Mahmoud describes his work frankly as prostitution. “I know it is haram, but it’s not my problem.” He keeps his real job quiet from his family; Mahmoud’s wife thinks he’s in the travel business. Ever the lawyer, however, Amir insists that these unions are aboveboard. “I do not consider this marriage prostitution,” he says, “because it is legal and shar’i.” Technically, he has a point: Samia’s marriage ticks all the right boxes in terms of Islamic formalities, dubious intent aside. But she herself is unconvinced. “I used to go to the mosque when I was little. I am a religious girl, but I know I am doing something haram by accepting this marriage.” It’s a problem for her family too. Although summer marriages are common in Hawamdiyya, they’re also a source of shame. Samia’s mother says she has no friends in the town, an isolation she ascribes to the coming and going of people to Cairo in search of work. But Mahmoud reckons this has more to do with ostracism than migration: “[Some] families cut their relationship with families who are in the business; they are conservative and religious.… They do not interact with these families so as to avoid a bad reputation.”
When asked about her future, Samia says getting out of the business is top on her list. There’s a light in her intelligent eyes when she describes her ambitions: having left school at twelve, she’d like to continue her studies and learn English. As for marriage, she’s not hopeful. There is a young man in town she likes, but she avoids him now. “I cut the relationship with him because he will know what I do and he will be sad,” she says, with a regret far beyond her years. Samia is torn between hating men and wanting to find someone who will take her out of all this. “I see, maybe I will make this operation to be virgin again if the man who wants to get married to me wants to do that. My dream in future is to find a good man.”
In recent years, there have been attempts to clamp down on summer marriages by linking them to Egypt’s broader push against underage unions, since research shows a majority of these holiday matches involve girls under sixteen.4 Irrespective of coercion or prostitution, such unions are illegal, thanks to a 2008 amendment to Egypt’s Child Law that raised the legal age of marriage of both men and women to eighteen. The change was fiercely opposed in Parliament by members representing the Muslim Brotherhood, who assert, among other points, that Islamic jurisprudence puts the age of self-responsibility, and therefore consent to marriage, around puberty. Indeed, one of the first legal reforms proposed by their ultraconservative cousins, the Salafis, come to Parliament was to again lower the age of marriage. Embedded in these arguments is the same reasoning that perpetuates female genital cutting: that girls could go off the sexual rails at any moment, all the more so with the temptations of modern life, and the sooner such libidinous energy is channeled into marriage, the better.
But when Egyptians talk about underage marriage, it is not a question of two love-struck teenagers tying the knot. Today, the vast majority of marriages of those under thirty are between older grooms and younger brides, with an average age difference of five or so years.5 However, the marriages causing consternation for those with an interest in human rights are the ones with half a century, not half a decade, between husband and wife. Such spring-thaw/dead-of-winter unions are also a rising source of controversy in the Gulf; in recent years high-profile cases of child brides seeking to escape their middle-aged or elderly grooms have hit the headlines in Saudi Arabia and in Yemen, where more than half of women are wed by age eighteen and recent efforts to raise the age of marriage have also met with fierce resistance from Islamic conservatives.6 Egypt’s second-highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti, also came out against underage summer marriages.7 However, proponents argue that such marriages are entirely permissible because they follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad and his favorite wife, Aisha, who, it is said, was six when they married and nine when the union was consummated—though this is a point of debate among some religious scholars today.
The Mubarak regime’s assault on the summer marriage industry was also wed to the global campaign against human trafficking. For years, Egypt has been on the receiving end of international criticism as a major highway for the modern-day slave trade; it has spent much of this century flagged by the U.S. State Department as “a source, transit, and destination country for women and children who are subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor and sex trafficking”—not just the summer marriage business, but also sex tourism involving the country’s legions of street kids, sexual exploitation of African migrants on their way to Israel via the Sinai, as well as further variations on the abuse of domestic and other workers.8
Suzanne Mubarak, then first lady and the driving force behind a number of national councils on women and children, took a highly public stand against human trafficking, at home and abroad. The Mubarak government set up a special anti-trafficking unit and passed several laws prohibiting the practice, including one directed against the exploitation of children, with penalties of up to life imprisonment. The government trumpeted its progress: training judges, police, and Ministry of Tourism and other officials on how to identify and handle trafficking cases; hotlines and shelters for victims; and high-profile arrests of marriage registrars for facilitating child marriages. (In one case the whole chain of summer marriage—parents, broker, lawyer, and the Saudi client—was arrested, the client sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison.)
For all the official fanfare, such measures did little to dent business for Mahmoud and Amir. Raising the age of marriage has proved a minor obstacle for determined parents, says Amir; all it takes to satisfy marriage registrars is a quick trip to the local clinic and some money under the table for a doctor to check a girl’s wisdom teeth (considered a sign of physical maturity) and issue a certificate that she is of age. Indeed, this pervasive deception leads even some liberal activists to quietly endorse lowering the age of marriage, their argument being that families are doing it anyway, in some cases marrying their daughters through informal ‘urfi unions, then switching them over to registered marriage when they turn eighteen. In the meantime, though, these young women have more often than not become young mothers, but without the rights accorded official wives. Better to have a law that recognizes this reality, one human rights lawyer from Alexandria told me, than to think the law will change people’s behavior.
