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 two men commit a like abomination, punish them both. If they repent and mend their ways, leave them alone. God is forgiving and 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 The forgiveness is not for those who do ill-deeds until, when death attendeth upon one of them, he saith: Lo! I repent now; nor yet for those who die while they are disbelievers. For such We have prepared a painful doom. 18 O People who Believe! It is not lawful for you to forcibly become the women’s heirs; and do not restrain women with the intention of taking away a part of bridal money you gave them, unless they openly commit the shameful; and deal kindly with them; and if you do not like them, so it is possible that you dislike a thing in which Allah has placed abundant 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 will you take it back whereas you have become unveiled before each other, and they have taken a strong pledge from you? 21 AND DO NOT marry women whom your fathers have previously married - although what is past is past: this, verily, is a shameful deed, and a hateful thing, and an evil way. 22