Dati — another cabinet member with a North African Muslim background — was flip-flopping. After originally defending the ruling as a means of helping a woman get out of an unwanted marriage, she decided on Monday to ask a public prosecutor to launch an appeal.

The news today was that the erstwhile husband and wife both accept the ruling and do not want an appeal that would make them a legally married couple all over again and force them to replay their separation through a longer and more costly divorce process. The woman’s lawyer said she was furious. “I have to get on with my life,” he quoted her as saying. “I don’t know who decided that they would think for me. I haven’t asked for anything. It feels like I’m hallucinating.”

Almost nobody but the couple and their lawyers want the ruling to stand. But almost nobody is actually thinking through the implications of what they’re demanding.

Most critics want the ruling overturned for one or several of the following reasons:

• it violates a woman’s privacy by making virginity a possible criterion for marriage.
• it violates sexual equality because no proof is asked of a groom’s virginity.
• it introduces a religious concept of the virgin bride into the secular marriage contract.
• it treats the bride like merchandise in a commercial transaction.

These are all valid arguments. Unfortunately, the result of a successful appeal would be to restore the marriage of a couple who do not want to be married, especially not after the drama they went through. As was widely reported, the hoodwinked husband discovered his wife’s lie on their first night together and went right back to the wedding reception, which was still in progress, to announce the news…

Simply overturning the ruling would also leave on the books the paragraph in the civil code that allowed it in the first place. Several hundred marriages are annulled in France every year because of the “essential quality” clause, and nobody’s saying this should be scrapped. Some critics have said the other criteria — such as hiding a previous marriage – were OK but a woman’s sex life must remain completely private. There is probably a way to amend the code to accommodate that, but the legislators will have to get around another problem. Male impotence is currently accepted as a criterion for annulment. Should that be private too?

One of the few politicians who seemed to look beyond a knee-jerk reaction was the straight-talking health minister, Roselyne Bachelot. While explaining her position, she made some statements that might surprise people outside of France. But her comments still made a lot more sense than most others:

“This is a topic that cannot be resolved in court,” she said. “What one ruling has done, another can’t simply undo. Now, it’s an issue for national legislators. Parliament is where all this should be decided.

“It’s true that the notion of a ‘fundamental quality’ is something that, in the case of virginity, may have been widely accepted … in the 19th century or in the early 20th. Morals have changed and that’s fine. So I want parliament to pass a law to define these characteristics.”

She rejected the argument that the wife’s lie was the central issue. “The right to lie is a fundamental right of human beings. The issue at the heart of this is the notion of a fundamental, substantial and essential quality.”

Nadine Morano, the state secretary for family affairs, warned against seeing this as a Muslim issue. “People say it’s a Muslim family, but I also know many families of practising Catholics for whom this element remains an essential quality for both the man and the woman.”

“No matter what anyone says, the decision handed down by the court in Lille conformed to the civil code. Should we make a law and say we cannot include virginity as one of the essential qualities of a person simply because we see that it creates inequality between men and women?”

Any suggestions about what French lawmakers should do once the soundbite phase of this story is over?

A French court has annulled the marriage of two French Muslims because the husband complained his wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be. His lawyer won the case by arguing a civil marriage is a legal contract and lying about an important element in it amounts to fraud. Religion had nothing to do with it, he argued, and the court agreed. More details are in our news story here.

But religion obviously had something to do with this. The man has a traditional Muslim view (and not only Muslim, by the way…) that his wife must be a virgin at marriage. Some Muslim families shun daughters who are sexually active before marriage, in rare cases going so far as committing a so-called “honour killing.”

The decision is also discriminatory. Only a woman’s virginity can be physically tested, so applying this standard violates the legal equality between men and women.

The clause in the civil code that the lawyer used is usually applied to cases where a spouse finds his/her new partner concealed an earlier divorce or had a physical or mental disability that made a normal sex life impossible. French media have mentioned earlier cases where it was used. In one, a man had his marriage annulled because he discovered his wife had been a prostitute. In another, a devout Catholic woman used it against a husband who had concealed his earlier divorce.

One interesting angle here — although Islam is mentioned in this debate, there hasn’t been much Muslim-bashing or suggestions of “creeping Sharia” like those made in Britain after Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams suggested some elements of Islamic law should be taken into British law. It’s not surprising the husband’s lawyer did not mention religion because a French court would have thrown out an argument based on faith. The debate is over which issue takes precedence, prosecution of a fraud case or defence of equality and individual rights.

Amar Lafsar, rector of a large mosque in Lille where the case was tried, said Islam does not necessarily demand virginity for a new bride and gives men and women the same rights. Asked what he tells young Muslim women considering marriage, he said: “I tell them a girl should preserve herself for her husband, for her Prince Charming, and if the girls listen and preserve their virginity and chastity, that’s great. But they’re free. They’re in a country of law and liberty. Each is free to respond or not to the message.” Here he is speaking in French to RTL radio.

