I wish the author had taken the time to do some research about this subject instead of rehearsing whatever common misconceptions were lying around her desk.

This issue is primaraly related to local cultures and tradition and incidentally related to Islam. Islamically, your sexual history is private. There are a number of historic and contemporary examples to illustrate this point but let's put it this way first, if virginity is somehow an Islamic requirement for marriage (as the author asserts) why do we not see Muslim converts in the United States rushing to get these procedures done in order to lawfully marry into the fold of Islam? How do we explain the compassionate perplexity that American Muslim clergy have demonstrated when they address the questions American women converting to Islam about disclosing their sexual history to their new Muslim suitor? Why is the answer always: say whatever you want, it's none of your potential husband's business. This is not to say that you should hide your herpes, but a person is not a list of mistakes they have made. And yes, if you are a Muslim you consider your sexual relations outside of marriage a mistake and a sin and you ask forgiveness. But just as it is forbidden to ask another Muslim if they prayed that day, no one is entitled to ask another person about their sexual history.

You may think that women being "entitled to conceal" points to the same underlying sexism under a new guise, but whether you call it "concealment" rather than "privacy" is just a matter of what kind of cultural and traditional context you are responding to. In the west, we understand this kind of information is private, and while we don't want to lie, we're pretty sure that some prying questions are unworthy of being asked.

In the context of Muslim countries, naturally, since sexual relations outside of marriage (temporally or permanent) are forbidden (in order to account for parentage in the era before DNA testing and to priviledge the nuclear family) individuals who have not been previously married in one of those ways are often assumed to be virgins. But not every marriage is a matter of public record and everyone knows adultery happens anyway. That is why, in the forgiving spirit of Islam, even if you committ adultry (any kind of unlawful sexual relations) it's no one's business but you and God's. Yet some cultures make God's business their business. That has nothing to do with Islam, but rather cultural rejection of certain aspects of Islam and the trading of spiritual strength and trust for elitism, sexism and classism. We all know you can't examine a man's virginity like you can with a woman, but Islamically adultery and virginity are the same whether you're a man or a woman: private, like your parts.

It's true that the punishment for adultry in Islam is stoning, but it takes four unimpeachable wittnesses each of whom had a clear view of the actual act of copulation to be convicted of the act. This purposefully means that conviction never happens unless people are fornicating on a crowded street with no regard for their family or society. Instead of stoning people left and right, the real purpose of the law is a spiritual one, to understand how detested something that is harmful to society and family structure must be to merit such punishment by a God that has shown Himself to be so incredibly merciful, and to forego it for that reason alone. The view of sexual privacy is clear in the requirement of four witnesses to the charge of adultry and also its corrollary: if someone accuses someone else of adultry and the above proof is not set forth, that person is guilty of liable and subject to a number of lashes. Again, the point is a spiritual one, not that we should go around serving up these severe punishments. There are huge ramifications for a family once a charge of adultry is issued, one that is never erased even if the evidence to back it up is never produced. Since people may accuse with various motives in mind, only the most socially threatening incontestable cases are capable of conviction according to the law. While both laws in themselves might serve as a practical deterent, their true purpose is a spiritual lesson about loving what God loves for you and detesting what God detests for you.

Islam tried very hard to change the status of women in the Middle East, but from one end of the world to the other biases against women persist. These biases will always interact with the way the religion is practiced and articulated and it is up to us to examine complex issues carefully. The muslim populations of France have always been ethnically enclaved and their mosques generally cater to one ethnic community in particular. That cleric doubtlessly came form a community with embedded ideas about a women's chastity before marriage and he reflected the ideas of his parish in his administration of Islamic institutions. Framing this issue as an Islamic one does a disservice not only to people who rely on journalists to provide accurate information, but also to the millions of women in non-Muslim countries who face similar hardships surrounding the status of their virginity because of the culture and tradition in which the live.

I'm aware that Islam was actually very progressive with regard to women's status in society - the Koran even makes provisions for wives and daughters to inherit and own property, which was basically unheard of back when the Koran was written. Of course, most other non-Muslims are unlikely to know that, so it's a good thing you mentioned it.

Practices such as female genital modification (FGM), "honor killings" and treatment of women as second-class citizens or property are thought by many in the West to be "Muslim" - and I guess they are considered that way by Muslims who do those things. But as you said, they are not really Muslim practices, and in many cases actually contradict what the Koran says about treatment of women.

Those kinds of practices are actually holdovers from traditions that particular peoples practiced before they adopted Islam. It is unfortunate that such abuses of human rights and dignity persisted in spite of Islam and, even worse, that Islam became a justification for/associated with them.

FGM? Sounds like Collateral Damage. I appreciate your conclusion that religion "sanctifies" previous traditions of abusing human rights and human dignity. It does not require much research to observe that major religions are directly responsible for abuse far worse than what they replaced. It isn't organization that is bad. It is the origin of that organization that makes it bad. Bad fruit comes from bad trees.

Its lame to group all 'religion' together. i won't defend all religions because they are not all equal. Rather, grouping them together is intellectually lazy and shows dismissive arrogance.

This topic is about Islam and the Muslim attempts in France to uphold Islamic social standards within licentious French social environment.

But lazy intellectual snobbery borne of prideful arrogance and narcissism tries to paint this as 'us' vs. them.

Saletan seems so insular as to percieve American sociological conditions to be representative of universal human evolution, and all those who are not following American 'standards' are therefore 'less evolved'.