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by Feki, Shereen El

  Like their great-grandfathers, today’s grooms bear the brunt of matrimonial costs. The financial responsibility of men within marriage is enshrined in Islam: “Husbands should take good care of their wives, with [the bounties] God has given to some more than others and with what they spend out of their own money.”22 More recently, this balance of payments has redistributed slightly: for couples under thirty, the groom and his family are picking up just under 60 percent of the costs, with the bride’s family covering the rest; brides themselves chip in around 5 percent of the total outlay—no surprise (tradition aside) given how few young women have regular employment.23

  Expectations have puffed up over the years. Those critical of today’s matrimonial excess often cite a hadith in which the Prophet encouraged a poor man to marry even though the only mahr he could offer his prospective bride was to teach her the chapters of the Qur’an he had learned by heart.24 When my parents married in the 1960s, my father brought a refrigerator and a set of cutlery to the union; their mahr was twenty-five piastres (roughly five cents now), which my mother carries with her to this day. But those were the lean years of Nasser’s regime; today a fridge and a fork no longer cut it when it comes to matrimony. The average cost of marriage in Egypt—excluding housing—ranges from around EGP 20,000 (just over USD 3,300) in the poorest families to just under EGP 60,000 in the wealthiest echelons of society.25 All in all, this is an enormous investment; according to one analysis, it would take the poorest cohort of men and their families a scripturally significant seven years to save enough to marry.26

  Egyptians under thirty say the biggest hurdles to tying the knot are the cost of housing, furnishings and finding a job to pay for all of it. When asked the best way to overcome these barriers, more than half looked to the government to step up—or step down, in the case of the protester in Tahrir Square with his pro-marriage placard.27 Various schemes have been tried in Egypt and across the region—some government funded, others charitable concerns—to ease people into matrimony, a policy favored by the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded groups. These include subsidized group weddings, which are arguably more popular with journalists looking for a colorful story than with brides looking forward to their big day.28

  Few governments, however, have mounted quite as concerted an assault on singletons as those in the Gulf. The United Arab Emirates Marriage Fund, for example, provides grants of AED 70,000 (USD 19,000) to low-income grooms (those earning less than AED 19,000 a month).29 To appreciate how much—or rather, how little—this will buy a groom, I took a trip to a bride show in Abu Dhabi. The event assembles hundreds of exhibitors, from wedding dress designers and jewelers to chocolatiers and makeup artists, under one football-stadium-size roof. My curiosity was as much personal as professional. I too was planning a wedding—my own, in fact. My fiancé and I had settled on a simple affair, with fewer than a hundred guests, and I was keen to see how my own modest arrangements stacked up against local celebrations. At the show, I quickly ran into Salwa and Annous, two sisters in their twenties from Abu Dhabi. Annous was getting married in a couple of months, and they were busy selecting photographers and checking out designer abayas, blithely unaware of how much the wedding might cost.

  One group that knows the numbers by heart is Carnation, a Dubai-based events organizer. Business is booming across the UAE, in the “season,” which runs October to April. The cost of a wedding can easily run into millions of dirhams—and that’s just for the venue, food, entertainment, and decorations. Weddings of the ruling families of the emirates can cost tens of millions of dirhams and have thousands of guests—which some young Emiratis complain is setting an impossibly high standard and ramping up expectations among brides and their families.30

  Even less exalted weddings are big productions in the Gulf region; five hundred guests is a discreet event in Carnation’s books—mine barely registered on their scale. In the UAE, these guests, and those costs, are spread over two separate parties. Weddings in Egypt (and much of the rest of the Arab world, for that matter) are now largely mixed occasions, where men and women mingle over dinner and dancing. Not so in the Gulf, where the tradition of separate male and female parties—which was common in Egypt in my grandparents’ day—continues. Wedding planners described the men’s celebration as a relatively low-key event, with a simple dinner and some local music; by midnight, the party is essentially over. The women’s gathering, however, is a much longer and more lavish affair, with an elaborate dinner, a lineup of singers that can include famous names flown in from the entertainment centers of Cairo and Beirut, and blinding quantities of bling. At the bride show, wedding organizers were strutting their stuff with full-scale mock-ups of wedding decor in what can best be described as the bordello school of interior design: enough gold, gilt, crystal, velvet, jewels, feathers, flowers, beads, lace, and satin to bring on an attack of luxury-induced Stendhal syndrome.

