JEDDAH, 6 October 2003 — To address issues like excessive dowries, the high cost of marriage and the growing number of unmarried women in the country, efforts are under way to establish a supreme family council under the chairmanship of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd.

The Shoura Council’s Islamic Affairs Committee has presented a proposal to the 120-member consultative body to set up the new council, which will consist of the ministers of justice, labor and social affairs, Islamic affairs, higher education, and education, plus five independent scholars.

The ministerial council will also tackle the growing rate of divorces and set out policies for family welfare and stability. The committee has called for more mass weddings and regulated wedding hall charges, Al-Madinah reported.

The Shoura committee stressed the need to encourage young men and women to get married by providing them with housing facilities, free plots of land and employment with attractive salaries while raising the ceiling for loans given for marriage purposes. The panel also debated spiraling dowries.

The number of unmarried men and women in the Kingdom is growing at an alarming rate, and a recent study has put the number of spinsters at 1.5 million. Parents play a big role in exacerbating the issue by demanding high dowries to keep up their social status at the expense of the marital life of their children.

According to a recent survey, 92 percent of young Saudi men and 69 percent of young women have said that high dowries are to blame for the delay in marriages, while 89 percent of men and 65 percent of women said high marriage cost was another major reason.

Another study, conducted by King Saud University in Riyadh, estimates the average cost of a wedding in the Kingdom at SR90,000, which is beyond the means of low-income families. The dowry accounts for 16 percent of that figure, the study says.

Divorce is another complex problem to be given attention by the new supreme council. Some 18,000 divorces were reported in the Kingdom in 2001, when 60,000 couples got married.