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.”
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