If any of your women is guilty of unnatural offence, bring four of your witnesses to give evidence; if they testify against them, retain them in the houses until death overtakes them or God provides some other way for them. 15 If any two people commit fornication, punish them. If they repent and reform, let them go. God is All-forgiving and All-merciful. 16 (Allah accepts) the repentance from only those who commit evil in ignorance and then quickly turn to Him in repentance. Allah will relent towards them. Allah is Knowing, Wise. 17 And that repentance is not of those who constantly commit sins, and when death approaches one of them, he says, “I repent now”, nor of those who die as disbelievers; for them, We have kept prepared a painful punishment. 18 O ye who believe! It is not lawful for you forcibly to inherit the women (of your deceased kinsmen), nor (that) ye should put constraint upon them that ye may take away a part of that which ye have given them, unless they be guilty of flagrant lewdness. But consort with them in kindness, for if ye hate them it may happen that ye hate a thing wherein Allah hath placed much 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 could you take it (back) while you have gone in unto each other, and they have taken from you a firm and strong covenant? 21 And wed not of women those whom your fathers had wedded, except that which hath already passed. Verily it hath been an indecency and an abomination and an evil way: 22