Sex and the Citadel (30 page)

Many of the women engaged in such summer marriages come from a particular governorate, Giza, next to Cairo. Samia lives in a town called Hawamdiyya, one of three famous for supplying women for summer marriage. Hawamdiyya used to be known for its sugar refinery; in recent years it has become a major destination for sugar daddies. I asked Samia if her town is so popular because its daughters are so attractive. She looked at me, her pretty face framed by a chic red-and-black-spotted silver hijab, as if I were an idiot. “No.” She frowned. “It’s because we’re so poor.”

Samia is one of five children—two boys and three girls. The
family lives down a scrappy alley in Hawamdiyya in a three-room apartment along with her grandparents. Her father is a caretaker, but well-paid work in the town, like almost everywhere else in Egypt, is hard to get. Their monthly income is around EGP 700, between her father’s salary, their vegetable patch, and a few chickens. So a couple of years ago, when a man turned up at their door with a “groom” for the nineteen-year-old Samia, and EGP 20,000, her father took the money; Samia got EGP 500 to buy some new clothes. “I was afraid because it was my first time. I did not know what to expect,” she said. “It lasted for a week and he lived with me in Cairo, [in an area called] Mohandeseen. He was interested in sex most of the time. After a week I returned to my family and he left. When I was back, I was sad because something had changed in me, [but also] I was happy because my family had money to spend the whole year. I talked with my mother about what happened, but I did not talk with my sister because I want to avoid her doing that. [In any case], the subject is so sensitive, we do not talk a lot or frankly about it.”

Mahmoud, on the other hand, has no such compunction. He’s a
simsar
, which translates to “broker” in English. In reality, Mahmoud is a pimp. He works with Amir, who’s a lawyer in a run-down office on a rubbish-laden, dirt-packed side street in Cairo. They look as if they’ve just come from central casting: both in their forties, Mahmoud is slick, with a gold chain and thicket of chest hair peeking out from an open-necked sports shirt; Amir is buttoned up in a crisp gray shirt and smart green tie, surrounded by his legal certificates and a giant gilded list of the ninety-nine names of God above his desk.

When I first met them, before the uprising, the global recession had yet to touch Mahmoud and Amir. Mahmoud and his broker friends—both men and women—were arranging at least two thousand “marriages” a year. For the legal paperwork, Amir receives EGP 1,000 per union; Mahmoud, who finds the girls, arranges the apartments, and generally smooths things along, gets EGP 2,000–3,000 in exchange. Such marriages were uncommon in the 1960s, says Mahmoud, but major changes since the 1970s—the Gulf oil
boom, Egypt’s
infitah
(open-door economic policy), and a growing consumerism, along with the rise of Islamic conservatism—ushered in this sex tourism with a religious twist. And prices have more than doubled since then, he says.

Mahmoud is ideally placed for his profession, with a foot in both worlds: he was born in Hawamdiyya and knows the families there, but now works as a driver in one of the big five-star hotels in Cairo, famous for its view and, so rumor has it,
hafalat khassa
—private parties hosted by wealthy Gulf guests where wine and women flow freely. Mahmoud walked me through how his side of the business works. “I know a lot of Saudi men in the hotel, and they want to get married to Egyptian girls … sometimes for ten days and sometimes for two weeks. It [usually] starts when I pick up a Saudi from the airport and he asks me to get him a wife, a ‘young’ girl; occasionally, he asks me for a virgin, but it’s more expensive,” Mahmoud recounted. “I know the girls from their parents, who tell me that they want to marry their daughters. For example, I know [a family with] two girls in university, and their mother is a widow and they need money. They came to meet the groom, and the mother told me that the girls need money to spend on what they need. The mother told me that the groom could marry both of them, but he refused. He said, ‘I am old and I cannot do that.’ ”

These arrangements are along the same lines as some of the “informal” marriages discussed in chapter 2, but in contrast to the secrecy that often surrounds those unions, a summer marriage is a family affair. Parents come to the “ceremony,” though it’s a no-frills occasion compared with the hoopla that accompanies a real Egyptian wedding. Key to proceedings is the signing of a marriage contract—“in the name of God and in the tradition of the Prophet, peace be upon him”—in which both parties promise to fulfill their marital obligations, including financial support from the husband and obedience and conjugal access from the woman. Unlike an official marriage, which is presided over by a
ma’dhun
and registered with the government, in these arrangements both parties and the lawyer keep a copy of the contract, which is torn up when the couple go their separate ways. These unions dissolve without strings;
all the woman walks away with is the money she was promised up front by her partner.

Over the course of two years, Samia had three summer marriages. That’s slow by Hawamdiyya standards; Mahmoud knows young women who go through five or six of these unions a year, which means that they are technically in violation of their marriage contract because they have not observed
‘idda
—that is, the period of three months prescribed by the Qur’an that women have to wait between marriages, so as to assure their previous husbands that they are not pregnant. In any case, for women like Samia, more fundamental rights are at stake. The contract clearly stipulates that she enters into the union of her own free will, but Samia feels she has little choice: “My father forced me to marry because he wanted to get rid of me.”

It’s not just poverty that is driving families to this, but growing consumerism as well. “Seventy percent of the girls I know in the village, they do this marriage; I have two close friends who did that,” says Samia. “Most of the girls, when they talk about this marriage, they talk from the money side. As for me, I wanted my sister to continue her studies in school; that’s why I accept to marry. I do not want my sister to have the same problem.” That money comes at a price, however. Samia drops her eyes, along with her voice, as she describes her husbands: “Most of them do anal sex with me and they took medicines [Viagra]. One of them was watching videos and sex scenes, and after that he practiced sex with me. One of them wanted to practice sex with me the whole time, but another one was lazy and quiet in asking for sex. The third one, he beat me once.” It’s rare that girls become pregnant from these relationships, says Samia, because they are all using some form of contraception. Condoms, however, are not on the cards, leaving these young women open to sexually transmitted infections; Samia herself was “sick in sex” after one of her marriages.

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.”