Some people have become very rich as a result of the infitah; according to one estimate, 10 percent of the population controls almost 30 percent of the national income, while more than 20 percent live on less than two dollars a day.1 It was these superrich who found themselves in trouble during the uprising because of their tight ties to the Mubarak regime, and many in prison thereafter on corruption charges. Meanwhile, the poor are still with us, and there’s no quick fix to Egypt’s vast economic divide.
Azza and her family are somewhere in the struggling middle. They are, materially speaking, much better off than her grandparents, who started life in the family village, the ‘izba, in the countryside west of Cairo; like almost half of Egypt’s population, most of Azza’s family now live in the city. They are also more educated: Azza and her siblings all attended university—the beneficiaries of Nasser’s policies opening higher education beyond the elite. Unfortunately, the supply of jobs has not kept pace with the surge in graduates, and their education has not kept up with the demands of the market: while official statistics put unemployment in the low double digits, unofficial estimates suggest that the real figure is closer to double that, hitting university graduates hardest. Even Egyptians with jobs are finding it tough to make ends meet, what with annual inflation hovering in the double digits as well.
These seismic shifts in Egyptian society are rocking Azza’s marital bedroom, although the earth most certainly does not move when she and her husband make love. “He can have an erection, then two minutes later …” Azza pursed her lips, imitating a deflating tire. “Now he is afraid to come near me. We used to make love once every five days. Now it’s been more than a month.” Azza’s husband was eventually persuaded to see a doctor and came back with a clean bill of health. She wonders if their problems might be related to her work.
Like a quarter of Egyptian women her age, Azza has a job, in her case one that earns almost three times as much as her husband’s, since she is with a foreign firm, while he’s a midlevel employee in a sluggish state-owned company. She covers most of the household bills, and there are a lot of them. Azza and her family are caught up in Egypt’s burgeoning consumer culture; what with private school fees (something of a necessity, given the poor state of government schools), sporting club memberships (not exactly a luxury, with how little public space there is in Cairo to safely exercise), mobile phones, and new clothes for three kids, it takes at least two incomes just to keep up. The five of them live in a modest two-bedroom apartment in one of the high-rise eyesores that have sprung up over the past decade as Cairo has expanded into the desert. They’d like to move—sleeping arrangements aren’t doing much for Azza’s love life since she and her husband share a bedroom with their youngest child—but Cairo’s property prices have soared over the past decade, putting the next rung on the housing ladder all but out of reach.
Azza belongs to a generation, and a class, of women in a bind. On the one hand, she has benefited from Egypt’s push to educate women; more than 70 percent of Egyptian women are now literate—that’s tripled since Azza was born—and half have gone on to secondary school and beyond.2 She has more rights under the law—at least on paper—than her mother did when she was Azza’s age, and many more than are accorded to women in most of Egypt’s neighboring states: if Azza wants to travel, for example, she can get her own passport, without needing her husband’s permission, and she can pass her Egyptian citizenship to her children. But there are plenty of catches to these hard-won rights, and men still have much more scope than women when it comes to laws, on the books and in practice.3
For all the gains made by Azza and her peers, there is a strong streak of patriarchy in Egypt, reinforced by the rise of Islamic conservatism since the 1970s, that has conspired to keep women in what is seen by many as their religiously sanctioned place. “[My husband] doesn’t like that I work with foreigners,” said Azza, “but he likes my money. He doesn’t like that I earn more than him, that I make most decisions about money or the kids.” He’s not alone: a recent national survey of Egyptian adults found that while around 60 percent are in favor of women working outside the home, more than three-quarters of those polled—including a majority of women—believe that when work is scarce, it’s men who should get the jobs. While almost half of those surveyed in an earlier poll agreed that the more satisfying marriage is one in which both husband and wife work and take care of the kids, in practice working women like Azza end up doing double duty, at home and on the job.4
Traditionally, women have played an important role in decision making inside Egyptian homes; my grandmother, for example, was a force to be reckoned with on the domestic front (though, like many wives today, she made sure my grandfather was seen to have the final say).5 No matter the balance of power behind closed doors, there is, as we saw in the previous chapter, a pronounced reluctance in many quarters to see women flex these muscles in public; more than half of those surveyed in yet another recent national poll rejected women working as judges, mayors, or the president.6 And so, while Azza’s job is an economic necessity, her professional success is putting a strain on her marital relations—in and out of bed.
Meanwhile, Samar, Azza’s cousin, has troubles of her own. Her husband, a small-businessman, had just returned from a trip to Italy. When Azza was a child, Egyptians rarely traveled abroad; today that’s changed. Samar’s husband was full of praise for Italy, particularly its slim, elegant women, whom he has taken to comparing with his wife, to her face and not in her favor. Since then, Samar, a stay-at-home mom, has been trying to spruce herself up and shed some pounds, at considerable expense; Cairo is full of weight-loss clinics, gyms, and plastic surgery centers ready to nip and tuck bodies into shape—a shape now increasingly modeled on the honed curves of Lebanese bombshells like Haifa Wehbe, a pop singer and Pan-Arab pinup girl. But there’s only so much Samar can do with her naturally ample form. If that weren’t enough, her husband now complains that she is boring in bed. Samar is not sure what exactly that means; as far as she knows, there’s only one position—flat on your back, braced for action. She assumes, or rather hopes, he’s drawing his standards from porn DVDs and the Internet, rather than from real-life, real-time experience.