  By comparison, Carnation’s display was positively restrained. Osama Mistal, a company manager, and I sat on a vast white quilted leather sofa, fur rugs at our feet, bathed in a soft pink glow, looking down a catwalk where, on the night of the wedding, the bride would parade after making a dramatic late entrance. Her dress is obviously a star attraction, and from the gowns doing a brisk trade at the show (AED 35,000 on up), opulence-meets-decadence was very much the fashion: bare shoulders, plunging necklines, and open backs. Female guests, particularly the more nubile among them, are also dressed to kill, revealing their assets in what is essentially a showroom for future brides, giving prospective mothers-in-law at the party a good look at what they might snag for their sons. Around midnight, the groom and his close male relatives turn up briefly on the women’s side. The women then party on after the couple has disappeared to a local hotel before jetting off to some distant destination. (In a slick yet slightly optimistic exhibit, South Korea was marketing itself at the show as a honeymoon hotspot.)

  As Mistal explained, it’s not just the wedding that is breaking the bank for men these days: “There is gold, the dress, the house, the furniture, gift items to the bride during the engagement like perfume, watches, clothes … so many ways to spend money.” The Gulf states have opened themselves to the full force of global capitalism, so it’s no surprise that status should now be tied to possessions, and that weddings have become a celebration of conspicuous consumption. “Where you [in the West] were, is where we are now,” Mistal observed. “Before twenty years [ago], children, what they need? They go to school and come back. Now they need separate room, and laptop and games, the mobile. There are so many requests. So everything becomes more and more and more.”

  Forty years ago, before the UAE and other countries in the Gulf began to ride a fossil-fuel wave of prosperity, today’s lavish outlays were out of reach for most families. The mothers and grandmothers of today’s brides remember their own simpler weddings, in which finding enough food and feeding the poorer members of the tribe were the primary concerns.31 Some of those traditions live on in today’s weddings, with a global gloss that makes them more expensive than ever. Weddings may have moved from desert encampments to five-star hotels, for example, but camel is still on the menu, only now you need a whole caravan for a legion of guests.

  But it’s in the brides themselves that this mixture of old and new is most pronounced. Annous is a good example. She’s marrying at twenty-two and has finished university—a rarity in earlier generations, who married in their teens and were mothers, often several times over, by her age. Today, however, women vastly outnumber men in higher education in the UAE and are increasingly carving space for themselves in the workplace.32 Annous speaks excellent English, is widely traveled, and is up-to-date with the latest movies and fashion in the Gulf and the West. Yet her father chose her bridegroom, a distant relative whom she has met only once; her recently married older sister saw her husband for the first time at their own wedding. This is not unusual in the UAE. Research shows that arranged marriages, usually to first cousins, remain
the norm there, where the financial and social benefits of keeping it all in the family are seen to outweigh the well-known medical risks to children of such consanguineous unions.33

  Annous prefers to rely on her father’s judgment in choosing a husband, though she is aware of how couples meet and mate in the West. I asked if she wouldn’t prefer to have a “love story”—Egyptian shorthand for an unarranged marriage. “If he is from the family, you feel it’s okay,” she said. “If they get married from love, they divorce. We know some women, they get married by love story; even if they continue [in the marriage], it’s all problems in our culture. If it’s a relative, it’s better.”

  Even so, brides today are a lot pickier than they used to be. In Islam, a woman has the right to refuse a prospective husband, although in practice plenty lack the opportunity to exercise it. Salwa, however, belongs to a new generation that is flexing its muscle on this point. She has turned down a number of offers because she’s waiting for the right man: moral, respectable, hardworking, polite, and definitely not married to another woman. I know some young career women in the Gulf who choose to become a second wife, which gives them the perks of marriage and motherhood as well as time for a career, while leaving the full-time occupation of cooking, cleaning, and otherwise maintaining a husband to wife number one. But Salwa doesn’t see it that way, and it’s this assertiveness that some think is at the heart of the UAE’s marriage problems.

  Emiratis are practically an endangered species in their own country; more than 80 percent of the population are foreigners brought in to build the nation. While the planners meant this to be the building of skyscrapers and a diversified economy, it has come to include forming families as well: about a fifth of Emirati men are now married to foreign women, mainly from other Arab countries and Asia.34 Less than a tenth of Emirati brides take a foreign husband, but that figure is also rising, aided by a recent change in nationality laws that, as in Egypt, allows women to pass citizenship—and all the material benefits that go with it—to their children.

  The official discourse blames the phenomenon of foreign marriages on economics: foreign brides don’t have status-conscious families breathing down a groom’s neck for the wedding of the century and the house of a lifetime.35 And so marriage has become part of the national push to preserve Emirati identity and to combat perceived family fragmentation. But as Salwa and thousands like her demonstrate, there are clearly other forces at work in the marriage stakes, ones no amount of money will dispel.

  Back in Egypt, the uprising saw a number of on-the-spot weddings in Tahrir Square, as couples sought to mark the occasion and show their revolutionary colors by breaking with the excesses of the ancien régime. “This is the new Egypt,” one man, insistent on marrying his fiancée the next day, told his prospective in-laws. “We don’t need all that stuff,” he said, referring to the trappings of marriage. But while Egypt struggles toward what many hope will be a new order, the big wedding is still in fashion, albeit on a less lavish scale. In the short term, this degree of restraint has more to do with economic uncertainty and a reluctance to reveal one’s wealth too publicly, out of a newfound fear of being targeted for violent crime in the security vacuum that opened after the uprising, as well as a desire to avoid suspicion of ill-gotten gains through association with the former regime, than it does with any postmaterialist change of heart. There are, of course, couples who want to get off this material merry-go-round altogether, but it is hard to stop the ride. One prospective bride, a middle-class university student in Cairo, listened in awe as I described my own arrangements: my fiancé and I splitting the bill between ourselves; my symbolic twenty-five cent mahr and a pair of pearl earrings as shabka; newlywed bliss in a tiny rented apartment, with no car, few appliances, and little furniture to our names. “Wow, that’s way cool,” she said admiringly. “You could never do that in Egypt.”

  A SIMPLE AFFAIR

  Such is the desire to steer clear of zina that, even if a big white wedding is not in the cards, couples will go to considerable lengths to bring their sexual relations into Islamic alignment. In addition to “official” marriage, whose many bells and whistles include government paperwork, there are a number of “unofficial” forms of matrimony permitted in Islam: some are state registered, some not, but they generally check a minimum number of boxes to make them Islamically sound. Just because they are halal, however, doesn’t necessarily make these unions socially acceptable.

  Arguably the most straightforward of these arrangements is zawaj mut’a (pleasure marriage), in which a couple agrees to a time-limited union, ranging from hours to years, with physical intimacy generally part of the package. In mut’a marriage, it can be as easy as reciting a few lines to make a contract stick. Nor is divorce necessary, since these unions are on a timer from the start. Women walk away with the money they were given upon marriage. While “temporary” wives are not entitled to inherit from their husbands, children born of the union have, in theory, the same rights as those from an official marriage provided their fathers acknowledge paternity.

  Mut’a marriage is allowed in Shi’i, but not Sunni Islam. At least not anymore, having been abrogated during the early years of the Islamic empire—a point of considerable debate ever since.36 Today, mut’a marriage is practiced by Shi’i Muslims in their Arab heartlands—Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain among them—although reliable statistics on such arrangements are hard to come by.37 Research shows a variety of motives, among them, young people searching for space to get to know one another and married men and divorced or widowed women—the latter now common in war-ravaged Iraq—looking for sexual gratification with an Islamic cover in economically straitened circumstances. Although religiously accepted, a mut’a union does not enjoy the same social prestige as, nor the full legal rights of, official marriage—and is not something a woman with a reputation to keep would likely put on her résumé. This is because mut’a marriage is not about settling down and starting a family; it makes no attempt to varnish its sexual purpose.

