The Islamic process for verifying adultery is very cautious simply because it is such a serious crime of which to accuse someone. In fact, it is a very big sin in Islam to falsely accuse someone of adultery, and the accuser is held accountable for slander under Islamic Law. Islam has discussed all aspects of adultery and fornication from defining the terms to explaining how it is proven and how one is punished for them. In all the texts and historical references we have available to us, it is never mentioned that a woman must bleed in order to prove her virginity or that there are any physical signs of virginity (such as an intact hymen) of which we should be aware. We only know that it is prohibited to accuse another human being of illegal sexual intercourse without having sufficient proof of that as described above. If a Muslim woman (or man, by the way) is truly not a virgin and she chooses to lie about that, then she surely knows that she will face Allah with her lie on the Day of Judgment. This alone is enough to make the vast majority of Muslims abstain from illegal sexual relationships.
Unfortunately, Islamic Law is not applied to its fullest in many of our Islamic nations, and the people who have religious knowledge are not always well coordinated with the people who have scientific or medical knowledge. Even worse, it only takes one or two people in positions of power to give wrong information, and lives are changed forever. This is what is happening in parts of the Muslim world.
I was prompted to write this article after reading a disturbing essay on virginity authored by a well-known Muslim professor in the field of obstetrics and gynecology at a university in Kuwait. (I am not sure whether or not he is also a medical doctor as this is not mentioned on the website where I found his essay. It is, by the way, a very nice website with a lot of useful information about medical ethics in Islam.) In any event, the professor takes it upon himself to say that it is completely false that a hymen may tear when a girl engages in activities such as horseback riding, bicycle riding or gymnastics. He does not give any evidence for that at all, and it does not take much reading between the lines to understand his real message: that some unchaste women who want to conceal their pasts use sports as an excuse for why they do not bleed and that women in general have become less fearful of being identified as non-virgins since science now backs them up and allows them to escape suspicion of immoral behavior.
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