THE MARRIAGE STAKES

THE MARRIAGE STAKES

The day I arrived in Damascus Yahye, the driver, announced that the following Friday he was going with his parents to meet the girl they had chosen to be his wife. Yahye is twenty-six and the chosen bride is sixteen. When he told me, I thought, “OK, this is not an educated family, so ...”

However, I have since learned that this has nothing to do with education or social class or wealth. B., one of the consultants at the centre, is also twenty-six and he has decided that he would like to marry and settle down. He was brought up and studied in Canada and the United States and his father is a university professor. So, having told his family of his desire to marry, his mother made up a list of acceptable, eligible girls and every Friday he and his mother go to visit one of the girls on the list.

The real protagonists in the marriage market are the mothers - on both sides. The boy’s mother makes up her lists and, having done so, makes the initial approach to the mother of the girl. The first question, if the families do not know one another (which they very frequently do not), is “Is your daughter veiled?”. If she is, and the initial tentative telephone approach is successful, then the boy’s mother will arrange to visit the girl’s mother. If this first personal meeting proves positive, then the boy will attend the next meeting. The girl will not appear at first but leave about ten minutes for the mothers to explore family lineage, financial position and other aspects of mutual interest, and then she will make her appearance to serve tea. This gives her and the boy the chance to catch a glimpse of one another. The girl, even if she is veiled, should contrive during this meeting to uncover part of her leg so that the degree of whiteness of her skin can be appreciated.

What happens after that depends on the ortodoxy of the families. If the family is really orthodox, the second meeting may not take place at all because the marriage transaction is a purely economic one and, if the terms are right, the two mothers will come to an agreement. The two fathers will then meet to size one another up and, in some cases, no more than one week may elapse between the initial meeting and the marriage ceremony itself!

If the families are more liberal and the girl’s opinion is taken into account, and if the girl raises no serious objections, then the pair may be allowed to meet at the girl’s home to get to know one another a little better before proceeding with a marriage contract. In such cases perhaps three months may elapse before the marriage ceremony. Longer engagements usually only take place when the bride-to-be has been betrothed when she is still under marriageable age.

Often a religious marriage takes place on paper which means that the Islamic judge prepares a marriage document although no ceremony has taken place and the couple still live in their parents’ homes. This gives them the opportunity to meet more openly as this is regarded as a formal engagement. Sometimes, during this period, they discover that they are absolutely incompatible and a divorce must take place although in practice they have not been married.

If the initial encounters lead to a tacit engagement, the boy gives the girl a gift of jewellery. The value of US$3,000 is considered adequate for this first gift. If a formal agreement is reached, then a similar gift of jewellery to the value of about US$10,000 is given. If the marriage does not take place in the end, the girl usually returns the gifts because, if she were to keep them, her reputation would be ruined.

Marriage is really not just between the two people involved but a marriage of the two clans. This family component can lead to many problems and, according to the young people we know, most divorces are the result of family interference on one or both sides. It is also said that summer is the marriage season and winter the divorce season. Summer is a popular time for marriages because, when girls finish school, they become eligible for marriage.

In some cases a couple might meet either at school or at university but, until they are in a position to approach their families and request permission to marry or at least the families’ blessing, their relationship must remain clandestine, because any girl seen in the company of a man who is not a family member, her fiancé or husband immediately loses her reputation. This can cause friction too, because the young man is usually unwilling to approach his future father-in-law with such a request until his financial position is such that he can offer the girl a standard of living comparable to the one she enjoys in her parents’ home.


The custom of arranging lists and making visits to choose the future bride is not, it would appear, so common in the Latakia area in the north. The tailpiece to Yahye’s tale is that the girl decided that she would rather continue her studies after all.

One afternoon, Robert found two of the engineers conferring in low tones in the corridor. What are you two up to? We’re talking about what we’re going to do this evening. Are you going out jogging (They are both trying to lose weight as they are in the marriage market) or don’t tell me you have date?! This last remark was made in jest, but, lo and behold, they looked at one another and said, Well, yes, but we’ve just discovered that we both have an appointment with the same girl, so we’re trying to work out who should go. You go. No, you go! ....

The chief victims of this system are the women, but, ironically, it is the women who are the perpetrators and continuers of the very system which keeps them tied. In a way it is understandable, because the mother is the major player in the marriage game and, if the system were to change, she would find herself without a role and her importance as social go-between and maintainer of clan and tribal relationships would disappear so, unwittingly or not, she carries on the oppression of her own kind. B. summed up my feelings on the matter when he said “I’m glad I don’t have a sister. I would hate her to have to go through this”. However, most men are happy for the system to continue. A small number, such as B ‘s elder brother, refuse to play the game and he is seriously considering returning to Canada so that he can choose a wife and live a different kind of marriage. The brother of another young man we know refuses to return preferring to make his own way in Argentina.

The law forbids mixed marriages between the different religions but a Moslem man can marry a non-Moslem woman so long as she is a member of one of the monotheistic religions. She, of course,must convert to Islam. He could not, for instance, marry a Hindu. A Moslem woman, on the other hand, cannot marry a non-Moslem man unless he converts to Islam before the marriage.

Among the minorities, marriages tend to take place within the particular ethnic or religious community. The Greek Orthodox marry among themselves, as do the Armenians. Interestingly, the Circassian minority, who are Moslem, marry among themselves also and tend not to marry Moslems from the majority Arab community. As one girl told me, “No, we want to keep our minority pure, and we want to speak our own language at home and to our children. Anyway, you can’t marry an Arab. If you came home late one evening, instead of asking you if you were tired, he would ask you what man you had been with and then there would be a fight. No, no, we marry among ourselves”.

In general, inter-group marriage is frowned upon by social custom and, as is the case the world over, religious intolerance is one of the major causes of heartbreak for many people. One case we know of is a young, widely travelled Sunni man who met and fell in love with a girl from the Druze community. As religious particularisms are not important to him, he would be quite happy to convert to the particular branch of Islam which the Druze occupy, but that is out of the question because, as one of the tenets of Druze philosophy is salvation through a series of reincarnations, they believe that the Druze community is limited in size and, therefore, conversion is not acceptable. This poses a major problem for the young couple because, if the girl were to renounce her Druze status and convert to Sunni Islam, she would be pronounced dead by her family - or worse A possible solution to regularize their situation in legal terms could be a civil marriage, but civil marriage is not contemplated in the Syrian legal system so they would have to travel abroad to be married somewhere else. The upshot of the matter is that they are living together with all the social stigma for the girl that this step entails. However, it allows her family to pretend that nothing is happening and to keep her within the family circle. When she goes to visit, she must go alone. And all this when the family actually like and respect the young man in question! However, this is not a specifically Syrian or indeed Moslem problem but one which rears its ugly head the world over when two religious communities meet but will not accept one another.


The other day in the Arabic class, the subject of marriage came up, first of all as a joke. Then one of the two Italian ladies, who is married to a Syrian, said to the other “Fouad (her brother-in-law) wants to get married. Maybe Maha (the teacher) would be interested.” Fouad is a widower of 46 with two small children. The matter was explained to Maha who then asked whether he was a Moslem and then whether he was a Sunni. Yes. Then, out of the question. She is from Suweida and a Druze. Although the Italian lady is married here and has a grown-up family, she was not aware of the inter-group difficulties, so I explained about that to her. Then Maha illustrated the point with a story about a friend of hers, a Druze, who fell in love with and married a Sunni. When she became pregnant, her own family cut her throat!

July 1998