The man was reported to be a 30-year-old French convert to Islam and his wife a student of about 20 from a French Muslim family. According to Le Monde, the wedding festivities stretched late into the night and the husband, who had left with his wife, returned to the party and announced the news. He went to see his lawyer in the morning.

The case leaves a whole list of questions. Looking back, should the court have ruled as it did? Should the principle of sexual equality take precedence over the realities of a broken contract? And what should now be done? A government spokesman suggested an appeals court should review the verdict, but overturning it would place the woman back in a marriage her husband doesn’t want. Letting the verdict stand creates a precedent that, according to feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter, treats the woman as “merchandise.”

What do you think about this?

Should some Islamic countries be barred from the Beijing Olympics? The question came up in an interesting op-ed piece this week arguing that countries that ban women from competing in sports events violate the Olympic Charter and thus should be excluded from the Games. As Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, wrote in the International Herald Tribune:

The procession of the Olympic torch drew protests from Paris to San Francisco over China’s treatment of the Tibetan people, but no one has protested another tragedy that is afflicting millions of women in Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Muslim countries. Many Muslim women dare not even dream of the Olympics because their countries ban female sports altogether or severely restrict the athletic activities of the “weaker sex.”

The International Olympic Committee charter states that “any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, sex or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”

But the Olympic Committee is failing to adhere to its own standards. While the hypothetical example of participating countries barring black athletes from the Olympic Games would have rightly caused international outrage, the committee continues to allow the participation of countries that do not allow women on their Olympic teams.

Countries with men-only Olympic teams include Brunei, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. According to their respective governments, women are barred from Olympic participation for “cultural and religious reasons.”

This raises some interesing questions about Islam and sports.  Al Ahmed says those countries barring women from the Olympics cite “cultural and religious reasons” for doing so. If there are 56 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), that means that over 50 other Muslim countries do not agree with the idea of banning women from sports competition. So is the opposition from Brunei, Saudi Arabia and the UAE simply cultural? And if so, is it valid for those countries to cite Islam as a reason for their decision?

The Olympic Charter clearly states in its Fundamental Principles of Olympism that sex discrimination violates the Olympic spirit. But obviously the International Olympic Committee is not enforcing this rule and the men-only teams are not respecting it. Should the IOC put its foot down and demand compliance?

Another interesting aspect that Al Ahmed mentions is that the number of men-only teams is falling- “from 35 in Barcelona in 1992 to 26 in Atlanta in 1996 to only 10 in Sydney in 2000 and four or five at the last Olympics in Athens.” One country in those statistics is Algeria – a recent feature by our North Africa chief correspondent William Maclean tells the story.

Al Ahmed has an optimistic conclusion:

“If the IOC is pressed to live up to its own standards, the London Games in 2012 should witness the celebration of female Olympians from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and other Muslim countries.”

Can this change that quickly? Let us know what you think.

For most readers outside the United States, and probably many living there, the recent stories about the polygamous sect raided in Texas in early April raised several basic questions about multiple marriage and the law in America. Like any other Western society, the United States bans polygamy. Mainstream Mormons officially banned the practice in 1890, but several breakaway groups continued it. While informed readers may know that, it still came as a surprise to see there was a polygamous community of several hundred Americans living in a large compound right under the noses of the local police and politicians. And they were not the only ones — once-hidden polygamists are now pressing to have “plural marriage” decriminalised. What’s going on here?

Andrea Useem, author of the interesting blog Religion Writer, has come up with a fascinating look behind these recent polygamy headlines. She’s got links to blogs with names such as Polygamy Now and Introspection of a Plural Wife (at Heart). The most interesting part, though, is the long interview she has with John Witte, the director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory Law School in Atlanta. As she puts it: “He explains why polygamy laws are rarely enforced, how “moral repugnance” is one of the last arguments against polygamy, and why having a concubine is still legal.”

Read it all here.

Useem also has a link to one of several interviews with women in polygamous marraiges on YouTube. Here it is:

Britain passed its law legalising abortion 40 years ago today. But the controversy has not died down. Parliament is again besieged by two camps of activists, one keen to stop what they say is murder and the other defending what they see as a women’s right. Judging it too difficult to have the law overturned, the anti-abortion camp aims to lower the 24-week limit for the termination of pregnancy to 20, 18 or even fewer weeks.

For more, read Kate Kelland’s feature here. We also have a factbox on abortion laws around the world and the story of a boy born at 22 weeks — probably the most premature baby to have survived in Britain — and now thriving.

The factbox shows a wide spectrum of legal positions, with differing rationales producing different conditions, especially on the time limits. Britain is clearly in a minority with its 24-week limit; many other countries set the bar at 12 weeks, with possible exceptions.

Do you think Britain should reduce its 24-week limit?

It started as a women’s protest for the right to wear Muslim headscarves at university, in this case at Marmara University in Istanbul. Then the men showed up with their banners and megaphones, lined up in front of the cameras and began speaking in place of the women. That left the ladies standing demurely on the sidelines or in the crowd, all decked out with their bright silk scarves with nothing to do but clap at what the men said.

