Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic A view of Muslim marriages

Have you heard, as I have, that the situation is very bad for women in Muslim countries? Have you heard the same things about the treatment of women and girls in Muslim countries as I have? I have heard that girls are forced to marry men they don't know, that they are treated like property and constantly kept under "supervision" and "restraint", that they are sometimes married off when they are just children, that they are forced to accept being relegated to "second-class status" as their husband takes another wife, that they can be horribly punished or even killed if they break their family's "honor code", that they can be executed if they are raped, and so on.

But what does their situation look like to Muslim women themselves? Just the other day I saw an Egyptian movie called, I think, Scheherazade, tell me a story. (You wouldn't believe the language confusion: the movie was in Arabic, the subtitles were in English, but the title of the movie was in Swedish. Wow.)

Anyway, the original Scheherazade is the storyteller in the classic Arabic collection of fairy tales, Arabian Nights. She is the one who tells the stories about Aladdin, Ali Baba and others, but she has her own story to tell as well. And her story is a most horrible story about marriage. She is married to a king who loved his first wife, but after the first wife was unfaithful to him the king became the most horrible misogynist you can imagine. He had his wife executed, of course, but that wasn't all, not by half. No, he had to have a new wife, of course. But he wasn't going to give this wife the chance to cheat on him, so he had her executed after their wedding night. On the same day that he executed his second wife he married a third woman, and the next morning he had her killed. And so on. The king kept marrying and killing a woman a day, and in the end Scheherazade offered to marry the king to stop his relentless femicide. She accomplished this feat by telling stories to the king every night, and he could never have her executed, because when the morning came she was always in the middle of a story. The stories she told are the stories of Arabian Nights, and her own story is the story of a woman who has done nothing wrong but who must trick her husband into not executing her.



Scheherazade telling stories to her husband so that he won't kill her.

So the movie I saw was called Scheherazade, tell me a story. The Scheherazade of the movie was a woman slightly like Oprah Winfrey, but younger, slimmer and more elegant. She looked a little bit like Teri Hatcher's Lois Lane, come to think of it.



I found a picture! The woman is the actress who played the Egyptian TV hostess. The man is the actor who played her husband.

This woman, whose name I have forgotten, was the hostess of her own TV show as I said, and we saw her interview other women who told her about their lives. And wow, the stories they told her were so weird. They were stories about oppression, but not stories about enforced marriages or enforced polygamy or genital mutilation or any of that old stuff. But all the stories were about marriage, one way or another.

The first woman was such an outcast in her society that she had to live in an "asylum". (That's what the English subtitles called it, but I couldn't figure out exactly what it was. The place was a bit like a mental hospital.) The reason why this woman had to live in the asylum was that she was unmarried. And not only was she unmarried, but she was unmarried by choice, since she had turned down a suitor. Well, wow, you know. No wonder she had to be in a mental hospital. :rolleyes: How could she have made such a crazy choice? How could she have sent a suitor packing?

Well, the man who wanted to marry her had told her his conditions for making her his wife.
a) When they were married she would have to wear a veil.
b) She would have to keep working, but he would take control of her salary.
c) She would have to manage the household, but she could not make a single decision about anything without asking his permission first.
d) She would have to pay for all the furniture for their apartment and for all the costs of managing their household.
e) He would sell her car and take the money... okay, you get the picture.

The woman listened politely to all his demands, and when he was done she asked him this:

"So that's what I will do for you if we are married. But what will you do for me?"

"I will be your husband," he replied.

"What does that mean?" she asked. "What exactly will you do for me? How will you be my husband?"

"I will be your husband!" he roared. "Husband is husband!"

The woman was not satisfied with this answer, so she declared that she wouldn't marry the man. After that, she was considered so weird and impossible that no one wanted anything to do with her, and she had to live in the asylum.

The next woman who was interviewed was a poor woman wearing a veil. Everything about her suggested that she was a good woman with good, old-fashioned morals. But you wouldn't believe her story.

This woman and her two younger sisters were alone in the world after their father died. He had turned down all the suitors who had expressed an interest in his daughters, and when he died the girls had nothing but each other and the hardware shop that their father had owned. The shop was run by their father's apprentice, a young man named Said.

As the years went by the young women became ever more desperate. As unmarried women they were at the bottom of their society, with no status and no prospects whatsoever. Eventually the sisters decided that one of them should marry Said. He himself would get to choose which of them he wanted.

Said was at the bottom of society too, and like the sisters he had no prospects and no future. Like the sisters he was "unmarriagable", and like the sisters he was a virgin. Now, however, all three sisters expressed an interest in marrying him. Not only that, but the three sisters all hinted to him that they might be willing to sleep with him before marriage if only he would pick them as his future wife. It's not very surprising that Said started sleeping with all three sisters, is it?



Said about to have sex with one of the younger sisters after he has promised to marry her.

