The modern Egyptian state has taken an active role in the production, promotion, and monitoring of marriage since the late nineteenth century. Consequently, legal, heterosexual marriage has been widely regarded as the sole socially accepted context for cohabitation, sexual activity, and childbearing in twentieth-century Egypt. Scholars, however, have documented a range of sexual partnerships and affective relationships that tie individual men and women together, and that deviate from the dominant cultural ideal of a publicly sanctioned union. This panel examines such practices, and includes historical, sociological, and anthropological studies of interfaith, interracial, homosexual, and secret unions between women and men in modern Egypt. A rich array of methodologies is applied to the investigation of unions that have existed in the face of social disapproval and beyond the legal and religious confines of the state.
A formative period for the consolidation of personal status laws and of the nation-state, early twentieth-century Egypt harbored a diverse range of marital practices. The first paper in this panel demonstrates how the semi-colonial state's less rigid control over intimate ties allowed extra-marital relationships in turn-of-the-century Alexandria, in spite of individuals' attempts at legal intervention. The second paper examines the national legislation forbidding Egyptian diplomats from marrying foreigners in the anti-colonial period of the 1930s and its recent application to presidential candidates in post-Mubarak Egypt.
Public concern around unsanctioned marital practices in contemporary Egypt has revolved primarily around the practice of secret, or 'urfi, marriage. The third paper in this panel depicts the experiences of 'urfi couples in Cairo and Minya to highlight the contradiction between individuals' entry into 'urfi unions and their aspirations to contract conventional marriages eventually. The final paper presents the case of a contemporary Egyptian woman whose hymenoplasty surgery is meant to hide the evidence of a previous 'urfi marriage from her soon-to-be husband.
These papers have in common a contextualized analysis of the tension between conventional marriage and alternative intimate relationships, thus shedding light on the social construction of the ideal marriage. Occupying a space outside the parameters of conventional conjugal bonds and the state's purview, unsanctioned relationships expose ruptures in the normative socio-legal regulation of marriage and sexuality in modern Egypt. As such, these unions expose men and women's creative and resourceful attempts to purse forbidden love beyond the gaze of their communities and the reach of the state.
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Marriage, and the state and social sanction that went with it, was impossible for a number of kinds of relationships in turn-of-the-century Egypt. Obstacles faced by same-sex and cross-sect couples have been examined, to some extent at least, in the historical literature; inevitably, these studies are colored by present-day debates over the same issues. This paper considers a different set of evidence about extralegal relationships. It presents a close reading of several criminal prosecution dossiers generated by the combined efforts of the Alexandria City Police and the British and French consular courts of the city. These dossiers describe a handful of unusual affective relationships from late nineteenth and early twentieth century Alexandria, involving self-inflicted violence, suicide, cross-dressing, and abduction, which find no ready counterpart in present-day debates. For this reason, they are a particularly fruitful site to examine law's reach into personal life at a particular moment in time.
These relationships alarmed neighbors, relatives, or authorities, who sought to use the law to end them. In each case, however, legal institutions proved unable to bring any sanction into effect. The broader aim of the paper is to explore an era of incomplete sovereignty over personal status. The conventional narrative holds that marriage and courtship were tightly regulated by society and by the law at the turn of the twentieth century. Ample evidence supports this conclusion, but these cases reveal a different face of relationship control. On one hand, residents of Alexandria endorsed the authority of the state's formal legal sphere by soliciting its intervention, rather than seeking extrajudicial remedies. On the other hand, the law failed to meet their needs, at least in these cases. The hegemony of the law, asserted by the institutions of justice and acknowledged by the population, met its limits here. Like the other papers in this panel, this evidence is revealing of the conventions that construct normative notions of marriage.
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Dr. Hanan Kholoussy
This paper examines the 1933 legislation that prevented Egyptian diplomats from marrying foreign, especially European, women. While this law emerged during a period of anticolonial nationalist struggle against British colonial rule, it continues to be implemented in contemporary Egypt. Most recently, it has been applied to presidential candidates in post-Mubarak Egypt. This paper historicizes the law in the broader public debates about bachelorhood and mixed marriage that dominated the pages of the Egyptian press in the 1920s and 1930s. As has been argued elsewhere, mixed marriage in semi-colonial Egypt was a contested site of national identity formation that attracted the growing attention of intellectuals and laypeople (Kholoussy 2003). It served as an arena where notions of colonial modernity were produced and reproduced as a condition for the enlightenment and progress of the nascent Egyptian nation and its subjects, most notably its women. An analysis of these debates revealed that mixed marriage was often portrayed as an impediment—and sometimes as a facilitator—to Egypt’s path of modernity where the Egyptian colony could reform and prove to be ‘modern’ and, thus, worthy of political independence.
