Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 2: The Bedouin Girl

S is 15, beautiful, dark-skinned and slender, with a hawkish desert nose and a full upper lip, dressed in a fuchsia and turquoise traditional dress, with beautifully coordinated headscarf. She lives with her parents, some older relatives and a few of her unmarried siblings in a palm-thatched home at an oasis in the Sinai desert, which tourism has, relatively speaking, transformed.

I’m sitting by the tiled cistern where the women of the village wash the clothes, with S, her mother and an older female relative, who scrub rather dilatorily to remove the sand, an essentially Sisyphean struggle in the desert.

“Do you go to school?” I ask.

“Last year,” she says.

“Here?” I ask. “Or in Mazamia?”

“I stay with my sister and her husband in Gazela.”

“So you finished school last year?”

“Yes.”

I try and ask her what she wants to do when she… grows up? She’s already 15… Next?… Now she’s finished school?…

It seems pretty obvious, as she hangs with the women of the family, followed by a baby goat that has imprinted her as its mother, what she’s going to say, but one never knows: she is on the tourist trail here, she’s been to school, she may want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a politician…

Eventually I get the question across. S looks at me as if I’m mad. “Get married and stay at home,” she says.

I struggle a bit for what to say next. I’ve met people from remote tribal communities before, in Indonesia, Laos, Mauritania, Kenya, Guatemala and Tibet, but this is not really remote. You can get here in a vehicle. S speaks English. She can read and write. She’s met people from all over the world.

“So when do you think you will find a husband?” I ask.

“17? 18?” she says.

“And babies soon after?”

“Inshallah.” (The phrase, which means “god willing”, is one you hear a lot across the Arab world.)

“How many you want?” I ask. “Two? Five? Ten?”

She shrugs and smiles.

“Where do you think you will live?”

“My husband,” she says. “He choose. Maybe my village? Maybe his village?”

Of course. “So, how do you find a husband?” I ask. “You go to a wedding?”

Bedouin weddings are huge affairs, because still, even though most Bedouin now make their living from tourism, it’s the easiest way to marry their young. Plus, everyone loves a good party. The rich will have a wedding to themselves. Less wealthy parents will club together and marry five or six couples at the same time, filling the valleys with pickups, tents, and the scent of roasting camel.

“Yes,” she says. “And if he choose me, my baba, he go to my baba…”

“He goes to your baba and he asks?”

“No,” S says. Her English is a hundred times better than my Arabic, but we’re not going to plumb any emotional depths here. “He talk to his baba, and his baba talk to my baba, and if my baba thinks OK, he talks to me and he asks me, and if I choose, is OK.”

“So your baba asks you? And your mama too?”

“Not my mama,” she says. “My baba.”

I nod. “How do you do it in England?” she asks.

It’s an obvious question, one for which I should have prepared, but it rather floors me – as when a young East Indonesian Muslim asked me how I could have a child without a husband and not go to prison…

I flannel a little. How can I put this simply without making Western women seem like a bunch of idolatrous whores? I’m not going to go into my own story, or my relationship with Z’s dad, but do I even want to introduce the notion of sex outside of marriage to a teenager whose virginity is so jealously guarded?

I am well aware, you see, that Western sexual mores play about as well in Egypt as traditional Islamic punishments do in the West.

S seems quietly amused by my confusion. “Well,” I begin. “Not everyone in England has a religion. Some are Christian. Some are Muslim. But many, their parents had a religion, but they have no religion. So they don’t always marry. Sometimes, they just live together, with no marriage.”

“So he ask your baba?” she says, trying to understand how this could possibly work.

“No,” I say, and pause. “In England, now, when you have your first baby, the average woman is 29,” I flash the relevant number of fingers. “Many women are older. Maybe 35, 36…” More fingers. This is grandmother age here. “You do things before you marry. You go to university, you get a job, you live on your own…”

She’s befuddled less, I think, by the language, than by the concepts. Her school caters to the Bedouin of the region, and the Bedouin, as you may recall from Lawrence of Arabia, are not great respecters of government of any kind. Some preferred life when Israel ruled Sinai to life under the Egyptians, who have endeavoured to enforce systems such as education and road safety, and grabbed great swathes of their traditional lands.

