By Supna Zaidi
A marriage annulment proceeding in France became a glaring example on April 1, 2008 of how careful the French legal system must be in creating precedents that among its French-Muslim population reinforces sexism from the Arab world. France is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe.
Therefore, the French legal system becomes a testing ground for immigration and human rights as it relates to Muslims and their assimilation into the West. Since 2004, France has always created headline over issues relating to Muslim social, economic and political issues. From the student hijab issue that in 2004, the riots in the "ghettos" in 2005, to various cases that come and go through the court system relating to free speech and human rights, France's government and court rulings reach the world stage to publicly reinforce its secular identity and human rights values. Otherwise, inconsistency, it will be to France's own detriment because it fails to realize that France sets the precedent for the rest of the European continent.
On April 1, a 25 year old French-Arab nursing student's 10 month old marriage was annulled on grounds that her failure to admit that she was not a virgin to her future husband constituted fraud. The court stated, that her lie related to "an essential quality decisive for the consent of her husband to wed." Both husband and wife are Muslim. The husband wanted to marry a virgin and apparently made this clear prior to the marriage ceremony. In Islam premarital sex is a sin, and in practice it is enforced against women only. Repercussions can range from harm to reputation, ostracism from one's family, to the most extreme consequence - honor killings. While various acts justifiably constitute marriage fraud and result in annulment, chastity should not be a permissible ground.
Marriage fraud is a legitimate ground for annulment in most western courts. The idea simply states that the court will annul a marriage where one party can show that but for the reliance on a particular promise or fact, the marriage would not have taken place: lack of disclosure on certain health conditions, promises of children, etc are valid. The problem with legitimizing "chastity fraud", is that the French court is then defending the logic behind not only seeing women as second class citizens, but for high crimes like honor killings.
This is because in the Muslim world, a woman's reputation is directly linked to her family's reputation. And the family is the head of the household. For a woman, it's first her father and then her husband. Women before Islam in the Arab world were property. In contrast, women in the west gained control over their bodies with the advent of the birth control pill. This allowed them to be than vassals for childbearing or social lepers if becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Control of one's body allowed women to control the rest of their lives - education levels rose; the ability to work and gain a living became possible.
Women were no longer tied to men for support. The identity of a woman moved beyond her sexuality and childbearing potential. The Mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, where the case was heard, reacted to the court case by stating, "We know that women's rights are never secured, but we never thought we'd see such regression in our country." France's conservative secretary of state for social solidarity, Valérie Létard, called the decision "an attack on the integrity of women and a violation of the fundamental rights of all individuals."
With Islam, women gained some rights, but never reached full personhood. Identity is still for the most part confined to a woman's relationship to a man. In return, a man's reputation is affected by his ability to control the women in his life. Therefore, a woman's chastity can make the father of a bride proud or make a certain nurse's husband the laughing stock of his local mosque and immigrant community. Most sane men will be embarrassed, but leave the issue at divorce. Others can become angry and commit murder in defense of their honor. France cannot recognize the backward value placed on women's virginity. France did the correct thing by banning the hijab in schools to secure French secularism and France did the correct thing by keeping religion out of the economic problems relating to the communities that rioting in 2005.
Now, France must do the right thing and not recognize chastity fraud as a ground for divorce because it reinforces a woman's position as property in the Muslim mind, not her humanity. The nursing student and her husband have a right to an annulment. But the court could have found it on other grounds to satisfy both parties.
(Supna Zaidi is editor-in-chief of Muslim World Today and an attorney in New York. She can be reached at sapnaz@yahoo.com)
