26 Sept. - 2 October 2002 Issue No. 605 Chronicles	Current issue Previous issue Site map
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Al-Ahram: A Diwanof contemporary life (461)

Wedding woes

Fewer Egyptians were getting married in the 1930s. The global economic crisis had affected the country in the form of mass unemployment and sky-rocketting inflation, thus rendering the cost of marriage out of the reach of most young Egyptians. Professor Yunan Labib Rizk* looks at the phenomenon

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As though Egyptians did not have enough problems as it was, Al- Ahram, during the summer of 1930, drew the public's attention to yet another concern: the aversion of the young to marriage. Abu Abdoun El-Adrousi, an Al-Ahram reader, expresses this concern in a lengthy letter to the newspaper on 28 September that year:

"A crisis has gripped the country, threatening its unity and its future: the marriage crisis." Evidence of this crisis existed in the registers of the religious courts for that and the previous year. These registers demonstrated that the number of marriages was gradually declining. Thus, "bachelorhood is on the rise, and this merits contemplation and attention, if not on the part of parents and guardians then at least on the part of intellectuals and the press."

The cause for this crisis, in El-Adrousi's opinion was sky- rocketting inflation. "I asked an elegant, refined young man of good social standing why he had not married. He said he could not afford it. The first thing a girl's parents ask a prospective suitor is how much money he has, as though their daughter were an item to be sold and bought in the market. A prospective husband's skill at a profession, his knowledge and his ability to earn a living are nothing to parents compared to wealth and property."

Perhaps a frustrated suitor himself, the writer appealed to all patriots who love their country to wage a campaign against parents' excessive emphasis on the price of a bride and the exorbitant costs of marriage. He further urged the need for appropriate alternatives, "because the marriage crisis in Egypt is a serious problem that requires a rapid solution if we are to prevent the grave consequences that await young women in Egypt."

El-Adrousi's concern was widespread, judging from the flood of letters and articles that appeared in Al-Ahram that year. However, others offered different assessments of the causes of the "marriage crisis". A reader from Minya blamed religious officials for "the strike against marriage", as he called it. He relates that a judge in the Minya religious court issued a directive prohibiting the authorisation of marriage contracts if the applicants did not present birth certificates. The directive, he said, violated a Ministry of Justice regulation stating, "Those who are suspected of having not reached the age of consent must furnish a marriage certificate, but if that is not possible the testimony of an authorised physician, whether or not in government employee, will suffice."

Also from Upper Egypt, from Girga, a certain Abdel-Halim Abdel-Rahim El-Assiouti complained of the difficulties couples face in obtaining birth certificates. The procedures, he wrote, could take months and were extremely costly. He explains, "The applicant, if unsure, must specify the year in which he thinks he was born and then pay a fee of 33 piastres. Then he has to wait for months until he is informed whether or not a certificate exists. If not, he has to pay another 20 piastres so that a search can be conducted for another year. This process can continue for years on end, during which an additional fee has to be paid each time the search is conducted. Generally, the result is that a certificate never existed in the first place, necessitating a certificate of age estimation from a physician."

El-Assiouti wrote that these certificates could be very dubious. "In walks a 10-year-old into a doctor's clinic, and lo and behold, out he walks again after a scarce five minutes with a certificate graced by the doctor's signature stating that he is 20 and legally entitled to marry. There is no mystery in how this can occur."

El-Assiouti goes on to propose a solution, which was to issue medical inspection cards and to create an official commission to appoint local physicians to assess applicants' ages. Not only would the intervention of the government ensure that doctors did not overcharge applicants but the process would become a source of national revenue.

The newspaper was not the only forum in which the concern over the marriage crisis was aired. On 5 July 1930, Al-Ahram reports that a lodge meeting, of which there were several in Egypt at the time, hosted a debate entitled, "The marriage crisis: who is responsible?". Normally, lodge meetings were shrouded in secrecy, which had always aroused suspicion concerning their nature. Not so on this occasion, as Al-Ahram confirmed that the debate was open to the public. Moreover, the newspaper also announced that the organisers had allocated a section for women, clearly sensing the need for the presence of this segment of the populace, which was so fundamental to the debate.