  Even more controversial is Egypt’s spin on informal marriage: zawaj ‘urfi, or customary unions. Over the past few decades, ‘urfi marriage has become a lightning rod for anxieties about sexual morality in particular and social collapse in general. Customary marriages, which are not recorded by the state, used to be the way of much of matrimony in Egypt until the 1930s, when government registration was required. ‘Urfi marriage continued in my father’s day, but it was rare, practiced mainly by widows fearful of losing their husbands’ pensions on remarrying, actors and artists with a taste for the unconventional, and middle-class men trying to have it all—sleep with their secretaries, salve their consciences, and keep it a secret from their wives.

  More recently, however, ‘urfi marriage has trickled down to the youth in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab region.38 Just how common it has become is a matter of speculation; no one knows for certain because modern-day ‘urfi marriages tend to be secret, unlike those in my great-grandparents’ day. In Egypt, figures attributed to “official sources” range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of such marriages a year. As with anxiety over unmarried women, such numbers fuel public panic but research tells a different story. In a study of more than forty-five hundred Egyptians aged eighteen to thirty, at most 6 percent of university students were estimated to be in such relationships; the real frequency lies somewhere between what young people are willing to admit to and what their elders greatly fear.39

  “A lot of my friends have ‘urfi marriage,” Laila, a soft-spoken undergraduate in media studies at one of Egypt’s leading universities, told me. She has firsthand experience: as a teenager, Laila entered into an ‘urfi marriage with a man ten years her senior. They told their friends but kept it from their families. It was a simple process: Laila signed a preprinted form that her boyfriend provided—she has little recollection of what it specified, and in any case, she didn’t keep a copy. Laila’s ‘urfi arrangement was positively bureaucratic compared w
ith more exotic forms: “blood marriage,” in which the couple seal their contract with pinpricked fingers, “tattoo marriage,” and other inventive vows.40

  Official marriage was never going to be an option, Laila said. She comes from an upper-middle-class family, with educated parents, and was attending a private foreign-language school when she met her boyfriend, one of Egypt’s millions of drug users. “I knew this relationship would not continue and my parents will not accept an addict,” she told me. Besides, her boyfriend was keener on ‘urfi than formal marriage. “He encouraged me because he doesn’t want to feel responsible. In ‘urfi marriage, all the essential things in a normal marriage are not required of him.”

  From the beginning, Laila was under no illusions about the Islamic-acceptability of her arrangement. But that’s not why she did it. “In my religion, I know it’s not halal, but it’s a sign of commitment,” she explained. “It’s for the couple. It’s a paper that’s worth nothing, but they think it is something that connects them.” She was clear in her mind on this. “I know that my religion does not accept ‘urfi marriage; I am doing it to make me feel better, but I know it’s not right. In my religion, marriage is about more than having pleasure. It’s a journey in life and it’s two persons coming together.… Maybe parents, they want to see a good life for their kids and that’s why they don’t accept it.”

  Laila holds a harder line on ‘urfi marriage than do some of Egypt’s Islamic scholars. The religious permissibility of ‘urfi takes us back to the heart of what makes a marriage in Islam. The minimal set of requirements depends on whom you ask. Some scholars argue that an intent to settle down and start a family is key. Others argue that ishhar, or public announcement, is central to making a marriage Islamically sound; some insist that the consent of a woman’s wali (official guardian) is vital. But other scholars maintain that all it takes to make a real marriage in Islam is an offer, acceptance, mahr (which can be as little as the couple agrees—or none at all, if the bride consents), and two witnesses—a wali is not required, provided a woman is mature and knows her own mind.41