FEZ, JULY 1971
LETTER 1
Praise to God.
From Mr._____
To your highness the great religious scholar Moulay Mustapha Alaoui,
I am happy to come before your highness asking your advice concerning a catastrophe which has befallen me, a problem whose solution is beyond my capacity.
I pronounced the repudiation formula while I was boiling with anger. I pray your highness to tell me if there is anything I can do to have my wife back in spite of what has happened.
I must confess that I love my wife deeply and intensely.
Peace.
It is specified in the Moroccan code that a repudiation pronounced in anger or drunkenness is not valid. Although this is quite well known among average Moroccans, this husband seems to feel a need for reassurance in a society in which words have such fatal importance. The husband’s anxiety is echoed in the woman’s fear of living in a state of illicitness with her own husband whenever he yields to the temptation to use the repudiation formula.
CASABLANCA,
LETTER 2
From Mrs._______
I had a quarrel with my husband and he repudiated me. Now I came back to him but he did not perform the legal formalities for our remarriage. Can I still stay with him or do I have to go to my parents’ home? I have three children and he always keeps swearing, using the repudiation formula without ever performing the necessary acts to make our life lawful again. I have to add I married him very young. Do I have to put up with this situation or can I leave and go back to my parents?
Repudiation is not only a trap for the man and the woman, it also morally binds all members of the family, who feel uncomfortable when they have witnessed a verbal repudiation. If the man does not perform the legal remarriage, they feel that they are living with fornicators who are committing zina.
PROVINCE OF BENI MELLAL, 14 MAY 1971
LETTER 4
I am bringing to your attention this problem on behalf of Mr_____
A man said to his wife, ‘you are repudiated a triple repudiation’ and he repeated it three times. It was a banal misunderstanding. He has children with his wife. She is still living with him in the house. He does not sleep with her or come near her to talk with her. But he still performs all his duties as a father: he gives her the money she needs for herself and for the children.
Now, given the fact that this man is ignorant, that he does not have any knowledge about these religious matters, it is his father who is asking you about what the religious laws say about this problem. Is there a way for this man to have his wife back or is there no solution?
The striking thing about Moroccan divorce is that there is no check whatsoever on the desire of the husband to break the marital bond. The judge’s role is limited simply to registering that desire, never contesting it.
The structural instability inherent in the Muslim family has been identified by psychiatrists29 and pedagogues30 as having disastrous effects on child development. This instability is likely to increase with the increasing pressures of modernization, which create additional conflicts and tensions. A question like that of the woman’s right to go outside the home, which was unequivocally submitted to the husband’s authorization in traditional households, is likely to become a source of confusion and conflict between husband and wife. Traditional patterns of heterosexual behaviour, ideology, folk wisdom, and law cannot be of any help to the male whose rights and privileges over his wife are challenged by modernization.
7
The Mother-in-Law
In a traditional marriage, the mother-in-law is one of the greatest obstacles to conjugal intimacy. The close link between mother and son is probably the key factor in the dynamics of Muslim marriage. Sons too involved with their mothers are particularly anxious about their masculinity and especially wary of femininity.
Psychoanalytic theory has identified the relationship with the mother as a determining factor in the individual’s ability to handle a heterosexual relationship.1 Cross-cultural studies like Philip Slater’s have shown that societies have found ways to use this relationship very effectively. Slater divides societies according to the importance they place on the mother-son relationship.
Societies vary between two poles, one of which accents the mother-child relationship, the other the marital bond. Each produces its own pattern of self-maintaining circularity.2
He argues that in societies that institutionalize a weak marital bond, the mother-son relationship is accorded a particularly important place and vice versa. In Muslim societies not only is the marital bond weakened and love for the wife discouraged, but his mother is the only woman a man is allowed to love at all, and this love is encouraged to take the form of life-long gratitude.
His mother beareth him with reluctance, and bringeth him forth with reluctance, and the bearing of him and the weaning of him is thirty months till, when he attaineth full strength and reacheth forty years, he saith, My Lord, arouse me that I may give thanks for the favour where-with.3
The son’s grateful love for the mother is the object of many verses.4 Moreover, this love is not limited in time. It is not a process with a beginning, a middle and a ritualized end, indicating that the adult male can now engage in a heterosexual relationship with his wife. On the contrary, in a Muslim society, marriage, which in most societies is invested with a kind of initiation ritual allowing the adult son to free himself from his mother, is a ritual by which the mother’s claim on the son is strengthened. Marriage institutionalizes the Oedipal split between love and sex in a man’s life.5 He is encouraged to love a woman with whom he cannot engage in sexual intercourse, his mother; he is discouraged from lavishing his affection on the woman with whom he does engage in sexual intercourse, his wife.