LAUNCHPAD FOR LIFE
Marriage is the bedrock of Egyptian, and Arab, society, considered the natural and desirable state by more than 90 percent of Egyptians, regardless of age, sex, or education.7 The drive to wed is, in large part, propelled by family pressure and fueled by religion. The Qur’an is big on matrimony, exhorting believers to tie the knot as quickly and as simply as possible: “Marry off the single among you and those of your male and female slaves who are fit [for marriage]. If they are poor, God will provide for them from His bounty: God’s bounty is infinite and He is all knowing.”8 The Prophet too encouraged Muslims to marry: “Whoever marries safeguards half of this faith; let him fear God for the second half” is one of many hadiths on the subject.9
That being said, booty, as well as duty, comes into play. In Islam, sex is channeled into regulated structures, one of which is marriage. This connection is enshrined in language. The same word in classical Arabic, nikah, applies to both marriage and sexual intercourse; in Egyptian street slang, niik, an abbreviated form, means “to fuck.” Sex outside these regulated contexts constitute zina, that is, illicit relations—an offense that crosses the line of acceptability (hadd) in Islam. In shari‘a, the penalty for zina is death by stoning for married partners and one hundred lashes for the unmarried—provided four eyewitnesses testify or there is an uncoerced confession. And so in Egypt—indeed, across the Arab world—marriage opens the door to a socially sanctioned (and therefore more regular) sexual and reproductive life. It is also the gateway to adulthood and a little more independence from your family. If finances permit, marriage gives you a free pass out of your parents’ home, and the green light to set up your own semiautonomous breakaway state.
All of which helps to explain one of the more curious placards
held by a young man in Tahrir Square during the uprising of 2011. GO, it ordered President Mubarak, I WANT TO GET MARRIED. Matrimony might seem an odd demand for a revolutionary, but if you understand what has happened to marriage in Egypt over the past few decades, it makes perfect sense.
In my grandparents’ day, marriages were by and large arranged by the family, within the family—usually between paternal cousins. Today, however, around half of married Egyptians under the age of thirty say they met their spouses through a friend or relative; for university students and graduates, these sorts of personal networks are now the main way to find a mate.10 In my own family, for example, my uncle married a cousin, and my father was once engaged to his cousin as well. But in my generation, despite my grandmother’s best-laid plans that had all her grandchildren paired off like passengers on the ark, none of us intermarried. Yet tradition still counts for something: around a third of Egyptians under thirty—mainly poor, young, rural, less educated, and from the more conservative south of the country—still marry a relative.11
In opinion polls, respectability appears to trump romance when it comes to choosing a mate: in a recent national survey of Egyptian youth under thirty, for example, more than three-quarters of women (and 90 percent of men) cited “polite”—that is, well brought up—as the most important feature in a spouse, with “religious” a close second; “educated” and “love and understanding between husband and wife” came further down the list.12 But such results require careful reading in Egypt and across the Arab region; depending on the issue at hand, people will often say what they think they should in opinion surveys—especially when it’s the government asking the questions—rather than what they actually believe. Anecdotally, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that young women and men, across the region’s great divides, are indeed looking for love, among other criteria, when it comes to matrimony.
Getting married in Egypt is like sending a rocket to the moon—there are several stages that have to fall away before you get into orbit. Families are the fuel for liftoff. One friend, a successful businesswoman in Cairo, gave me the lowdown. “If you want to get married, there are certain places to go, and certain routes to take. You wanna make sure this guy is marriage material,” she warned. “It has to be through family; so his mom, his aunt, his sister, somebody. His family has to know and your family has to know. This way is formal, like no messing around.”
The engagement phase begins when parents publicly acknowledge a relationship and give their blessing to the couple spending time together; in more liberal households, this means time alone as well. Engagement is a flexible arrangement; I know women who have been through multiple fiancés, without turning a hair—family involvement being a necessary, but no longer sufficient, condition to reaching your destination. Mission Marriage moves into higher orbit with katb al-kitab (writing the book), the formal Islamic marriage ceremony; this tends to be a small family affair in which the union is officially recorded by a ma’dhun, or marriage notary. Finally there is the farah, or public wedding celebration. It is considered bad form to consummate a union at any point before the farah, though I know plenty of couples who have prematurely fired their boosters after katb al-kitab.
Should friends, family, or neighbors fail to produce a marriageable prospect, then it’s time to bring in the experts. Khatba, professional matchmaker, is a long-established calling in Egypt and the wider Arab world. While less than 1 percent of married Egyptian youth in Egypt say they met their spouses through paid intermediaries, you wouldn’t know it from a visit to an “office for the facilitation of matrimony,” or a marriage bureau, in downtown Cairo.13 Under a photo of the Ka’ba,* a large table held hundreds of photos of men and women, some smiling, some serious, attached to papers scrawled with personal details. “In an average day I see forty cases, equally males and females, all over the age spectrum, from eighteen to seventy,” said Amr Abdel Megeid, a cheerful man in his forties, as he pointed to the mountain of applications beside him.