It was just another case of what women here often complain about — that the headscarf has been hijacked by politics for decades, leaving ordinary women to suffer the consequences. Some have sacrificed an education for their faith, preferring not to go to university if it means uncovering, and they feel like little more than a political football in this very masculine power struggle.

Check out our video from Marmara University, especially the protester who says “We want freedom to wear headscarves!” Hmmm … do you think he’ll ever wear one?

Turkish politics is deeply divided over whether women should be allowed to wear the headscarf at university and elsewhere in public life. Secularists, who fear that pious Turks are bent on curbing their right to live as they please, are trying to protect Turkey’s official secularism so fiercely that they are accused of restricting religious freedom. Pious Muslims are clamouring for a change in the strict ban on headscarves as a human right. And, as in the video, it’s the men who do most of the talking.

“Some are trying to win votes by banning the headscarf, others by allowing it, and we’re stuck in the middle. For years they have been making politics over me and my headscarf,” one angry young woman told me at Marmara this week.

Turkey’s parliament in Ankara, dominated by the religious-leaning AK Party, has lifted a ban on the use of the headscarf at university. But the secularist establishment is rebelling. The reform has been challenged in court while some rectors refuse to let covered women into class until another law is passed. Secularist students have also protested against the reform, as in the photo to the right. The placard reads “The headscarf cannot liberate women.”

While the secularists accuse covered women of trying to undermine the secular republic, the women themselves deny any political agenda and appear to suffer deeply from what they consider restrictions on their personal freedom.

At the protest this week in Istanbul, one young woman whipped out a copy of the Koran to explain to me what it was all about. This was an order from God, she said, as she guided me patiently through the text. Others I spoke to kept using the word “humiliation” when they described how it felt to go to class “undressed.”

These women are now setting their sights on getting the ban lifted in other areas of public life — much to the horror of secularists — so they can put their degrees to use in the public sector. And that guarantees their wardrobe, whether they like it or not, will remain a political issue for years to come.

P.S. Whenever the headscarf issue comes back into the headlines, a wave of articles shows just how many aspects this story has. Here are a few of the most interesting recent ones:

• Al-Ahram Weekly reports on a beauty salon for covered women in a Cairo suburb.
• Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol comments on which other reforms the government should introduce now that it has allowed the headscarf at universities.
• The New York Times describes how secularised urban Turks react to headscarves.
• The Washington Institute for Near East Policy discuss the foreign policy implications of the headscarf issue for Turkey and the U.S.
• An American anthropoligist argues in Sightings that the controversy veils what the headscarf really means.
• British writer Madeleine Bunting says secularists have nothing to fear from women wearing headscarves.

Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, the 23-year-old Afghan journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy and other crimes against Islam, has told the London daily The Independent in his first interview since the verdict that his trial for downloading a report on women’s rights from the Internet was over in only four minutes. Independent correspondent Kim Sengupta spoke to Kambakhsh at his prison in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sherif. Here is the interview and an editorial by the newspaper, which has launched a petition for Kambakhsh’s release that has got 88,500 signatures so far.

Remember the “burkini”? This cover-all swimsuit made a big splash in Australia last year when its introduction allowed Muslim women to stay covered but swim and even become lifeguards. The lycra suit looked like an ingenious adaptation of tradition and technology that could help integrate Muslim women more into Australian society. Our story from January 2007 said about 9,000 had been sold so far.

Its debut in the Netherlands has not been as successful. A young woman was ordered out of an indoor pool in the northeastern city of Zwolle last Thursday after only five minutes in the water with her two-year-old son. The pool manager said users found burkinis objectionable so the woman — a convert named Liselotte Buitelaar — should swim only in special hours set aside for separate groups. Like the obese, who have their own special hours, he told the daily Dagblad van het Noorden (English here). The manager said he was afraid other swimmers would stop coming if they saw a burkini there. “It costs me clients. Money is money,” he told the daily Trouw.

Trouw said the burkini figured in The Hague’s parliamentary question time last month and Jet Bussemaker, state secretary for sport, said he thought it helped integration. In the Zwolle local council, the Socialists and Greens have protested against the ban, saying people should be able to decide themselves what kind of swimsuits they wear.

A Dutch company called Woortman Sportswear has been selling burkinis for about a year, in different cuts and colours (that’s their ad at the right). Their designer, Lebanese- Australian Aheda Zanetti, says on the website:”When a Muslim woman is participating or competing at a national or international level, the first comments made about her concern Islam or the way she dresses … By providing the appropriate clothing for the Muslim woman, who complies with religious, cultural and sports obligation, we are helping to bring out the best in Muslim woman, to prove that a Muslim woman is a role model to other women in the world, not an oppressed, no name, and no face being.”

In this Reuters video below, Zanetti says the burkini is also good for protection against the sun. Mecca Laalaa, the trainee lifeguard pictured above, tells how she can now swim after years of going to the beach with friends but never joining them in the water.