The rising number of unmarried Saudi girls is an issue of great concern to everyone. The Shoura Council has intervened, asking a number of female experts to join in a discussion of the problem, which the media continues to highlight.
Philanthropic societies offer money and other incentives to encourage young men to marry while religious men and social reformers speak about the importance of marriage. The Internet has even joined the campaign with many matchmaking sites. This is all good news. What, then, is the problem?
The problem, ladies and gentlemen, is that everyone is interested in seeing a man and a woman living under one roof but not at all concerned with what will happen after that. People seem uninterested in telling us how these couples can build a healthy, coherent and happy family, relatively immune from trouble and disintegration.
On the other hand, widespread divorce, which I consider far more dangerous to society than unmarried women, is not viewed with the same level of concern. The phenomenon is now so common that we are about to see an entire generation of young Saudis who are from broken homes — in other words, whose parents are divorced.
Divorce has reasons, and these normally begin well before marriage. The responsibility is collective, with the family, school, media, administrative rules and regulations all sharing some of the blame.
Within the family there is discrimination, with boys favored over girls, who are expected to submit to their fate and endure insult and repression without asking for explanations. The girl grows up thinking her beauty is her ticket to a happy life. She is taught that a good husband is one who will spend lavishly on her. The boy, on the other hand, is brought up to become a lazy, inconsiderate man who is unable to shoulder responsibility. He learns how to oppress his sisters and may even go so far as to abuse his own mother since, as the man of the house, he can do as he likes. How on earth can we expect someone who is so arrogant and disrespectful of his sisters and his mother to respect his wife?
The fear of seeing their daughters unmarried makes parents rush them into marriage, sometimes when the girls are no older than 15. A girl who has been more or less forced into marriage soon becomes a mother herself, responsible for raising a child. In school, students are taught a number of subjects but far too little of a family life based on divine laws. Those laws govern the relationship between men and women when it comes to marriage, divorce, men’s guardianship of women, loyalty, alimony, polygamy and the knowledge of their rights and obligations in real life.
