All the single ladies

• Last Updated: November 05. 2009 1:04PM UAE / November 5. 2009 9:04AM GMT

Reading Ghada Abdel Aal’s book, or the blog whose posts it collects, a picture emerges of how taxing and at times humiliating it is to be an unmarried woman in Egyptian society. Victoria Hazou for The National

Young Egyptian women, Ursula Lindsey reports, are taking to blogs and publishing books to give voice to their frustration with the indignities of single life, the pressure to marry and the stigma of divorce.

In August 2006, Ghada Abdel Aal, a 27-year-old pharmacist, started an anonymous blog called Ayza Itgawiz (I Want to Get Married). She had a thing or two to say about what it’s like to be a single Egyptian girl in search of a husband. “Stay with me and I’ll tell you about my tribulations,” she wrote, “so that you’ll know everything we put up with.” What followed was a chronicle of her misadventures in the marriage market, complete with gloating neighbours, meddling relatives, two-faced friends and hilariously awful suitors.

The blog quickly gained a following, and in 2008 an editor at the prestigious Dar El Shorouk publishing house contacted Abdel Aal – who lives with her parents in a town two hours north of Cairo – and coaxed her out of anonymity. The book version of her blog, which consists of all her posts plus a few additions, has sold about 30,000 copies, a huge print run by current standards in Egypt, where the low levels of book-buying are constantly bemoaned.

It’s hard to know how many unmarried women there are in Egypt today. Amid talk of a “crisis” of spinsterdom, the government’s main statistics-gathering institution recently published a report that suggested there were three million single women over 35 — then felt compelled to deny its own statistic, claiming the number was only a few hundred thousand. But it’s well-documented that both men and women across the Middle East are getting married at a later age. Economic forces – high unemployment and the shortage of affordable housing – play the biggest part, since a job and an apartment are prerequisites for young men planning to propose. Women’s educational and professional attainments (and heightened expectations) must also be a factor. Whatever the reason, a good 10 years (at least) may pass between a middle-class woman’s graduation from college and her betrothal. During this decade, everyone around her is preoccupied with one constant, insistent, unspoken question: When is she going to get married?

“Unspoken” is the key word here. I Want to Get Married speaks frankly about what it is generally considered clever and polite to conceal. “Let’s all agree that the subject of weddings and grooms and delayed marriage is very sensitive,” Abdel Aal writes, “and that it’s very difficult to find someone who’ll talk about it openly, especially when it comes to girls. Because whoever talks about it openly is either looked upon as badly brought up, or in a hurry to get married, or a failure who can’t find anyone to marry her.”

Of course, chick-lit thrives on the public airing of mortification: Abdel Aal succeeds in large part by addressing her legions of readers as trusted confidants on this most private of issues. Thus we follow her through the humiliation of 10 would-be husbands, including two con-men; a police officer who has government informants investigate her and her family; a suitor who interrupts their first meeting to watch a football game; and a man who shows up with two wives he already has. Each of these encounters is preceded by a heroic cleaning and shopping spree and ends with invectives (and suitors) being hurled down the building’s stairwell, much to the delight of peeping neighbours. Many of these vignettes are painted with such broad strokes that they are closer to jokes (“Did you hear the one about the suitor who...?”) than stories drawn from real life. Nonetheless, a picture emerges of how taxing and at times humiliating it is to be an unmarried woman in a society where “there is no success in any field that can take the place of marriage”.

This could all be depressing, but Abdel Aal’s stories are buoyed by her satirical voice. Here she describes her conversations with female neighbours:

“The ladies stop me and go on kissing me and biting their lips.

– The Lord grant your wishes, my dear.

– Oh well, only girls of good family are left waiting…

– Are you still?

– Really, still?

– No news?

– Still?

– Still?

It goes without saying that the word I hate the most in the Arabic language is ‘still.’”

Abdel Aal’s problem isn’t with marriage, which she herself wants, and which she assumes to be a quite universal aspiration. Her problem is with the pressure to settle that results when it is understood that “the girl who gets married early is clever” but “the girl who delays must have a flaw” – and men are allowed to take their time and loftily survey the field. In the last blog entry reprinted in her book, Abdel Aal notes that by the time an Egyptian woman turns 30, she is either prepared to throw herself at the first suitor who steps through the door, or she knows better than ever what she will (and won’t) accept in a partner. Abdel Aal is herself 30 now, and it’s clear in which category she belongs. (Though she is certainly familiar with desperation: at one point, she describes herself as “ready to marry any living multicellular organism who will take me out of the wedding display window”.)

