Sex and the Citadel (7 page)

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 professionally 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.

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.