AND AS FOR those of your women who become guilty of immoral conduct, call upon four from among you who have witnessed their guilt; and if these bear witness thereto, confine the guilty women to their houses until death takes them away or God opens for them a way [through repentance]. 15 If two among you commit it punish them both. If they repent and make amends, leave them alone. Allah is the Relenter, the Merciful. 16 God will only accept the repentance of those who commit evil in ignorance, if they repent immediately. God is All-knowing and All-wise. 17 But God shall not turn towards those who do evil deeds until, when one of them is visited by death, he says, 'Indeed now I repent,' neither to those who die disbelieving; for them We have prepared a painful chastisement. 18 O you who believe! You are forbidden to inherit women against their will, and you should not treat them with harshness, that you may take away part of the Mahr you have given them, unless they commit open illegal sexual intercourse. And live with them honourably. If you dislike them, it may be that you dislike a thing and Allah brings through it a great deal of good. 19 But if you desire to give up a wife and to take another in her stead, do not take away anything of what you have given the first one, however much it may have been. Would you, perchance, take it away by slandering her and thus committing a manifest sin? 20 And how can you take it when one of you has already gone in to the other and they have made with you a firm covenant? 21 Do not marry women whom your fathers married, except for what has already taken place in the past. This is indeed a shameful deed, a loathsome thing and an evil practice. 22