It was the custom in such debates for the audience to hear two conflicting opinions and then cast a vote. On this occasion, the first speaker posited that men, not women, were to blame for the crisis. "His opinion was supported by religious court advocate Ahmed Hatata and one of the women present." The woman remained unnamed. Assuming the opposing opinion was Mohamed Zaki Sharaf, assistant director of the Bank of Egypt's department of legal affairs, and Mustafa Kamel, another lawyer.

In spite of this widespread concern, it is evident that the opinions offered were off the mark. The fact is that all the causes cited for the marriage crisis existed beforehand, yet people kept getting married. What appears to have escaped the commentators was that the global economic crisis that had affected Egypt, as elsewhere, in the form of mass unemployment and plummeting standards of living rendered the cost of marriage far out of reach for most young Egyptians.

Nevertheless, one reader, Mohamed Abdel-Aziz El-Sada, did attempt to attribute the marriage crisis to a global cause. This was the "recent war", referring to World War I, which "delivered such a shock that it stunned the world into a total standstill or, otherwise put, marked a watershed separating the beautiful past from the future". Currently, El-Sada continued, the world was a boiling cauldron that "will continue to seethe until eminent sociologists and psychologists manage to bring it under control", adding that social and psychological factors "have the mysterious power of being able to overturn all systems." He goes on to explain that the changes following the war had generated a "curious freedom, different from that which people were familiar with." Specifically, the freedom women were experiencing was not a "proper freedom" but a "reckless freedom", which, in turn, had given rise to an increasingly widespread phenomenon: contracted common-law marriages.

Although El-Sada's conclusion seemed to have strayed from his premise, the issue he raised became the subject of a study by an Al- Ahram staff reporter, Ahmed Abdel-Halim El-Askari, who explored the religious and sociological aspects of common-law marriage in a series of articles that appeared over several weeks. El-Askari begins by alerting readers to the dangers inherent in the phenomenon. Every day the courts had to adjudicate in a case concerning a child's parentage or the "ruined future of a girl who had surrendered herself to a man after he had written out a piece of paper stating that he married her for such and such a sum of money".

El-Askari was surprised that this practice was so widespread especially as there was no real justification for it. "We are not living in a desert or even a semi-desert, but rather in Cairo, the capital of Egypt," he wrote. "The Ministry of Justice is only steps away and it has appointed specialists whose offices are located in all parts of the capital and whose sole job it is to validate marriages or divorces, for which official forms have been specifically created."

Although curiosity and consternation had prompted him to seek the opinion of experts, El-Askari's bias was evident in the way he formulated his questions. For example, he wrote to Sheikh Moussa El-Nawawi, chief magistrate of the Supreme Religious Court, saying, "Common-law marriage and the attendant disputes and the backlog of cases have become so prevalent as to threaten the safety of the family. What steps should be taken to counter this danger? Do we need new legislation?"

A good question, indeed, to which the judicial official answered, "A legal marriage is that which entails mutual consent in the presence of witnesses, and the conditions of this process are clear, whether or not it has been formally documented. A long time ago, the government introduced a system of marriage contracts and divorce certificates. The government further appointed official notaries from the clergy and promulgated an ordinance regulating their activities. The purpose of this was to safeguard the family entity, both during the time that couples are alive or after their death. However, no restrictions have been placed on the proof of marriage in the event the couples are alive."

Not satisfied with this answer, El-Askari pressed forward with a second question. Did the sheikh think that recent developments "compel us, at least, to examine more closely whether current legislation is appropriate to our contemporary age?" The official was even less obliging. "Perhaps I would answer your question on another occasion," Sheikh El-Nawawi answered, to which El-Askari appended, "I withdrew from his presence after expressing my gratitude."

Undoubtedly the Al-Ahram reporter was seeking some solace when he directed the same questions to the chief magistrate of the preliminary religious court. If so, he was to be disappointed again. Sheikh Mohamed Suleiman said, "The contracts stipulated by law pose no danger to the family. Rather, the danger resides in people's failure to abide by them. Muslims should marry in accordance with the Book of God and the Sunna of the Prophet and in striving towards the Book of God they will be spared destruction. As for the danger you mentioned of litigation over common-law marriages, it is far less than the danger of dissolution or cohabitation in the manner of certain aspects of contemporary civilisation's barbarity."

