The Muslim no-strings-attached misyar marriage often done in secret is fast pervading Saudi Arabian society — a boon for cash-strapped men unable to afford expensive traditional weddings, but deplored by critics for legitimizing promiscuity.
The practice, usually a temporary alliance in which the wife waives some conventional marriage rights such as cohabitation and financial support, has been legally permitted in the conservative Muslim kingdom for decades.
More than a dozen interviews with matchmakers and misyar couples — including grooms juggling other conventional marriages — offer a window into a phenomenon still shrouded in secrecy and shame, despite its proliferation.
Photo: AFP
The testimonies highlight how the practice is seen as a hybrid between marriage and singlehood, benefiting polygamists without the stress of maintaining a second household.
Despite its potential for abuse, it also appeals to some women keen to shun patriarchal expectations of traditional marriage, as well as unmarried couples seeking religious cover for sexual relationships, forbidden by Islam outside wedlock.
“Misyar offers comfort, freedom and companionship that is halal,” said a Saudi Arabian government official, who is in his 40s and has been in such a relationship with a Saudi widow in her 30s for more than two years.
He had three children from a separate, conventional marriage, and visits his misyar wife in her Riyadh home “whenever” he wants, he said, without elaborating what she gained from the secret alliance.
One of his friends “has had 11 secret misyar wives. He divorces and marries another, divorces and marries another,” he added, trailing off.
Saudi Arabians, as well as the kingdom’s expatriate workers, use dating apps and matrimonial Web sites to hunt for such partners.
“Misyar is cheaper. There is no dowry, no obligation,” a 40-year-old Egyptian pharmacist in Riyadh said.
He began searching after sending his wife and five-year-old son back to Cairo at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, mainly due to rising living costs and an expat levy introduced by Saudi Arabia, he said.
“Being away from my wife is hard,” he said, adding that he had been searching for a misyar partner through matchmakers on Instagram who charge as much as 5,000 riyals (US$1,333).
“I gave them my preference: weight, size, skin color ... but no match so far,” he said.
Misyar marriages are often short-lived, with most ending in divorce from anywhere between 14 and 60 days, the Al-Watan newspaper reported in 2018, citing sources in the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Justice.
It is touted by some women as a fleeting escape from spinsterhood, or a chance for a fresh beginning for divorcees and widows, who otherwise struggle to remarry.
A close associate of a divorced Syrian woman in Riyadh said that she was in a secret misyar relationship because she feared that her Saudi Arabian ex-husband would legally seek custody of her two children if he discovered that she had remarried.
It is impossible to estimate the number of such marriages, many of which are undocumented.
Saudi clerics say that the practice has proliferated since 1996, when the kingdom’s highest religious authority legitimized it with an Islamic edict.
However, many question the validity of a furtive practice at odds with the main tenets of Islamic marriage, which requires a public declaration.
A prominent Riyadh cleric attributed its proliferation to men unwilling to shoulder the responsibilities of polygamous marriage, which is permitted in Islam as long as all wives are treated equally.
In a 2019 column in the Saudi Gazette daily, columnist Tariq al-Maeena described misyar as a “license to have multiple partners without much responsibility or expense.”
“Reports in the Saudi press have spoken of growing concerns over the number of children fathered by Saudi males in their trips abroad, and abandoned for all practical purposes,” he wrote.
Some women are forced to pursue court cases against Saudi Arabian men refusing to accept children born into misyar relationships.
“A woman contacted me and said: ‘I am a misyar wife, and my husband does not recognize my child,’” the Riyadh cleric said. “He says: ‘The child is not my problem.’”
“I advised her to take him to court and fight for her rights,” the cleric added.
However, women are encouraged socially to turn a blind eye to their husband’s misyar adventures.
Fahad Almuais, a matchmaker who says that his clients are mostly “polygamists,” spoke of one government worker who kept his misyar relationship hidden from his first wife.
When the man began routinely disappearing every weekend, her female neighbor advised the suspicious wife to “stay quiet,” Almuais told online news portal Thmanyah.
“He married misyar so he wouldn’t make [your life] a living hell,” Almuais said, quoting the neighbor. “Be patient and let him go for the weekend, and the rest of the days he’s yours.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS