The Fiction (and Non-Fiction) of Egypt’s Marriage Crisis
Hanan Kholoussy
In August 2006, a twenty-seven-year old pharmacist started blogging anonymously about her futile hunt for a husband in Mahalla al-Kubra, an industrial city sixty miles north of Cairo in the Nile Delta. Steeped in satirical humor, the blog of this “wannabe bride” turned into a powerful critique of everything that is wrong with how middle-class Egyptians meet and marry. The author poked fun at every aspect of arranged marriage—from the split-second decisions couples are expected to make about lifetime compatibility after hour-long meetings, to the meddling relatives and nosy neighbors who introduce them to each other. She joked about her desperation to marry in a society that stigmatizes single women over the age of thirty. She ridiculed bachelors for their unrealistic expectations and inflated self-images, while sympathizing with the exorbitant financial demands placed on would-be husbands. Four years and thirty suitors later, in 2010 the pharmacist remained proudly single at thirty-two, refusing to settle for just any man.
Ghada Abdel Aal took Egypt by storm—its blogosphere, its literary scene, its television line-up, and even its image abroad. Blogging in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and peppering her slang with the pop-culture references of youth, Abdel Aal quickly attracted a large following. By late 2010, the hits on the witty website had surpassed a half million.1 Her tragicomic tales of matchmaking mishaps had become so popular that Egypt’s powerhouse publisher Dar al-Shorouq tracked her down to offer a book deal. A year and a half after she first posted in cyberspace, ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz (I Want to Get Married) debuted at the Cairo International Book Fair in January 2008. Less than three years later, the book was adapted into an Egyptian television series with the same name. To date, ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz has been translated into Italian, German, Dutch, and, most recently, English.
Divided into twenty-five brief chapters that showcase her best blog entries, the book describes Abdel Aal’s encounters with ten different suitors. Each suitor gets his own chapter, with each encounter preceded and followed by a chapter or two of commentary. No subject is sacred: Abdel Aal discusses police brutality, al-Qaeda, and the peccadilloes of politicians, as well as sexual harassment and dating, a phenomenon dimly acknowledged in Egypt beyond Westernized elite circles. Her parade of suitors includes a thief who cons her into loaning him money before making a fast getaway, a polygamist who proposes with his two wives looking on, a detective who checks out her family through a full-blown police investigation, and an avid soccer fan who watches a game during their first meeting and walks out because her family cheers for the opposing team. Most of these episodes are drawn from her own experiences, although Abdel Aal has admitted she occasionally borrowed friends’ stories or embellished her own for entertainment’s sake. And entertain she did. In a country where books are an increasingly hard sell, ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz was an instant bestseller. It had gone through six printings by 2010. The book made such a big splash in Egypt that Western media giants like the BBC and the Washington Post reported on the sensation.
PARODIES WITH A POINT
Throughout her rapid rise to stardom, Abdel Aal ignited controversy. Egyptian literary critics who value formal Arabic were offended that her very vernacular blog was considered a literary contribution worthy of translation. Many men were affronted by her parodies of suitors’ behavior, and accused her of being a publicity hound. Many women, too, were uncomfortable with Abdel Aal’s expressed anxiety about marrying and her derision at experiences that may be all too familiar. Elders were dismayed by her mockery of matchmaking practices that are deeply embedded in social norms. But the overwhelming majority of her readers, young and middle- to upper-class, found the book hilarious, appreciated the slang, and agreed with her critique of the customs and costs of Egyptian marriage. As a result, the broadcast version of ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz was one of the most anticipated shows of Ramadan—the hottest television season in Egypt and the Arab world.
Boasting a famous cast, including Hind Sabri, Sawsan Badr, and Ahmad al-Saqqa, ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz was one of the three most watched of the forty-odd new shows that aired during the Islamic holy month, which in 2010 occurred in August and September. Framed as a sitcom, the show reached a much broader audience than the book had, both outside Egypt and inside Egypt, where more than half of the population cannot read or write. Its broadcast as a Ramadan serial cemented the book’s status as a cultural watershed—another coup for a small-town blogger from the Delta.