The Mother’s Decisive Role in the Choice of Her Son’s Bride
According to my interviews with traditional women, it is the mother, not the son, who initiates the marriage and makes the decisions about the creation of her son’s new family, although officially this is supposed to be the role of the son’s father.
One day we were sitting in the courtyard as usual when somebody knocked at the door. An aunt of mine, my father’s cousin, who was to later become my hma [mother-in-law] was at the door. She came straight from Tetuan. She was looking for a bride for her son. . . . I was thirteen years old then. She saw me, talked with my father, asked him for my hand for her son and left. She came back two months later and my marriage contract was signed.
(Did you know your husband?)
No. I never talked to him.
Fatiha F.
Appearances exaggerate the role of the father-in-law, who is responsible for the negotiations about the bride-price and the execution of financial decisions called for by the marriage contract, but the mother’s role is pivotal, because she has access to information relevant to the marriage that only women can have in a sexually segregated society. The mother is the one who can see the bride, engage in discussions with her, and eventually acquire a very intimate knowledge of her body. In Moroccan society only a woman can see another woman naked and gather information about her health. This occurs in a hammam (a kind of Turkish bath), which has manifold functions besides allowing people to perform the purification rituals and bathe. The hammam is an intense communication centre,6 a powerful information agency exposing the secrets of the families who frequent it.
The guellassa (cashier) and the teyyaba (the ‘girl friday’ who assists the clientele in all sorts of ways, giving massages, carrying water, suggesting herbal recipes for uterine troubles) have a strategic position in the hammam. They have more or less complete biographical accounts of the members of the families living around the hammam. The young girls are a particular target for gossip, and their behaviour is a daily object of concern to the other women, those who are related to them and those who are not. A young girl’s reputation has a direct impact on her family’s honour and prestige. It is interesting to note that the
women who are in charge of making young girls’ reputations – be they mothers-in-law, guellassas, teyyabas, or simply relatives of the son – are all elderly women who no longer have any sexual life, because they are widowed or divorced or simply abandoned by husbands involved with younger wives. The power of the elderly woman as receiver and broadcaster of information about young women gives her tremendous power in deciding who will marry whom and significantly reduces the man’s decision-making role. If the mother comes up with information about the future bride’s bad breath, or a hidden physical deformity, or a skin disease, she is likely to have a decisive influence in the matter. One such example was provided by Maria M., a 55-year-old woman whose marriage was postponed for seven years because the husband’s mother told him that she suspected that his future bride had tuberculosis, given her extreme pallor and thin build. Because the fathers of the bride and groom were close friends, such information did not break off the prospect of the marriage altogether, but it did have a mighty influence on the future bride’s life.
I was an old maid by everybody’s standards when I got married. All my younger sisters were engaged and got married before me. My marriage became a kind of joke and I felt I was the object of a divine curse. This is why I never open my mouth and say bad things when I am asked my opinion about a young girl. This happened years ago, but I remember the humiliation as vividly as if it happened yesterday. I still cannot smile at my husband’s mother.
Maria M.
The power of elderly women over the lives of young people is acknowledged by Moroccan folk wisdom, which views age as having entirely opposite effects on men and women.
A man who reaches eighty becomes a saint,
A woman who reaches sixty is on the threshold of hell.7
Or:
What takes Satan a year to do
Is done by the old hag within the hour.8
For a woman, advanced age is synonymous with the power to plot and weave intrigues.
When the woman grows old
She becomes obsessed with intrigues;
Whatever she sees, she wants to get involved in.
May God curse her, alive or dead.9
Before going any further, I should point out that even though the mother seems to be favoured as a woman in Moroccan society, she does not escape the fate of being associated with the devil, the destructive force in the system. Elderly women, as is illustrated by the proverbs, are viewed negatively, exactly like young women, whom society endows with a destructive potential. The only difference is that young women are destructive because they are sexually appealing, old women because they can no longer claim sexual fulfillment. Great pressures are put on the menopausal woman to regard herself as an asexual object and to renounce her sexuality as early as possible. Her husband is expected to turn his attention to younger women-so much so that a menopausal woman who tries to claim her sexual rights with her husband will be perceived as unrealistic and her complaints will be met with scepticism by men and women alike. A current joke that seems to have a lasting appeal for male Moroccan audiences runs:
Why doesn’t the government create a kind of ‘used car dealership’ for women where you can bring in the old wife, add some money and trade her in for a new one.
It is only by understanding the pressure on the aging woman to renounce her sexual self and conjugal future that one can understand the passion with which she gets involved in her son’s life.
In societies where sex antagonism is strong, the status of women low, and penis-envy therefore intense, the woman’s emotional satisfactions will be sought primarily in the mother-son relationship; while in those societies in which these social characteristics are minimally present, the marital bond will be the principal avenue of need-gratification.10
In my data, all mothers-in-law were perceived as completely asexual. In a few cases in which information about sleeping arrangements was available, the ‘old couple’, although sharing the same room, did not share the same bed.