In contrast, this paper focuses on the state’s attention to mixed marriage between Egyptian men and European women through its diplomatic legislation that affected men only. It demonstrates how the 1933 law served as a platform to define the rights and duties of upper-class Egyptian national men who represented the semi-independent nation internationally in its newly created foreign service. It was a vehicle for the state to shape the normative national subject vis-à-vis its intervention into the private lives of public officials. By exploring the various ways in which Egyptian and British legislators, journalists, and social commentators conceptualized mixed marriage and national service, this paper sheds light on upper-class masculinity in early twentieth-century Egypt and its intersections with new formations of gender, governmentality, and national identity. Furthermore, it attempts to understand why the regime that is currently ruling Egypt chose to apply a 1933 law that evolved out of the particular circumstances of the British occupation to presidential candidates in post-Mubarak Egypt.
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In Egypt, young women are rumored to seek surgical reparation of the hymen before marriage to disguise evidence of premarital sexual activity (a procedure called “hymenoplasty” or “hymenorraphy” by doctors). The notion that women are using surgery to hide past sexual activity from future husbands is deeply frowned upon by many Egyptians, and many physicians believe that it is both religiously proscribed (har?m) as well as illegal and unethical. In spite of these beliefs, several of the country’s high ranking jurisprudence experts, including the Grand Mufti of D?r al-Ift?', have ruled hymenoplasty permissible under certain circumstances, and contrary to popular belief (and published sources, including The Lancet), there is no law against it, nor does it contravene the ethics code of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate.
Based on primary research conducted between 2008 and 2010, including ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with women, physicians, and clerics, this paper presents the case study of Sara, a working class woman who had previously been secretly married (`urfi) and subsequently divorced, and her attempt to obtain hymenoplasty to hide this socially unsanctioned marriage before marrying again. This case study reveals that it is not only the never-married who feel pressured to demonstrate the token blood of “virginity.” The paper situates Sara’s case in the broader context of Egyptian media debates about the religious permissibility of hymenoplasty, Cairo physicians’ beliefs about the medical ethics of this surgery, and Egyptian cultural anxieties about changing patterns of sexuality and marriage, including `urfi marriages. The existing scholarship on hymenoplasty is scant and has largely focused on the medical ethics of hymen “reconstruction” in Western countries (e.g. Cook and Dickens 2009; Saharso 2003) and, to a lesser extent, on debating whether Islamic jurisprudence rulings on hymenoplasty are “patriarchal” or not (Eich 2010). In contrast, this paper explores rulings for and against hymenoplasty by Egyptian and international Islamic jurisprudence experts, as well as the justifications offered by doctors who secretly perform the operation but publicly condemn it, to argue that the key issue being debated by physicians and religious scholars in Egypt is less about proof of virginity and more about the role of doctors can and should play in mediating the relationship between women, their future spouses, and God.
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Prof. Rania Salem
It is widely held that secret (‘urfi) unions are on the rise among Egyptian youth. Some have argued that they are merely a legal and religious cover for extra- or pre-‘marital’ sex among young people. Others contend that they are a response to the prohibitively high costs of conventional unions because the couples do not set up a joint household and because their parents remain uninvolved. However, these existing accounts rely primarily on the analysis of public discourse or second-hand reports about ‘urfi marriages. In contrast, this paper relies on data collected in the course of twenty semi-structured interviews with young men and women who are currently in ‘urfi unions and who reside in Cairo and Minya. As such, it is the first full-length study of ‘urfi marriage that draws on interviews conducted with individuals who have actually entered into such unions.
In this paper, I first describe my respondents’ decision-making processes, the circumstances of their unions, their partner’s socio-demographic characteristics, and their familial aspirations for the future. My findings show that the parties to these secret unions aspire to enter into conventional marriages someday. This raises the question of why actors who hold normative aspirations engage in non-normative actions. I explain this paradox by arguing that these actors operate in a context where marriage continues to be socially valued, at the same time that marrying openly remains out of their reach. As a result, means that deviate from those sanctioned by mainstream society are found to achieve the ends of a committed sexual partnership. I also find that marriage expenses constitute a real obstacle to marriage, and the desire to avoid the costly requirements of conventional marriage emerges as a key motivation for ‘urfi unions. This suggests that marriage has become a status category, one that is achievable (openly and in a timely manner) only by socioeconomically privileged groups in Egyptian society. Thus I argue that marriage constitutes a new demarcator of class in Egypt today.
