An 18-year-old Muslim bride named Rajabbi Khurshed killed herself after her husband refused to accept the results of multiple virginity tests and demanded a second wife. The husband, 24-year-old Zafar Pirov, is now in custody in Tajikistan for his role in his young wife’s suicide. He could face up to eight years in prison.
Khurshed was married for just 40 days when she decided to take her life. From the beginning, the young girl was a victim of patriarchal mandates. Forced into an arranged marriage with a man she had never met before, Khurshed was victimized by nearly everyone and everything in her life, including her parents, her husband, and the state.
Radio Free Europe reports:
Her parents arranged the 18-year-old woman’s marriage, in her native village of Chorbogh in May, to a man she’d never met. The Tajik state obliged Khurshed to undergo a prenuptial medical exam, which in her case included a virginity test that while technically optional is routinely demanded of young women by either or both families. And her new husband, 24-year-old Zafar Pirov, cast her out weeks later after humiliating her with further virginity tests and demanding that he be allowed to take a second wife.
Ultimately, Khurshed felt the need to escape the hell on the earth that she had been placed in. Drinking a fatal dose of vinegar, the teenage bride killed herself.
She told her family on her deathbed that following the forced virginity tests, she “couldn’t take it any longer.”
Tajikistan’s obsession with virginity has ruined many lives after a 2015 court ruling demanded that grooms and brides undergo comprehensive physical exams before getting married.
While men only need to undergo basic exams for sexually transmitted diseases, women are held to a much higher standard. So-called “purity” tests, invasive exams designed to humiliate and dehumanize women, primarily young brides, are administered to women by overzealous state-sanctioned doctors. To date, Tajikistan’s judicial docket has been flooded with hundreds of court cases involving virginity disputes. Most of the cases are brought forward by Muslim husbands who refuse to believe their wives.
Virginity’s place on the altar of veneration has facilitated the exploitation of young women across the country. Men have weaponized Islamist-inspired ideas of sexual purity to subjugate women in horrific ways. By all measures, Khurshed was a virgin. She passed all her tests and received the proper certification to prove yet. And still, her abusive husband, Pirov, rejected the veracity of the tests in a bid to procure a second wife and fulfill his desire for totalitarian control over the women that have been placed into his life against their will.
Welcome to the real war on women.