Each of the sisters thought that she was Said's chosen one, but eventually they found out that he had cheated on all three of them. The sisters were so horrified at this unbelievable betrayal that they became each other's enemies for life, and the eldest sister sent her younger sisters packing, even though they had no relatives in the world who might provide for them and nowhere to go. Then the eldest sister went to the hardware shop where Said worked and hinted that she wanted to sleep with him. She slipped behind a corner so that he couldn't see her. When he approached her, she hit him full force with a big heavy metal tool, and as he lay bleeding on the floor with a cracked skull she doused him with something flammable and set him on fire. And, you know, clearly the movie wanted us to sympathize with this woman. If any woman had the right to kill a man it was this woman, because the man she killed had made a mockery of marriage at her and her sisters' expense.

Wow.



The veiled blue-looking woman is the woman who killed a man and set him on fire.

The third episode was about a young woman dentist who was approached by a handsome and urbane middle-aged man. He courted her, and she quickly agreed to marry him. His and her families gathered with a lawyer and signed a marriage contract. Now the man and the woman were married, but the woman didn't want to sleep with her husband until they had undergone the equivalent of a "church wedding", particularly since her own family demanded that she guarded her virginity until the final marriage ceremony had taken place. However, the man wore down the woman's resistance and persuaded her to make love to him even though they hadn't had their "church wedding" yet. The reason why they hadn't had their wedding was because the villa they were going to live in hadn't been fully renovated yet.



The man persuading his wife to have sex with him, even though they have not undergone their final marriage ceremony yet.

The man and the woman kept sleeping with each other, and after a while the woman told the man that they had better have their wedding soon, because she was pregnant. Now the man dropped his bombshell. He accused the woman of having been unfaithful to him, because he was sterile. This wasn't something he had ever mentioned before. But because he claimed to be sterile she had to have been with another man if she was pregnant. It was a blatant lie, of course, and the woman asked the man to have a blood test so that they could prove that it was his child. But the man refused and reminded her that in a case like this a man was above suspicion, so he would automatically be believed by society while she as a woman would be regarded a liar. And because society would believe him and condemn her, he demanded that she pay him three million dollars, or else he would scandalize her and her family.

Wow.

These were the three episodes that women in Egypt told their "Scheherazade" in the movie. But "Scheherazade" had her own story to tell, just like her fairy tale namesake. She was married to a handsome and ambitious reporter who wanted to be Editor in Chief of the newspaper he worked for. But the members of the board were unhappy with his wife's TV show. They told the man that his wife had to stop telling such controversial stories on TV, or else someone else would be the editor. The wife wouldn't stop, however, and when her husband didn't get the job, he blamed his wife and beat her up really bad. The last story she told in her show was her own, the story of a beaten and battered wife.

Well, very interesting. The story of the battered wife is a painfully familiar one, but the other stories seemed utterly weird to me. They were all about the utter necessity of marriage, particularly for women, and about the oppressive impossibility of marriage for women at the same time.

Interestingly, however, marriage has been almost as necessary for women here in the west in the past as it was seen to be for women in Egypt in that movie. Think of Jane Austen's books. Her heroines seem to have to find a man to marry unless they are to die of boredom, poverty and passitivity. Because if women like her didn't marry, there was basically nothing else for them to do.



If young women like these ones couldn't get themselves a husband their lives would come to nothing, and soon they wouldn't even be invited to the balls.

Oh, but they could write books and become famous, couldn't they? Well, even that option was an iffy one. Remember that the Brontë sisters used male pseudonyms in order to get their books published in the first place. In Sweden in the late 1800s we had a female writer who was an internationally famous writer of bestsellers, and she became rich thanks to her books. She soon became the richest person by far of her own community. She could buy back the manor that her father had lost because of his gambling, and she made it the grandest house within miles and miles. But did that give her much of a status in her own community? No, because she was unmarried. When the people had their big community celebrations and parties, the rich and famous writer had to sit at a "humble table" with other people who had not done so well in life, while the respectable married women shared the "table of honor".



Selma Lagerlöf, the rich and famous 19th century writer who was not as good as the farmers' wives of her community because she was not married.

And a woman's reputation was totally dependent on her ability to stay in her husband's good graces, whether or not he himself was a good husband to her. I have read about a woman who was married to a merchant in a Swedish town in the 1800s. The man and a woman had a maid, and the man quickly started sleeping with the maid. The wife put up with the situation. But after a few years the man wanted them to get another maid, not because he wanted to get rid of the first one, but because he thought they needed two. No sooner had they hired the second maid than the man started sleeping with her, too, and now the wife had had enough. She went to court and asked for a divorce on the grounds of infidelity. The man actually admitted sleeping with his two maids, and the woman was eventually granted her divorce. Afterwards she had to live in a tiny room in an attic with her daughter, because she had basically no money after her divorce. The man kept living with his two maids in his grand house, and he may or may not have married one of them. The local priest, who was in charge of the church registers, wrote in those official registers that the woman in the attic was "divorced". The man who lived in the grand house with the two maids was "a man of honor".

This situation is so totally different from what we have today in the west, when a marriage is basically a "love contract" between two equal parties. But seeing that Egyptian movie, which was partly set in a glitteringly modern world, was like seeing the oppressive mores of the past transplanted into a world of modernity.

Ann