CAIRO — Conservative Egyptian lawmakers have called for a ban on imports of a Chinese-made kit meant to help women fake their virginity and one scholar has even called for the “exile” of anyone who imports or uses it.First the facts around the hymen kit, according to AP. I am only reporting the news here.

The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $29. Its purpose is to be an assist to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins. In many parts of the Middle East, sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken.

According to AP:

Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product to uphold Egyptian and Arab values.

“It will be a mark of shame on the ruling party if it allowed this product to enter the market,” he said in a notice posted on the Brotherhood’s parliament Web site on Sept. 15.

My recent conversation on this topic confirms the anguish of many Islamic women who are virgins and yet fear that they will not bleed on their wedding nights. The blog Chasing Jannah, writes in The Bloody Bed Sheets that the virginity test is something new in Muslim traditions, a reaction to our permissive Western societies that condone premarital sexual behavior.

The Islamic Garden cites the numerous ways in which a female’s hymen may be broken before marriage. Many Western women know these facts as well.

The following passage from The Myth of the Hyman confirms stories told to me about Muslim women in France. My friend said that the mothers help their daughters to deal with the challenges of producing “bloody sheets” for a husband and his family.

I bloody love flowers me!

via Flickr’s Purple_CactusIn a somewhat sad but even more inspiring version of this ritual in Lille, France, both the young Muslim woman’s mother and the groom’s mother collaborated to get her through the ritual, using an axe in the hen house to produce the needed bloody sheets.

“So everyone knew it was a charade?” I asked. Apparently the family gathered to examine the sheets, according to my friend? (Forgive me, if I have this wrong.) He said: “Yes, everyone knew but the groom and his father. The women had everything under control. “

IslamGarden confirms as so many Muslim women repeat: In Islam, there is no such need to prove one’s virginity by bleeding on the wedding night. This is not to say, however, that it is not important that both the husband and wife should be virgins provided that they are entering into their first marriages. Sexual relationships outside the marital union are strictly prohibited in Islam and there are very serious punishments for men and women who violate this rule.

I want to support the writer of IslamGarden in her desire to communicate that the virginity test goes against the tenets of Islam and is a cultural practice not a religious one.

Also, because I myself am investigating the origination of female genital mutilation, IslamGarden take issue with Western non-Muslims like myself who might believe that female genital mutilation is associated with Islam.

In the beginning of this movement the world was informed that this abhorrent practice is an Islamic ritual that Muslim women must undergo as a matter of religious obligation when the fact is that this practice is un-Islamic and has its roots in pre-Islamic African traditions. While some Muslim women are circumcised, it is not because Islam asked them to do that but because they live in a society in which religious knowledge has taken second place to cultural practices.

On the subject of female genital mutilation Molly Melching’s Tostan has been very effective working with villagers to abolish the practice. Echoing the world of IslamGarden, Tostan stresses that the villagers themselves must make this decision, based on education and local decision-making, and collectively abandon the practice as a group.

Another article that we posted stresses that in Jordan, where the Islamic clergy has issued a fatwah supporting the banning of virginity testing, and the Jordanian government has passed a law, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood insist that the women continue to undergo virginity testing.

These customs — old and new — are deeply embedded in a country’s culture and social policies and also exist as reactions to the sexual openness of modern Western culture. Anne

More reading: Molly Melching’s Tostan Empowers African Women on Their Terms

With New Laws and Fatwahs Behind Them, Jordanian Women Struggle to Claim Their Rights