All the Weird New Marriage Arrangements in Egypt

This is part three of a dialogue between Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, and Iranian author Janet Afary. El Saadawi is famous in the Arab world for her outspokenness, particularly on the issue of women’s rights. (Double X interviews her here. [2]) Afary is a professor of religious studies and feminist studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran [3], the book being discussed in this dialogue. Read part one here [4] and part two here [5].

Dear Janet,

I appreciate what you said about my writings. I wrote my book The Hidden Face of Eve [6] in Arabic in 1974. It came out in English in 1980, and included my comments on the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Many progressive men and women at that time (inside and outside Iran) supported the Islamic revolution, because they wanted to get rid of the Shah’s oppressive regime. But, as we soon realized, the new religious conservative state in Iran became just as oppressive as the old government. The lesson is now obvious: We can’t trade one oppressive regime for another and expect true modernity, or true democracy.

I would take that even one step further. The problem is not just unique to a modern religious state, but applies to a secular capitalist one as well. We women, and men for that matter, can’t have real political or sexual liberation under the American system, either. I realized this when I became aware of the sexual issues my students in the U.S. were facing. They didn’t seem all that different from the problems facing students in Egypt or Iran or Turkey or other Islamic countries. They were very similar, in fact, to the problems between men and women you described in the newly “liberated” Iran.

Since 1993 I have been teaching in different American universities. I used to encourage my students to write creative autobiographies. They wrote about hating men, feeling hopeless about relationships, having three or four abortions before they turned 30, or being single mothers.

I started to realize that the so-called “sexual revolution” in modern America may have made them more sexually active inside and outside marriage, but it had not liberated men or women. American young men in general (as in modern Iran and other modern or postmodern countries) feel little responsibility towards women they sleep with. Over time, I began to realize that sex without social responsibility or emotional commitment leads to new types of slavery and moral degradation.

In Egypt, new kinds of marriage arrangements are emerging, driven by a desire for liberation. Educated, economically independent women reject the state’s Islamic code, which allows men to have multiple wives and divorce at will. Husbands are also looking for sex without the full economic and social responsibility of marriage. This has led to something called El Misiar Marriage. An unmarried woman can have a temporary husband, called the Misiar husband, which means a “mobile” husband who comes and goes, with no marriage obligations or a legal contract.  After long media debates, Islamic authorities have declared that this arrangement does not contradict Islam, according to the vague principle of “the necessary allows the forbidden.”

Another type of new marriage is called Oorffy Marriage. (Oorffy in Arabic means social but not official.) According to Oorffy, a woman can marry a man without a legal contract, with no legal obligation on either side. Both are supposedly equal and free in these arrangements. But if a child is born in these arrangements, the mother is responsible. The father has the freedom to deny the marriage and to refuse to give his name to the child.

A few years ago, in a highly publicized instance, a well-known educated mother raised a case in court against her equally well-known Oorffy husband, because he refused to give his name to their daughter. The court obliged the man to give his name to the child with all the other responsibilities of fatherhood. Progressive men and women celebrated this court action, and the mother was considered a brave feminist leader.

However, if we look more deeply into these changes, we see that they hardly count as feminist victories. Once again, the women end up with the burdens of the relationship, and the patriarchy dominates. After all, she was fighting so her child could carry the father’s name, sure proof that the patriarchy still dominates the lives of women and children. These changes all sound liberating for women, but they actually wind up leaving the women with more burdens and the men with more freedom to have sex without any responsibility.

The policies of secular and religious regimes encourage men to be sexually active, and this leads women to be sexually active too, but we cannot call this a revolution or liberation.

We still have a long way to go in the whole world, not only in Iran or Egypt.

Nawal El Saadawi