As for arrests, they have done little to deter clients either. “It’s just propaganda,” Amir sniffed. “Maybe there were a few [men charged], but that does not affect the numbers.” Nor were anti-trafficking measures proving any more effective, one former employee of the government’s anti-trafficking unit told me, dismissing most of the projects as hype. She laughed at the idea of anti-trafficking legislation bringing an end to summer marriage. “When we talk about trafficking in [village] outreach, they all say in the community that none of us make this for our girls. To them it’s not a problem, it’s a way of life,” she noted. “Egyptians are very clever to find gaps in the law.”
Local NGOs, though, have had a little more success working inside communities, raising awareness of the medical and psychological risks associated with these sorts of marriages, and encouraging girls’ education as one step on the long path to empowerment. The key to getting families out of the trade is economics: there are projects to create community savings pools that women can dip into in times of trouble, as well as vocational training and other income-generating alternatives—though it’s hard to imagine handicrafts proving quite as lucrative as hand jobs. The best those working to eliminate summer marriage are hoping for, in the uncertainty of the new order, is to hold on to the few gains that were made in recent years.
The uprising did have an immediate, if unintentional, impact on the summer marriage trade, largely because the stream of Gulf visitors dried to a trickle amid stories of lawlessness on the streets of Cairo; Amir had scarcely a dozen clients the summer following the upheaval, less than a third of his regular clientele. But he was optimistic that recent events would, ultimately
, prove something of a boon. “Summer marriage will take some time to recover. When the security [situation] is solved, a lot of marriages will take place. Because after the revolution, and being a democracy, a lot of Arabs will want to come and see what happened, so there is a better chance for more customers, more clients. Even if Egypt is a democracy, even if there is economic improvement, this business will continue,” Amir confidently concluded.
None of this bodes well for Samia and her peers, who are looking for a different sort of life. Even if the laws were watertight, they’d offer them little relief: since Samia is over eighteen, restrictions on child marriage are not relevant. Nor are the laws on prostitution applicable, since her relationship is covered by an Islamically accepted marriage contract. And though, according to the letter of the law, she is being trafficked—by her own father, no less—the chances of her coming forward as a victim, or bringing a case against her father, are slim. It’s the same for any family shame, be it wife beating, incest, rape, or any of the countless other personal tragedies: the vast majority of women suffer in silence, as the director of one drop-in center for battered women in downtown Cairo told me, and will continue to do so until the price of speaking out no longer outweighs the costs of endurance. The ties that bind Samia to her summer job—financial need, family duty, and an Islamically grounded resignation to her lot—are hard to loosen, and for as long as Egypt welcomes a steady stream of Gulf visitors and their spending sprees, demand for her services is likely to continue.
“THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS IN PROSTITUTION”
Summer marriage is only one face of prostitution in Egypt. Sex work is arguably a success story of Egypt’s infitah, a triumph of private enterprise offering an array of services to suit all tastes and budgets—albeit with a heavy human price. Sex work is one of the clearest reflections of the ongoing power of patriarchy in Egypt and the wider Arab world, and a measure of just how conflicted individuals and their societies are over sex, proclaiming their Islamic credentials while ignoring, or indeed perpetrating, the exploitation and abuse of those who are in the business, by consent or coercion. In the Arab region, female sex workers carry a triple burden: as women who not only have sex outside of marriage but trade in it as well. This stigma, reinforced in law, leads them to keep quiet. As a consequence, sex work is both the most obvious and the most hidden aspect of sexual life in Egypt and the wider Arab world, and this makes these women getting their fair share of the prospective political, social, and economic gains of the region’s uprisings all the more difficult.
Just how many sex workers there are in Cairo, let alone in Egypt as a whole, is a matter of guesswork. But a quick trawl through the International Sex Guide, “the Internet’s largest sex travel website,” where men looking for action swap tips, reveals a united nations of sex workers: Russian and Central European escorts, Chinese masseuses offering something on the side, Sudanese refugees and Moroccan migrants working the dance floor, Egyptian women available to pick up off the street or to order up by mobile phone in a playground stretching from the infamous bars and clubs of the main drag to the pyramids, and rented apartments in Mohandeseen to massage parlors in the leafy expat haven of Maadi to a landmark five-star hotel on the Nile where commercial sex workers—male and female—are not only tolerated by management but discreetly offered to guests as off-menu room service. According to one estimate, there are at least eight hundred hot spots for female sex work in Cairo alone.9
“The whole country is in prostitution,” laughed Jihane, a chubby, bubbly woman in her midtwenties. She should know; Jihane sells sex to pay for her drug habit. We met at a private drug rehabilitation center in Cairo—one of the few to cater specifically to the swollen ranks of female addicts, who face even more stigma than their male counterparts. Jihane is on the more privileged side of Cairo’s social spectrum: she comes from an educated, middle-class family, her Arabic peppered with French. In her early teens, Jihane started taking drugs with school friends—first bangu (a form of hashish), then pills, and on to heroin. This graduation was prompted in part by economics; in recent years, the street price of heroin has fallen, all the faster after the uprising, to the point where it’s possible to pick up an eighth of a gram for around EGP 60—one of the few goods whose price has not skyrocketed in the years of double-digit inflation.