I start again. “So you are older, so maybe you try. You know, you may be with someone for a few months, for a few years…”

Her face expresses absolute horror and mystification. I think she understands what I’m saying but can’t actually believe I could be saying it. I try a bowdlerised version. “So you meet a man, and you go to the cinema with him…” Does she know what a cinema is? I don’t know. “…Then you say, ‘I like him,’ so you go again. Then maybe the second time you don’t like him, so you end it there.”

“The man, he choose?” she asks.

I think about The Rules, about the teen magazines girls read in the West, about the content of every bloody women’s magazine out there. “Yes,” I say. “The man, he choose.”

“So he ask your baba?” she says.

In traditional Arab culture, the senior male relative is the woman’s guardian, speaking for her in matters from property to divorce. This is law in Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, women’s rights were a pet project of the dictator’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak, but they still have some way to go.

“No,” I say, and take a breath. How can I explain that my father has no control over what I do? That I’m a free agent, with neither husband nor guardian. And, of course, traditionally the man does ask the father when it comes to marriage. “My baba… I love my baba… But he doesn’t…”

I struggle, and our guide, M, comes to the rescue. Mine or S’s? I’m not sure.

Later, we are sitting by the fire, with S, M and the one grown brother who still lives at home. His dress is more Arab than Bedouin, with a neat cap, a white shirt, loose trousers.

“He’s a bad boy,” says M, our guide. “He’s not married yet. He’s got a motorbike, goes all over, to Sharm, to Dahab…”

I can see the brother’s innocent good looks and cheeky nature playing rather well with the younger Western tourist. “So how many times you need to meet a girl before you choose to marry her?” I ask him.

“Three million!” he says, and laughs.

“He wants a Bedouin wife, though?” I ask M.

“Yeah,” says M. “He wants a village girl. They’re easy. Less trouble. The city girls, they get jealous…”

We talk a bit about Bedouin weddings. “So, at the wedding,” I say, miming looking and looking away. “All the young people mix and the old people they sit and they look and they pretend not to look?”

Everyone laughs. “How do you know this?” asks M.

“That,” I say. “Is something that’s common to every culture…”

S is free to travel, I’m told, but she needs to go with one or two friends at least, and, of course, have transport.

“So,” I say, by way of M’s translation. “Let’s say you’re at a wedding. You meet someone you like, he meets someone he likes, would you talk to him about it? Would you talk to her?”

Giggles, Arabic. “Of course they talk about it,” says M. “But it is the man who chooses.”

Later, I’m talking about the siblings with M, saying that tourism and tourist wealth has transformed S’s brother’s life more than hers, because his bike gives him a freedom of movement that she will not have.

“Look,” M says, eventually, discreetly pissed off about arguing the toss on this with me. “They need to look after their women.”

“I know,” I say. “She needs to stay a virgin and he doesn’t… Do they still hang the bloody sheet out after the wedding?”

“Not exactly,” he says. “Now it’s more of a napkin, a small square, and just for the parents to look at. And it’s not so important any more. There are operations she can have…”

(Hymen reconstruction, a procedure which makes vaginal rejuvenation and labia reduction look positively feminist, is a growth area in the modern Middle East, albeit illegal in some countries.)

“Or maybe her sister can give her something to fake it, some blood or something?”

“Maybe,” M says.

S and I didn’t talk about politics, and not only because I didn’t have the time or the language. She’s young enough to marry, young enough to have babies, but three years too young to vote.

A change of sheikh, the ruler of her husband’s tribe, is, I think, more likely to impact on her life than whatever is said or done in Cairo.

Further, I would guess – and I might be wrong – that, should she come to vote, the rule will be, as elsewhere in her life, “The man, he choose.”

This is the second in a series of interviews with Egyptians about life after the revolution. More:
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 1: The Coder.
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 3: The Future Soldier
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 4: The Guide
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 5: The Businessman
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 6: The Taxi Driver
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 7: The Working Mother