As though he had suspected he had not made his point sufficiently clear to El-Askari, Sheikh Suleiman reiterates that common-law marriage was "a thousand times better than cohabitation in sin and outside the bounds of God's Law". In this regard, the purpose of the courts was to "safeguard the rights of worshippers." In accordance with this, the function of the judge was to adjudicate in the disputes between individuals. That cases involving common-law marriages should come before a judge was simply "his misfortune and not a question of quantity, as you suggest".

Unable to conceal his disappointment at the response of the two religious court officials, El-Askari concluded this portion of his investigation with the remark, "May readers think what they will from these two answers. Ours is but to ask these two officials, with all due kindness and respect, to help us have women who do not play and joke with people or embrace them in public forums and salons."

El-Askari's dismay did not prevent him from taking his question to someone far higher up in the religious hierarchy. Unfortunately, the answer of Sheikh Mohamed Mustafa El-Maraghi, former rector of Al-Azhar, proved even more disappointing than those of his colleagues. But perhaps this should not have come as a surprise. While El-Nawawi and Suleiman were enforcers of the law, El-Maraghi had been one of its formulators, as is evident in his response:

"The draft personal status law that was passed recently contained an article that stipulated the following: 'No marital claim shall be heard before the courts, following the promulgation of this law, unless the marriage has been officially authenticated.'" El-Maraghi had been surprised that in spite of the fact that this article had met with general approval, the Ministry of Justice decided to strike it from the draft bill. After all, its purpose had been "to compel people to respect marriage contracts and to make these contracts public through an official registration".

The former Al-Azhar rector paused at some length on the issue of public notarisation and its religious foundations. "Jurists of the Hanafi school of Islam, for example, require that a marriage contract must be witnessed for it to be valid, and some imams have insisted that the contract be made public through the sounding of a tambourine, and such like. The aim of this was to safeguard the marriage contract, to facilitate the verification of its existence in the event of an attempt to refute it and to distinguish the marital bond from other bonds. The jurists made no conditions for other types of contracts similar to these conditions." In El-Maraghi's opinion, if witnesses and the striking of tambourines fulfilled the requirements of publicising a contract in the past, the laws currently in effect in Egypt fulfilled that purpose now.

Having failed to obtain some substantiation of his opinion on common-law marriage among religious officials, El-Askari turned to secular sources. The first he approached was "an eminent former minister who held the justice portfolio twice", he wrote, without mentioning the name of this respondent. Whoever he was his opinion was diametrically opposed to those whom El-Askari had interviewed previously. There was an urgent need for new legislation to prohibit litigation on the basis of common-law marriage documents, he said, adding, "Indeed, a penalty should be imposed on the wife against whom it has been proven she assented to marriage on the basis of an authorised marriage document." He went on to condemn common-law marriage outright, saying that when he was minister he had come across cases involving men who had been so infatuated with a woman that they entered into a common-law marriage without witnesses. "I was particularly struck that some of these cases involved lower class elements who pinned high hopes on marrying women of fortune."

The Al-Ahram reporter then asked the former minister why he had prevented the introduction of a new law when he was of the opinion that one was needed. Rather than being discomfited by the question, the minister responded candidly that there had been nothing to prevent the passage of a new law "apart from the political storms that the government was facing at the time". So delicate was the situation of the government, he added, that it feared approaching controversial issues, especially those of a religious nature.

Then why did he not push for a new law, now that he was no longer a member of government and still sensed the harm that ensued from the absence of such a law, the reporter asked. The former minister responded that such was the task of journalists who could not be faulted for such activity. As for politicians such as himself, he must suffice with what he had said.