The Mother-in-Law as Friend and Teacher
The mother-in-law and the wife should be considered competitors, but also collaborators. The older woman has many things to offer the young, inexperienced bride, not only in matters concerning sex and pregnancy, but also in other matters vital to a Moroccan woman’s life, such as physical beauty. The following quotation illustrates this aspect of the relationship between wife and mother-in-law.
You see, with all that she did to me, with all her tyranny, I remember my mother-in-law with peace. I do not feel any resentment towards her. With time I came to see her in a more complex way. I realize now how complex a person she was. . . . For example, she was very elegant, always dressed up and seated with a lot of poise and majesty, with her jewelry and her neat headgear. Clean and smart. . . . She always wanted us to be elegant, well-dressed, so that people would not say that she had sloppy brides. . . . She was terribly refined.
Fatiha F.
The secrets of refinement, elegance and adornment are valuable in a society that emphasizes the importance of physical beauty and values aristocratic savoir-vivre. An important part of the knowledge society bequeathes to the female child are the vast and diverse techniques and recipes for the use of plants, flowers, seeds, and minerals to make facials, shampoos, and cosmetics. Most Moroccan women still use these traditional beauty techniques in spite of the availability of cheap Western make-up. The mother-in-law’s role as imitator of savoir-vivre is as important as her role as instructress in matters of birth, sickness, and death.
Moroccan marriage is virilocal. The child-wife leaves her family, either before or immediately after menarche, to live in her husband’s household. Because of her segregated upbringing, she is often fearful of men and thus more inclined to trust and to communicate with women. During her first conjugal years she is likely to have a deeper relationship with a mother than with a son:
‘I stayed with my husband until I had my first period.’
‘How long did you stay with your husband before you had your first period?’
‘I don’t remember exactly – a year, maybe. I had no breasts, nothing. I was like a boy.’
‘Did he use to approach you?’
‘Never. He never approached me until after a whole year.’
‘And were you living with him and sharing the same room?’
‘I was living with my hma (mother-in-law); I used to cover myself every time I saw him.’
‘You were living with your hma?’
‘I was living with my hma. She used to treat me like a child of hers. She used to go to fetch young girls from the neighbourhood to play with and talk to so that I wouldn’t feel bored.’
Kenna
Moroccan parents are reluctant to give their daughters to husbands who live in different localities, for fear of mistreatment. Usually these fears are allayed if the mother of the groom decides to live with her son. To the bride’s parents, distrustful of the husband, the presence of the mother-in-law seems to guarantee their daughter’s fair treatment.
The following case of a husband-son from the province of Berkane provides an illustration – unusual even by Moroccan standards – of the extent to which a mother may become involved in her daughter-in-law’s life.
PROVINCE OF BERKANE, 20 MAY 1971
To Moulay Mustapha Alaoui:
Dear Sir,
I am the father of three children, all of whom were breast-fed regularly by my mother, who lost her husband – i.e., my father – a long time ago. She did that because she had milk in her breast.
What does religious law stipulate about this breast-feeding?
Not all mothers-in-law are gifted with the lacteal potential of this one, and the take-over of conjugal affairs need not be this extreme. It usually takes the form of the mother-in-law’s assisting the young bride during her first several pregnancies.
The interviews reveal that pregnancy is experienced as the submission of the woman’s body to strange forces. One could almost speak of di
ssociative reflexes in women’s perceptions of their swollen bodies.
I became pregnant while still a child myself. I did not want people to see my belly. I wanted to hide it. I would sit so that people would not notice it. I spent whole days crying – just lying about and crying.
Kenna
I did not know what was happening when the child started moving inside my belly. I would start screaming every time it happened. I had the impression that he was trying to come out of my skin. I felt very strange.
Hayat H.
The perception of first pregnancies as bizarre phenomena is heightened by unpredictable miscarriages.
‘I did not have my period during the first months that I was married. I was pregnant – a strange pregnancy. By the eighth month my belly was very swollen – a strange feeling, as if it were only fat . . . strange pregnancy. One day I felt the labour, the pain. I had a haemorrhage that lasted for days. I told the people around me that I felt as though a frog was lumping in me, eating my heart. They answered, “It is nothing. You are just too young to know and be patient with pregnancy. What you feel is natural for women.” I was not convinced. My husband took me to a doctor. She was a woman. She gave me shots right in the belly. After that I felt very odd and started shivering. Whatever was in my belly was dead. It started coming out. It was not a child. It was a strange accumulation of odd pieces.’
‘Odd pieces?’
‘Yes, pieces with strange shapes. It was not a child, but odd and different pieces. There were seven in all. One piece was like a fish, another like a grape, a white grape. Another was like an artichoke head; when you pushed on it a white head came out like an egg.’
Beyond the Veil Page 13