“You are a second- hand woman, I will divorce you.” The words rang in Aisha’s ears as a death sentence. With the uttering of one sentence, the honeymoon for the newly married couple had turned into a nightmare. 

Earlier that evening, Aisha (not her real name) had slipped into skimpy red knickers and stilettos, and writhed seductively on the bed as she experienced sex with her boyfriend for the first time. But suddenly the spell was broken, and the marriage would never recover.

Muslim woman The Bridge MAG image

When the Afghan girl had first experimented with oral and anal sex a few years earlier, she had done so as a way of finding alternative forms of sexual fulfilment.

She knew she would be expected to be a virgin when she finally married, so she reasoned that having other sexual acts were her only hope of achieving sensual fulfilment prior to this point – and the only way she could safely indulge in sex without being found out. Unfortunately for her, though, when she did eventually marry her groom would prove to be no fool.   Aisha belongs to a growing number of women from strict Muslim backgrounds who end up having their marriages annulled after being found out over the lies they tell their grooms about their prior sexual encounters.

According to a fundamentalist tradition, still in vogue, Muslim women do not have the right to have sex before marriage – whatever their age.

They are under constant pressure from their parents to remain virginal until the day they get married, fearing rejection if they do not observe this rule.

Europe’s Muslim population finds itself caught between the freedoms that European society affords young women and the deep-rooted traditions upheld by their parents and grandparents’ generations.

But in fact, those who have maintained that the prohibition of pre-marital sex is the most effective way of encouraging purity of thought and deed in unmarried Muslim women have, paradoxically, found that their orthodox morals are having the reverse effect.

Young Muslim women are increasingly becoming so intrigued by the forbidden fruits that they are discovering ever more ingenious ways of overcoming the rules. Like many other Muslim girls, Aisha has long performed sex using any means possible short of full-blown intercourse. Marietou, a 28-year-old banker, originally from Morocco, admits to masturbating for some years with the aid of adult videos until, one day, deciding “to catch up properly with my colleague”.

Others, like Sherim, 20, a Tunisian mixed-Belgian Media graduate profess to care little for anything but the most superficial conformity with her parents’ traditions. “I am still wearing a headscarf and act like a virgin, even if I am no longer chaste. This is just to please my parents. I am just waiting to become financially independent to fly away with my Nigerian boyfriend.  My dream is to live where I can express my love and feelings.”

Of 23 Muslims interviewed off  the  record for this article (18 of them women and five of them men), many of those from immigrant backgrounds confessed to considering oral sex as something quite normal and finding it difficult to refuse to perform it on their boyfriends.

Moreover, a number of those who admitted going further, and having full sex, admitted to finding extreme ways of ‘restoring’ their virginities – if necessary, by undergoing restorative surgery or faking the loss of their virginity on their wedding nights by staining their sheets with vials of blood.. A growing number of young Muslims do not, in fact, observe the virginity rule before marriage….

A striking view of Muslim women’s sexuality comes from Aboubakar Diop, a Muslim man, who argues:

“I am not chaste myself, but I will divorce my wife the same night if I ever found out she lost her virginity before our wedding, because what can you expect from a woman who once had tried it with someone else? Even after the marriage she will keep cheating on you. More over in my tradition such a woman is considered as a second hand women, she is impure, and she is the shame to the family.”…

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Rachel Tcheungna, Author, Writer of 

The Bridge Books and 

The Bridge Magazine Editor.