But although half of the sitcom’s thirty episodes came straight from the book, and Abdel Aal herself co-wrote the screenplay, the show did not live up to the expectations of many of her readers. Some were disappointed with Hind Sabri, in her first comedic role as the professionally successful but hopelessly single main character ‘Ula, a twenty-nine-year-old pharmacist. They faulted Sabri for exaggerated facial expressions, body language, and intonation, and for telegraphing the jokes while failing to provide a sense of character development. Others found ‘Ula’s aggressiveness in pursuit of marriage unrealistic, and the satire overly broad. In one episode that did not come from the book, for example, ‘Ula poisons her best friend and colleague to prevent her from attending a professional conference teeming with potential grooms.
A few readers were upset that the serial did not relay the book’s more serious underlying message. In the book, amidst her failures at finding a husband, Abdel Aal pauses to ponder the injustice of the social pressure on women to marry:
Society needs to stop confining women solely to the role of bride. Because when things fall apart . . . they feel like worthless good-for-nothings, and they sit and complain, like I’m doing to you right now . . . If I don’t get married and if I don’t have children and if I can’t follow society’s grand plan, I will always have my independent nature and I will always have my own life and I will never be . . . a good-for-nothing.2
By contrast, Abdel Aal’s televised persona ‘Ula is so swept up in the race to matrimony, at the expense of friendships and dignity, that she offers no such profound reflections in any of her frequent soliloquies to camera.
ANXIETIES UNDERNEATH
These criticisms revealed the underlying discomfort that many Egyptians, regardless of age, gender, or class, feel with the sensitive subject that the show rather shallowly addressed. Some were disquieted by Abdel Aal’s more nuanced textual narrative as well. The depiction of a single woman’s quest for a partner made many uneasy because Abdel Aal effectively reversed the active–passive binary that has historically dictated the rules of marriage in Egypt: men choose while women comply. The strict division of gender roles is even reflected in the verbs used to describe the act of marriage in Egyptian dialect: a man marries (yigawwiz) while a woman is married off (titgawwiz).
In the typical Egyptian marriage, it is the prospective groom who actively pursues a potential bride. If he has not already found one on his own, then it is he, often with his mother, who visits his intended and her family (traditionally in their living room, which is why arranged marriage is referred to as gawaz al-salonat, or living-room marriage, in Egyptian argot). It is he who decides if she would make a suitable wife, and he who meets with her father (or male guardian) to negotiate the fiscal provisions of the match. The groom is the one who shoulders almost all of the financial burdens (though rarely without the help of his parents or other economic assistance). His future wife may or may not be present during these negotiations, and may or may not express her opinion about the decisions. But the legal institutions and socio-economic structures that support marriage are set up in a way that reinforces this gendered arrangement across class divisions. Though many Egyptian women, especially among the upper classes, choose their own spouses or at least have much more say in who they marry, few do so without their fathers’ consent. Most brides’ fathers (or, in their absence, uncles or brothers) sign their marriage contracts as proxies, further reinforcing the degree to which patriarchal norms govern the practice of marriage.
Abdel Aal’s fame is due to her sharp and funny writing, to be sure, but just as much to her timing. In 2008, around the time of her book’s publication, a spate of articles bemoaning a “marriage crisis” in Egypt appeared in the local and international press. These articles identified a growing number of Egyptian men who could not afford marriage because of its extravagant costs, blaming women and their parents for their unreasonable financial expectations of would-be grooms hit hard by the worldwide economic crisis. Egypt’s high rates of inflation and unemployment, matched with unprecedented shortages of affordable housing, took on a more sinister cast: these economic worries were keeping young men from achieving the most basic of rights—the right to marry.