It was through her friends at school that Jihane got hooked on drugs; at first she used pocket money from her unsuspecting parents, who, like many middle-class Egyptian couples, were too busy working to stop the family from falling down the economic ladder to keep a close eye on the kids. Eventually, Jihane dropped out of school, left home, and moved in with her dealers. Direct bartering—sex for drugs—was how she managed to maintain her habit for a while, but then she drifted into the cash-only business, along with her friends.
Jihane’s crowd charges a client EGP 100 on up for full vaginal intercourse. According to Jihane, her more successful colleagues are making as much as EGP 4,000 a day, and virgins—some of whom are born into a family business—command even more at their debut. Most, women, however, come to sex work after losing their virginity through marriage, a failed love affair, or sexual abuse. Many in Jihane’s circle are working for pimps—mi’arrasiin, in colloquial Egyptian—husbands or boyfriends, but often other women too, themselves former sex workers, whose retirement plan consists of an apartment and a client roster passed on to younger women who use the flat as their workplace. It’s a well-established pattern of succession: “If the prostitute repented, she would go pimping,” so the Egyptian saying goes, referring to those—post-Mubarak era politicians, for instance—whose promises of change amount to nothing more than business as usual.
Because of all the obstacles to sex before marriage, I assumed that most of her clientele were single men, but Jihane set me straight. For her, at least, they’re mainly married men looking for sexual excitement lacking in their conjugal relations. “In America, a girl before getting married can watch a sex film and she will get experience; she may have sex with a boy, so she is not a girl [virgin] now. But the girl in Egypt goes to her husband’s house and she is virgin. And she does not watch sex films. When she gets married, she does not know how to do anything. The girls who work in prostitution, they have got more ideas and more experience. But if the wife has got this experience, the husband will doubt her behavior. And even if he tries to teach her, she will tell him it’s ‘ayb [shameful].”
I asked Jihane what she and her friends could offer that a wife might not. She reflected for a moment: “A girl [sex worker] can go into different positions, but his wife may be overweight and she cannot go into these. She doesn’t know how to move with him.” Anal sex—which, as we’ve seen, is a bone of contention between spouses—is also on the cards: EGP 300 a shot, according to Jihane’s price list. And that’s not the only extra. “The girls working in prostitution have means [techniques] like sucking [fellatio]. There is no sucking with the wife. There are some men who try to be friendly with their wives and do this, but it will be a very strange thing if the man asks his wife to do this. Even if the wife does sucking for her husband, she does not have the experience of one who is doing it all day.” The bottom line, says Jihane, is expertise and enthusiasm, feigned or not. “If she [the sex worker] is not enjoying it,” Jihane reasoned, “she is like the one [the wife] at home, so she is not going to get the money.”
As do many tourist attractions in Egypt, Jihane’s circle practices tiered pricing—one rate for Egyptians, and a higher rate for foreigners. The big money comes from Gulf tourists, but unlike Samia and her peers, Jihane’s clique also offers a rather more specialized service: same-sex intercourse. “Some girls know that some Saudi women like this matter and they go to the hotels and meet the Saudi women and they pay more than the men,” Jihane observed. “I know a friend of mine, she has got a Saudi client woman, she goes to her place, and she gets paid three thousand dollars for two hours.” According to Jihane, some of her colleagues owe their profession
al development in this particular department to the Mubarak regime. “Here in Egypt, when there is a girl sitting in a café, the morals police may arrest her when she is overexposed [revealingly dressed]. In the first case, if she’s arrested, she will be discharged, but if it is a repeat, the second time she may get three years in prison. When she goes to the prison, the women have sex together. And then when they come outside again, they use this ability to have sex with women. So when they are arrested, after they have contact with the police, they work in the lesbian field.”
Same-sex-inclined Saudis aren’t the only female visitors in Egypt looking for action. Commercial sex work is one of the few equal opportunity employers in the country and across the Arab region; even heterosexual men have their corner of the business, or bezness, as it’s called in Tunisia. From Agadir to Aqaba, where there are Western women on vacation, you will find local men at their service. With soaring unemployment, young men from around Egypt have been making their way to Dahab, a resort town on the Sinai Peninsula, and other tourist destinations along the Red Sea in search of a decent wage to support themselves and their families—and some of the best money in town comes from female visitors looking for a little attention and adventure. While the stereotype is that of a fifty-plus woman on the prowl for a much younger man, women in their twenties and thirties are increasingly flocking too. The attraction is more than just physical. “In a romantic desert setting … most women prefer romance to sex,” noted Anne Cumming, an aptly named English housewife who slept her way across the Arab region in the 1950s. “They want ambience and all the little attentions. They like the by-products of sex rather than its stark reality.”10
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