In France, a clash of law and religion

Outcry as court annuls marriage of Muslim pair

PARIS - Forty years after the sexual revolution in France, the country is confronted with a question it thought it would never have to ask again: Can a husband annul a marriage because his new wife is not a virgin?

The discovery last week that a court in the northern city of Lille had annulled the union of two Muslims because the husband said his wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be has set off a highly charged and highly politicized debate in a country where religion is not supposed to interfere with public life.

It has also sharpened the focus on much broader questions that all of Europe is grappling with: How much should European countries adapt their moral and legal codes to their growing Muslim communities, and how much should those communities be expected to conform to Western norms?

Fadela Amara, the minister in charge of France's suburbs and herself of Muslim origin, called the ruling "a fatwa against the emancipation of women"; Valerie Letard, the women's minister, said the decision represented a "regression of the status of women"; and scores of feminists and lawyers warned that it could create a precedent increasing the pressure on young Muslim women in Europe to be chaste or to undergo an increasingly popular surgery to reconstitute their hymens before getting married.

"It's a victory for fundamentalists and a victory for those who look at Islam as an archaic religion that treats women badly," said Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist and the author of several books on Muslims in Europe. "I'm sure the judge wanted to be respectful to Islam. Instead, the decision was respectful to fundamentalists."

On Monday, the office of Justice Minister Rachida Dati, who had initially defended the ruling, announced that it would be appealed. Dati, a daughter of North African immigrants, herself had a marriage that had been arranged by her family annulled.

The latest controversy started with the marriage of a French engineer and fresh convert to Islam to a French university student of North African origin on July 8, 2006. When the husband discovered during their wedding night that his bride was not a virgin, he abruptly left. The next day, he asked a lawyer to annul the marriage. The bride, who admitted that she had lied about her virginity but was initially opposed to the separation, eventually consented to his demand.

In its ruling, which was made on April 1 but revealed in the French press only last Thursday, the court in Lille did not cite the couple's religion. Instead, it based its verdict on the idea of a breach of the marital contract, concluding that the husband had married his wife after "she was presented to him as single and chaste." The fact that the wife eventually agreed to the annulment showed that she herself considered her virginity "as an essential quality decisive for the consent of her husband," the ruling said.

"Married life began with a lie, which is contrary to the reciprocal confidence between the married parties," it said.

According to Article 180 of the French Civil Code, a marriage can be declared void on the basis of "an error about the person or the essential qualities of the person." The law provides no clear definition of what constitutes an "essential quality." Several precedents have made it into jurisprudence over the past two centuries but it is the first time that a woman's virginity is cited.

The husband's lawyer, Xavier Labbee, said by telephone Monday that the annulment had "nothing to do with religion," describing the ruling as technical.

But in France, which is strictly secular and where all religious garb is banned from public schools, the case has raised fears that religious considerations are creeping into the legal system. France is home to the largest Muslim community in Western Europe, with an estimated 5 million inhabitants of mainly North African origin.

Observers like Bouzar question whether a judge would have ruled the same way if the couple had been Roman Catholic or Jewish, even though, as she pointed out, "all three monotheist religions traditionally demand that both the bride and the groom are virgins before marriage."

She also doubted that a Muslim woman could have obtained such a ruling because a man's virginity is "impossible to prove."