There is no doubt that marriage burdens an Egyptian groom with staggering costs. The pricey wedding celebration, dower,3 and down payments to establish the household are the foretaste of decades of spousal and child support. For many young urban men, particularly from the struggling middle and lower-middle classes, these expenses can be so steep as to deter them from seeking a bride until well into their thirties. But the stream of news coverage offered little insight into how the “marriage crisis” affected women. Nor did it provide convincing evidence that there was a genuine crisis, that is, a significant erosion of the ability to marry. Journalists and analysts initially cited a vague 2007 Brookings Institution statistic that nearly 50 percent of Middle Eastern men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine were single.4 A year later, however, Navtej Dhillon, who had directed the two-year research project that produced this figure, announced a “noteworthy” reversal in the trend of delayed marriage in Egypt: men born in 1976 were marrying at the median age of twenty-six.5 Similarly, in 2009, the head of Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics retracted his own agency’s report that the 2006 census had shown the number of single Egyptian women to be 5.7 million. Amidst the media brouhaha, he revised the estimate to only a few hundred thousand.6
More significant than the accuracy of these statistics or their subsequent retraction is the recurring perception that a marriage crisis menaces Egypt. In 2008, Western analysts, Muslim Brothers, academics, and laypeople all weighed in: What are the implications of large numbers of bachelors for national and international security? Might the young men be lured by Islamist groups, which provide interest-free loans and celebrate mass weddings to facilitate marriage? How might they vote in elections in which Islamists and others inveigh against the dearth of legitimate unions? The engagement of these questions in the press revealed a great deal about Egyptian men and women (as well as outside observers): marriage, it seems, is regarded as a barometer of the nation’s social progress, political well-being, and economic health. The “marriage crisis” is about much more than matrimony. It serves as a platform for debate about materialism, privatization, social customs, unemployment, gender roles, Islamism, and the performance of the government. Contrary to commentators’ beliefs, furthermore, the marriage crisis is not a phenomenon unique to twenty-first-century Egypt. In decades past, anxieties over marriage have spiked whenever Egypt found itself in the midst of socio-economic and political upheaval.
TAKING BACK SPINSTERHOOD
What distinguished the late 2000s round of marriage crisis debate was its coincidence with the popularity of ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz, a voice that claimed to speak on behalf of single women. In her blog profile, Abdel Aal identified herself as one of Egypt’s 15 million single women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Though she did not reveal how she obtained this improbable number, she did something far more powerful and provocative than add a statistic to the hubbub. She co-opted the slur “spinster” and proclaimed herself a spokesperson for this constituency. In doing so, Abdel Aal exposed the implicit threat concealed within the discussion of the marriage crisis affecting men: the fate of a nation full of unwed women in a society where marriage is the only legitimate outlet for sexual activity, particularly for women. As throughout the twentieth century, the late 2000s press debates on the marriage crisis focused overwhelmingly on bachelors and their reasons for not marrying. Rather than ask women why they are not marrying, analysts assumed that they must be the main reason for men’s abstention from marriage and thus a persistent obstacle to the course of nature. These female thirty-somethings were labeled materialistic, and said to be too career-oriented, educated, or “liberated” to make proper wives—not because they wished it so, but because men could not possibly choose them as partners. A single woman like Abdel Aal, who has made a career of explaining why she is not married, reversed the gender roles that maintain the social order. If throngs of single and not-so-young women like her are actively resisting marriage, they may be more subversive to the nation than the bachelors and their supposedly inadequate pool of potential brides.
Abdel Aal was aware that her simultaneous determination to marry and refusal to settle for just any suitor challenges social conventions. She began her book by acknowledging: “This whole subject of marriage, suitors, and delayed marriage is a really sensitive subject. It’s hard to find anyone who talks about it honestly. Especially girls. Because girls who talk about this honestly are either seen as crass and badly raised, or as obsessed with getting married. Either that or as old maids who can’t find anyone to marry them.” Like her audience, Abdel Aal seemed unaware that she was not the first in Egypt’s long history of women’s rights activism to castigate the institution of arranged marriage, or advocate for a woman’s right to choose her life partner.
