JEDDAH, 7 April 2007 — Instead of going through the rigmarole of trying to convince a first wife that she would be very happy to share her husband with another woman, a husband in Saudi Arabia took on a secret misyar wife.
A misyar marriage is essentially a codified Islamic version of the more informal “casa chica” arrangement that is common among wealthier married men in Latin America. In Mexico, for example, the “casa chica” is so common among professional married men that some health insurance plans will cover the mistress.
In Saudi Arabia, misyar works like this: A woman basically agrees in a binding Islamic marriage contract to be set up with certain material provisions (an apartment, a car, etc.) in exchange for living with a married man. She may also forgo any pre-nuptial demands, but since she doesn’t get a dowry or access to other material support she usually asks for something.
Usually the more attractive and younger the woman, the more leverage she has in her pre-nuptial demands.
However, sometimes this arrangement can go awry, especially when (as is often the case) the man hides the misyar mistress from his “real” wife.
This is what happened to one man, according to a report in yesterday’s Al-Madinah newspaper.
A misyar woman agreed not to make any pre-nuptial demands. However, when she discovered later that her misyar husband was hiding her from his family, she decided to leverage this information to the tune of SR380,000.
How did she do this? Simple: She blackmailed him. And it worked. With the help of a marriage official, the woman managed to convince her misyar hubby that it would cost him less to buy her a house than for her to go to his family and reveal what he has been hiding from them.
Let that be a lesson to those misyar husbands out there: Perhaps you should think twice about hiding this kind of stuff from your “real” wife (or wives).