The Idea of Alternative Marriage

For those who don’t know, a misyar is a marital contract that is sometimes used in Islamic countries. In it, a woman gives up rights she would have in a traditional marriage (cohabitation, financial support). The couple usually agrees to live separately.

I would say there is a general sense of loose responsibility around the misyar. For example, a man might have a misyar marriage with a woman when he already has a wife, and feel no obligation to tell his first wife about it.

A guy I know in Saudi, let’s call him Yousef, talked a bit about this when I was in Jeddah. He came for coffee and sat in my living room with two of his kids, twenty-something daughters who sprawled out at the dining table, teasing him relentlessly for everything in creation while doing stuff on their phones and pretending to ignore him.

Yousef, in his early sixties, started talking right away about his empty love life. I’ve known him for almost thirty years and I know he’s an extremely social person, someone who has a tremendous number of friends and who cultivates new ones all the time.

He said that he had a group of older, male friends and that they were all lonely—and they all had misyar marriages. They were tired of their marriages and were using misyar purely for sex. Yousef rejected this idea. He wanted to be in love, he said, he wanted romance.

Putting aside for the moment the fact that he has a wife who is raising his ten kids, the majority of whom are from other wives, now divorced, and that the one who stayed doesn’t like him, either, he was trying to impress on me the loneliness he felt, the sense that his life had fallen into a ditch.

In the background, one of his daughters was Google translating a description of her father for my daughter. She said in hesitant English, “He’s a…dick.”

“A dick?” my daughter said.

“Yes.”

My daughter leaned over to check the translation and saw it was “addict.” Her eyebrows went up. “A dick is not the same as addict, but you can be both.”

That was the other thing I knew about Yousef—he had a tenacious marijuana habit.

It surprised me that his daughters were so conventional and religious. The first thing they did when they entered the house was ask me not to take any photos of them. It was inappropriate for a woman to show her face online, and they couldn’t risk pictures getting out. They spent a bit of time lecturing my daughter on the perils of homosexuality, trying to impress on her that anyone gay is going straight to hell, no questions asked. My daughter, a native of San Francisco, had some words.

I hadn’t met their mother, but I deduced that she was religious, and that I was looking at her influence, because I couldn’t picture Yousef raising them that way. I remembered the time when he’d discovered just how devout his first wife was. He’d put a bottle of whiskey beneath her pillow one night, just to see her reaction.

I was a bit surprised by Yousef’s description of his friends. “Every single one of them does misyar?” I asked.

“Most of them, yes.”

“And they’re married?”

“Yes.”

I had always thought of misyar as a way to have casual sex. It was essentially a protection document. If you got caught, you could show it to the authorities and slip out of any charges of adultery, which was technically a capital crime. But in Jeddah, adultery is almost never punished as a crime, certainly not one that requires beheading.

Yousef’s depiction of the misyar was one of normalizing the mistress. Everyone does it, he seemed to be saying, but it’s lacking in some fundamental connection, some romance that he longed for. A misyar marriage was just about sex.

“And your wife?” I asked. “What does she think?”

“We’re just friends,” he replied sadly. “We always have been.”

One of his daughters wanted to describe him again. “He’s a…” She put a prim finger to her lips, like she didn’t quite know the word, or didn’t feel it was polite to say it, but she took the plunge and Googled it anyway, holding up her phone to show my daughter the translation, which was “womanizer.”