Since the inception of a women’s press in the 1890s, Egyptian women (and men) have reproached fathers for marrying their daughters off to men without their consent. They have also condemned the custom of arranged marriage for preventing the prospective couple from getting to know one another before marriage. Most of these critical voices framed their arguments as providing a service to the nation and its sons. According to these commentators, men were in dire need of being better acquainted with women so that they might find suitable companions: women who could, for example, assist in giving children (especially boys) a modern education. The colonial nation, in turn, was in need of successful marriages that would serve as a strong base of unity in the anti-colonial struggle against the British, and then form the foundation for independence. Few writers asserted the right of women to choose a mate for their own sakes, like Abdel Aal did. Nor did they suggest that women should marry freely and without their fathers’ consent.
Nowhere in her book, however, did Abdel Aal advocate for women’s ability to marry against their fathers’ will, and never did she condemn marriage itself. As the title of her works made clear, Abdel Aal wanted to get married. She was merely saying that she did not want to settle for the first caller with a furnished flat; she demanded the right to get to know her suitor, to make sure he was the one for her. And if she never did find a partner, she was asking society to respect her nonetheless. She wrote:
A thirties girl has been employed for seven or eight years, seen all sorts of people, understood all sorts of people . . . It has given her experience, a certain outlook on things, and it’s made her demand things of a future husband that go beyond the dreams of a girl in her twenties . . . A thirties girl has held down jobs, has made money, and she doesn’t need a man to support her financially anymore, so it’s not likely that she’ll be impressed with an apartment or jewelry or a car . . . Anyone who thinks thirties girls are desperate and will settle for anything needs to read this over again and think again.
While other Egyptian women might not say these things out loud or so forcefully, many agreed with her, judging by her fan mail and the comments on her blog. Abdel Aal even inspired a few, like Yumna Mukhtar and ‘Abir Sulayman, to launch Facebook groups and blogs in support of single women.
The various interpreters of Abdel Aal’s story seemed to intentionally disguise the unsettling reality about her: she upended everyone’s preconceptions about veiled middle-class Egyptian women. To many Egyptians, a woman—especially a middle-class veiled one from the Delta who was a product of the public school system and worked as a government bureaucrat—should not have publicized her desire to marry or condemned Egyptian customs and men for thus far preventing her from finding a true companion. While Egyptians are accustomed to feminists and women’s activists, who have been publicly and harshly rebuking customs and practices they find oppressive for more than a century, such women are easy to classify (even if incorrectly) in one of two categories—secular Westernized radicals or conservative Islamist activists. Abdel Aal did not fit neatly into either mold. While her socio-economic and political critiques were not new, her tactic of disguising them in tongue-in-cheek slang was original. The satirical mode not only enabled Abdel Aal to get away with her rather biting criticisms, it also afforded her fortune and fame in doing so, which she admitted made her prospects of marriage in Egypt even slimmer because men feared they would end up as characters in her next book. Her detractors—among them a commentator on her blog who suggested someone marry her to shut her up at long last—saw marriage as an institution that disciplines women into submission. Abdel Aal’s refusal to shut up reversed, at least temporarily and in this instance, the conventional hierarchy of marriage. This hierarchy is premised on women’s subordination to—not their disruption of—the normative order in which men seek and women comply, men provide and women consume, men speak out and women remain silent.
And Abdel Aal was not unique. She just happened to blog about the thoughts and experiences that many women before her and around her shared. Like women everywhere who face the pressure to conform, keep quiet, or behave passively, Abdel Aal employed subtlety to deliver her message. The reader was often too busy laughing to realize just how powerful her socio-economic and political critique was, even if she was not the first or last Egyptian woman to offer one. Ghada Abdel Aal effectively and brilliantly shifted the spotlight of Egypt’s fictional “marriage crisis” from its male victims to its female critics.