Thus encouraged, El-Askari turned to other prominent figures, among whom was Prince Omar Touson. In answer to the reporter's customary question on the potential harm of common-law marriages the prince said that he recalled that in 1893 a royal edict was issued prohibiting courts from hearing marital cases unless the marriage was officially certified. "This edict was issued in the course of a dispute over the legacy of Prince Ibrahim Ahmed. It was claimed that he was married to Princess Neimat, daughter of the khedive, and that she had a right to his legacy." Prince Touson expressed his surprise that the law had fell into disuse after that.

Then, contrary to what El-Askari must have expected, the prince said, "However, I do not understand the logic in stipulating this condition for marital litigation, especially given that such a condition does not apply to claims over progeny. Moreover, the need to reduce the number of such cases before the courts is not an appropriate reason for advocating legislation, especially given that the number of such cases are relatively few. In my opinion, from the standpoint of the interests of society, the system that is currently in place in the religious courts should be sustained."

If El-Askari felt his respondents failed to advance his campaign, his articles nevertheless paved the way to other contributions, all of which supported his opinion. In a letter to Al-Ahram, a person signing himself as a judge in the religious courts, cited several reasons which led people into common-law marriages. There were widows, for example, whose late husbands had established a trust fund to provide for them on the condition that they never remarried. In spite of the fact that "there were dozens of people who deserved this money more than others," many of these widows singled out "idlers to marry them".

Similarly, there were those widows who ate up the inheritance of the orphaned children, retaining title to what was rightfully theirs while entering into a common-law marriage. "If only it was the woman alone who ate up the money. But no, her common-law mate is keen on gobbling it up himself before her life or his marriage to her comes to an end."

More insidiously, there were instances when the courts intervened between a man and his true spouse, issuing a restraint against him not to interfere in the affairs of her marriage to a man her relatives married her off to under a common-law contract. "Then, after she discovers that she is unhappy in that marriage, she finds no alternative but to conclude an official marriage with her truly intended under the shadow of a common-law contract."

Another contributor was Dr Mahgoub Thabet, professor of forensics at the Egyptian University. His opinion appeared under the headline, "The problem of common-law marriage: the sociological and hygienic opinion of a physician," in Al-Ahram of 24 September 1930. Although he, too, recognised that couples would want to avoid the high costs of marriage and the procedural red tape, it was vital that they did not succumb to "the sexual attraction that surges in the bowels and the consequent emotions that inflame the chastest women and men". Even in the most democratic societies, Dr Thabet continues, the doors to marriage were not cast open without restrictions, for the institution required powerful protective barriers. He went on to list many of the conditions "civilised nations" stipulated before couples could be issued a marriage certificate. Among these was the need to produce medical certificates ascertaining that they were not infected by certain communicable diseases, a condition that common-law marriages failed to meet. The forensics professor concludes, "God spare the country the evil of common-law marriage, indeed any form of marriage in which health precautions are not compulsory, so that such marriages do not produce weak and feeble offspring, unsuitable for the fight of life."

What would have probably shocked Al-Ahram readers of those times was the letter to the newspaper from a student in the school of commerce. In his opinion, couples should fulfil several requirements before being issued a marriage contract. A man who was already married to a woman "suitable for conjugal life" should be prohibited from taking a second wife, especially if he had offspring from his current wife. Applicants for a contract should also be required to submit several certificates establishing that they had no criminal record, were free of contagious diseases and were of sound character. The husband-to-be should also submit an affidavit testifying to his financial circumstances and take out a life insurance policy, equivalent in value to the bride price and which would devolve to the wife as alimony in the event of separation.

While most of the previous conditions applied to the husband, two others applied to the intended wife. Men should be allowed to see their fiancées and acquaint themselves with them properly. The fiancée's family must also furnish him with accurate information on her moral character and her domestic capabilities. "Should this information prove incorrect after the marriage, the husband will then be able to hold his wife or her family accountable." The second condition applied after marriage. "Should the wife mistreat her husband, act improperly towards him, neglect him or neglect to serve him, or conduct herself immorally, the husband would have the right to divorce her without paying alimony and to demand the restitution of the bride-price." It is difficult to imagine the writer's female contemporaries, and perhaps their parents, agreeing to this condition.

* The author is a professor of history and head of Al-Ahram History Studies Centre.

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