Muslim women reclaiming virginity via surgery

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 as she awaited surgery Thursday. “Right now, virginity is more important to me than life.”

As Europe’s Muslim population grows, many young Muslim women find themselves caught between the freedoms European society affords and the deep-rooted 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 telltale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries such as 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 London-based Dr. Hicham Mouallem, who 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 usually done in private clinics and not covered by tax-financed insurance plans.

But the subject is talked about so much that it is the subject of a comedy film 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.”

The issue has been particularly charged in France, where a renewed and fierce debate has erupted about a prejudice that was supposed to have been buried with the 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 domestic drama has gripped the nation. 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 about her past. 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 to the court and agreed to an annulment.

The court ruling did not mention religion. Rather, it cited breach of contract, concluding 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.

The case persuaded the Montpellier student to have the operation.

“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.”

The surgeons who perform the procedure say they are empowering their 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, the plastic surgeon 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.”

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 association’s president. “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 the issue.

One 32-year-old Muslim born in Macedonia said she opted for surgery to avoid being punished by her father when her eight-year relationship with her boyfriend ended.

“I was afraid that my father would take me to a doctor and see whether I was still a virgin,” said the woman, who owns a small business and lives in Frankfurt, Germany. “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, a 26-year-old French woman of Moroccan descent and her partner decide for her to have the operation. She said she lost her virginity four years ago when she fell in love with her fiance. But they decided to share the cost of her $3,400 operation in Paris.

His extended family in Morocco is very conservative, she said, and is requiring that a gynecologist — and family friend — there examine her for proof of virginity before the wedding.

“It doesn’t matter for my fiance that I am not a virgin — but it would pose a huge problem for his family,” she said.

Meanwhile, the lives of the young French couple whose marriage was annulled are on hold. The Justice Ministry has asked for an appeal, arguing the ruling “provoked a heated social debate” that “touched all citizens of our country and especially women.”

At the Islamic Center of Roubaix, the suburb of Lille 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.”