In the spirit of the current arguing in the U.S. over gay marriage, I bring you the troubles with marriage in the Arab world.
Also from the famous Webster guy.
"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Marriage Mar"riage, n. OE. mariage, F. mariage. See Marry,
v. t.
1. The act of marrying, or the state of being married; legal
union of a man and a woman for life, as husband and wife;
wedlock; matrimony.
Last year the Ministry of Planning issued a report on the number of unmarried women in Saudi Arabia — an alarming1 . 5 million. Dr. Abdullah Al-Fawzan, a sociologist at King Saud University, later produced a study about hazards to the Saudi families, in which he cited unmarried women. He also listed a number of reasons for this.
One of these reasons, he said, was that the mindset or prejudices of people in the Kingdom have not changed over the years. He said that as people moved from a rural to a metropolitan environment over the decades, this should have meant a concomitant change in customs and social norms — including how girls get married — but that has not happened.
In the past, a girl’s family had to wait for a suitable man to come forward with his family and propose. Because towns and villages were small and most people knew one another, tying the knot was not a problem. But social and economic changes have meant that we now live in vast cities, and unfortunately we have held on to traditions that were suitable for us a rural society but are no longer suitable now.
Now in big cities, where residents number in their millions and few people even know their next-door neighbors, it is common for a Saudi woman to continue to be single into her late twenties hoping and waiting for fate to come knocking on her door.
But in many case Prince Charming never comes and then, well, she stays single.
It remains a social taboo for a woman to propose to a man, or even for the father of a single girl to mention that he has a daughter to the parents of an eligible bachelor. This is despite the fact that we all know that in Islamic history it was the Mother of Believers, Khadeejah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) who proposed to him, and not the other way around.
This taboo has nothing to do with Islam but continues to hinder social development.
Full Story @ Arab News
Posted by Muddy at February 25, 2004 10:45 AM | TrackBack