Abdel Megeid set up his matchmaking business in the early 1990s. He takes a dim view of newfangled approaches like online matchmaking. “The Internet is full of irregularity,” he sniffed. “On the Net, you can get temporary relations, but if you are serious, you come to us.” For a modest joining fee (and escalating payments as matches progress toward matrimony), applicants can fill out a form with their details and what they’re looking for in a prospective spouse, and then Abdel Megeid and his colleagues set to work. “We have the specifications in the files, and I match them from my experience, according to age, occupation, and other factors,” he explained, taking into account that women in Egypt tend to marry up in terms of education, wealth, and age. In the getting-to-know-you phase, meetings are under the bureau’s watchful eye; while women usually come with a relative, men tend to turn up alone, reflecting their greater personal ambit.14 “After introductions, we are still involved to stop men taking advantage. If we have suspicion, we kick them out,” he said.
Social change in Egypt is good for business, according Abdel Megeid. He’s well-placed to know; with a university degree in sociology, he sees matchmaking as part of the big picture, filling in gaps that have opened as the connective tissue between individuals and the state has broken down. “One of the biggest problems in Egypt,” he said, “has been the gulf separating the ruling system and the people. There are no lines of communication between them. The decisions to deal with people’s problems are taken in a vacuum. The communication roads are all blocked, except when you can get to the rulers through intermediaries.” He sees this gap in politics reflected in private life: “The blocked lines of communication lead to a lot of problems. For example, you could depend on your friends for help [in the old days]. Now everybody has his own problems and does not have time to help you. The relationships are all governed by self-interest. This leads to a vicious circle of deterioration.”
Abdel Megeid’s marriage bureau is benefiting from a widespread anxiety, in Egypt and across the Arab world, over the decline and fall of matrimony. In Egypt, government announcements on the number of unmarried people over thirty (more than one million, according to the 2006 census) stoke frantic talk about erosion of family values.15 Dig a little deeper into the statistics, however, and the panic finds some relief: marriage rates, which fell by a third from the early 1950s to the mid-2000s, have climbed back in recent years, and the vast majority of Egyptians are married—around 90 percent by the age of thirty-five.16
It’s not so much that people aren’t marrying as that they are marrying later. The average age at marriage in Egypt stands at around twenty-nine for men and twenty-four for women, three years later than what is considered optimal by young people themselves.17 These delays in marriage—dubbed “waithood” by one expert—are now seen in many countries in the region.18 The extreme example is Tunisia, where the median age has crept up over the past twenty years, to early thirties for men and late twenties for women.19
Today’s delays in marriage are a distinct shift, in Egypt as in most of the region, from a tradition of near-universal teenage marriage for women. My own grandmother was considered well past her nubile prime, and lucky to have married my grandfather, at the age of eighteen; two of my aunts married at sixteen, but their daughters and granddaughters, who are working university graduates, married in their early or middle twenties. National statistics reflect this trend: today roughly a quarter of young Egyptian wives are married by eighteen, compared with around a third in their mothers’ generation.20
In many quarters, satisfaction at the decline of early marriage—good for women’s empowerment, as well as a brake on population growth—has been replaced by rising moral alarm. Premarital relations are not such a pressing issue if most young women are married a few years out of puberty (and young men by their midtwenties). Moreover, for women in Egypt and its Arab neighbors, having a husband is key: a woman’s social value is still tied to her status as a wife and mother, no matter how accomplished or p
rofessionally successful she might be. In recent years, the phenomenon of ‘unusa—spinsterhood—has become the stuff of Facebook groups, blogs, best-selling books, and TV series. As they say in Egypt, “The shade of a man is better than the shade of a wall.”
Ask Egyptian men why they are waiting to get married and they have a ready answer. “The problem now is that the society is very materialistic,” says Abdel Megeid. “Money comes first; we lost our old principles.” Aspiring grooms and newlywed husbands are a little more blunt in their assessment. “The families of the ladies are so stupid,” one recent university graduate told me, himself just married. “They ask for too much—for shabka [jewelry], the golden things, the diamond solitaire, stuff like this. Plus an apartment, plus the guy has to get all the home appliances, plus the mu’akhkhar (if they get divorced he has to write on the contract that he’s going to pay this amount) plus the mahr [money given by the groom to the bride], plus, plus, plus, plus, plus,” he said, taking me through the conventional checklist of items expected of the groom in order to get the go-ahead from his intended’s family.
This is not the first time, however, that Egypt has been in a flap over marriage and blamed it on economics. In the early decades of the twentieth century, middle-class men were also complaining about their inability to marry—too little income, too much unemployment, too many demands from brides’ families. A newspaper of the day opined: “It is indisputable that the vast majority of young men are poor. Before they can think of marriage, they must think of making a living. If that is impossible then they are forced to neglect marriage.”21 Such grievances are strikingly similar to today’s complaints, and were similarly bound up in broader concerns about economic policies, moral values, consumerism, and Westernization.
B005X0JS14 EBOK Page 5