Abdel Aal now appears regularly on TV talk shows, pens a newspaper column, and has taken up screenwriting, adapting her blog into a soap opera to air next Ramadan. I Want to Get Married has been translated into Italian, and German and English versions are upcoming. To many Egyptian intellectuals, the success of such a decidedly “unliterary” book – one written in colloquial Egyptian, peppered with international pop culture references, Arabised English words, and the stylistic tics of text messages and e-mails – must represent another nail in the coffin of refined Egyptian literature. In a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, Dar El Shorouk has even begun a series of books adapted from blogs, and four of the five books published so far have been by young women.

The success of I Want to Get Married has also launched an online movement that includes the blog Diaries of a Spiteful Spinster, the Facebook groups “Old Maids for Change” – a riff on Egypt’s myriad political movements established “for change – and “Diaries of a Spinster”, whose discussions include “Why do boys play with girls’ feelings?” and “Is friendship [between men and women] one of the reasons for the rise in spinsters?”

And then there’s Mahasen Saber’s blog I Want to Get Divorced and..., whose title seems like more than a coincidental echo of Abdel Aal’s. Like divorced women and married women, Abdel Aal and Saber have much in common: both are middle-class, 30 years old, veiled, college-educated but lacking in “literary” background.; Both live in provincial towns, and have been recently been propelled into the national spotlight as the “face” of a troubling category of woman. In a context where being married is the ideal and the norm, both are often considered lacking and at fault. And of course there is a causal link between their two states: the spinster – tired of the indignities of single life, bowing to exhortations of friends and family – is evermore likely to make the poor choice that will turn her quickly into a divorcée.

And if getting married is difficult, getting divorced is often agonising. Saber started her blog in July 2008, exasperated by the three years she had already spent in court, trying to exit an unhappy marriage. While Egyptian law gives men the right to divorce at will, it requires women to provide irrefutable evidence of dereliction or abuse. Egypt’s all-male judiciary tends to postpone verdicts and encourage plaintiffs to reconcile with their husbands; husbands who don’t want to divorce have many means at their disposal to prolong the proceedings. New family courts created in 2004 were intended to improve things, as was the introduction of khula’ (literally: “extraction”) divorce, a no-fault agreement wherein the woman basically pays her way out of the marriage by surrendering all claims to her dowry or to alimony. But even khula’ divorces can move slowly, and they are only an option for wealthy women Nonetheless, divorce rates in Egypt are high: a third of all marriages here end in divorce within the first year.

Saber ended up spending many long days in court, filing motions and running after officials. On her blog, she documented some of the saddest cases she saw around her, such as that of a man who set his new wife – who was also his cousin – on fire: “Mr Sadism, after and before he set her on fire, was hitting her in the street refusing to divorce her (he’s right, why should he divorce her, where will he find someone else on whom he can let loose all his complexes and psychoses?). The point is he’s a man, man, man! How could he divorce his cousin, his flesh and blood? So he just burnt her.”

Seven months after starting her blog, Saber gave up on her own case and reached an agreement with her now ex-husband (the details of which she prefers not to discuss) outside of court. She wrote on her blog that she was exhausted by fighting the “loopholes” in the law, and that she feared celebrating her 80th birthday in court. The blog continues, however, and has expanded to include an online radio programme called “Divorcees Radio”. The focus has moved from the corvée of the courts to the reasons for divorce (one programme was dedicated to the new bride’s relationship with her mother-in-law) and the treatment of divorcees, specifically the widespread suspicion that divorced women are “loose”. (After her divorce, Saber was reprimanded by a concerned relative for speaking to a male acquaintance in a public place.)

The tone of I Want to Get Divorced and... is understandably more dramatic, even melodramatic, than comic. There is material for farce, as when Saber visits her husband’s new wife – ensconced with him in the apartment to which Saber still holds title – and finds her replacement wearing her old clothes and undergarments. Abdel Aal would have milked this exchange for all it was worth, but Saber is too close to her own wounds to create polished satire. She asks the new wife: “Don’t you feel that what you’re doing to me and my son is a sin, don’t you feel that you’re helping him [my husband] oppress me?” Then Saber compares her to an occupying soldier in Iraq.

Both I Want to Get Married and I Want to Get Divorced represent a sort of modest, pragmatic feminism. Their authors are critical of society without demanding radical change: Abdel Aal still wants to get married, Saber typically defends her rights by invoking Islamic law. But both have accomplished something substantial and surprising. Public discourse in Egypt is a circumscribed and male-dominated affair. Young women from the provinces, with no connections to Cairo’s literary establishment, aren’t the likeliest participants. Now they know they can head online to tell the world, in their own words, what they want.

Ursula Lindsey is a freelance journalist based in Cairo and a contributor to The Arabist blog.