BANI NAIM, West Bank, 10 October 2006 — Of the many troubles that the economic slide has brought to this town on the edge of the Judean Desert, Jihad Manassrah saw none more threatening than the growing number of single women walking in prim pairs through its narrow streets.
Marriage, once a jubilant expression of love and status here, had become a tradition many could no longer afford.
So last month, Manassrah, the imam of a local mosque, presented a novel social contract to several hundred men gathered for a rare public forum. The agreement put a cap on the cost of weddings and bridal dowries, which had swelled enormously in this once-prosperous town of merchants, day laborers and civil servants.
The declining marriage rate here is one example of social change in the midst of what the World Bank calls “an unprecedented economic recession” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Political power, demographics, family structure and customs are being transformed by financial constraints in large and small ways that will likely outlast the crisis itself.
As the Palestinian government withers without foreign aid and Israeli tax payments, large clans are reasserting their authority as the enforcers of conservative rituals that have dictated life in towns like this one for generations. But they are often doing so at the behest of Islamic leaders, who view the economic decline as a chance to rein in secular excesses and promote a view of marriage as something to be engaged in early and often.
“This is an opportunity to use this siege to rid ourselves of these old habits we do not need,” said Manassrah, 37, who was elected to the municipal council last year as an independent Islamic candidate. “This is going to be a new tradition we give to the next generation.”
Across the West Bank and Gaza, young men are abandoning towns and villages to find work in Palestinian cities, leaving communities like this one with a high concentration of unmarried women. At the same time, more Palestinian women are seeking higher degrees and jobs of their own to help husbands make ends meet, a trend university registrars say has accelerated in the seven months in which Hamas has run the Palestinian Authority.
In Bani Naim, a town of 20,000 people that fills several narrow valleys east of Hebron, the exodus of young men began a few years ago, and town leaders say it has quickened this year. The trend was reflected in a summer wedding season that, by all accounts, was the most meager in memory.
Women here commonly marry between the ages of 19 and 22, but many have been staying single far longer.
Islamic leaders also worried that men were increasingly reluctant to marry a second wife — often widows in need of financial help — because of the costs associated with the ceremony.
A Palestinian wedding is a lavish undertaking and in the years between uprisings the cost had risen to an average of $15,000. Bridal dowries are often used as a measure of status, and a bride here had come to expect her groom to provide 300 grams of gold, bedroom furniture and a new wardrobe.
There is also the celebration at the signing of the wedding agreement, which calls for the slaughter of a prized lamb, and custom also demands that the groom rent a large convoy of taxis to retrieve the bride on the wedding day, which culminates in a feast of more than a dozen slaughtered sheep and an expensive fireworks display.
Yusef Ghanem, 35, a balding bachelor who has received only a fraction of his teacher’s pay from the Palestinian government in seven months, said, “even a full salary is not enough for a wedding. One would have had to wait six or seven years to afford the expenses.”
Hearing this lament in his mosque from a growing number of men, Manassrah gathered the leaders of four clans that account for 95 percent of the town’s population.
He said their initial resistance to change focused on fears that lowering the dowry “threatened the rights of women” by “making the husband think his wife is inexpensive and making it easier for him to divorce.”
“We told them that people who have been married in these very expensive weddings have also gotten divorced,” Manassrah said. “Money isn’t the issue.”
After 10 meetings over the summer, an agreement emerged last month that Manassrah is planning to spread across the West Bank. The terms of the deal, roughly translated as “The Decency Document,” set limits on even the smallest details of the marriage process.
The dowry was capped at 150 grams of gold and $1,000 worth of clothes and furniture. Kanafi, a Palestinian pastry, would substitute for lamb at the signing of the wedding agreement. There would be one beauty salon visit on the wedding day itself and no taxi convoy. The feast should be small, without fireworks. “These were maximums, and we prefer if people do even less,” Manassrah said.
The agreement bore the stamps and signatures of clan leaders, Islamic foundations, the town’s sports clubs, agricultural associations, even the local taxi company likely to lose business as a result. After being asked its opinion, the Bani Naim Women’s Charitable Society signed on.
“Too many young guys were leaving here in search of a cheaper wife somewhere else,” said Leila Manassrah, 19, a society board member who is studying agriculture at Hebron University.
She said the agreement was a sign of the times. “Anyway,” she said with a smile, “if he’s a good guy, the dowry is just not important.”
When the document was presented to clan leaders, Yusef Manassrah announced that his three unmarried daughters, including Leila and her 27-year-old sister, would be wed under the new rules.
“The men were kissing me,” said Manassrah, who displays the agreement in his office. “They were shaking my hand, thanking me.”
Since then, there have been 10 weddings in Bani Naim. Of those, eight have adhered to the new spending caps.
Mustafa Humeidat, 55, has been writing the marriage contracts here for two decades and is a strong supporter of the agreement. With a dismissive grimace, he called the extravagance that accompanied previous weddings “a sign of ignorance.”
Humeidat said one family that ignored the rules was from outside the town and did not feel they applied to their daughter. The other, he said, showed that tradition will in some cases be hard to shake.
“The father told me he was going to marry this daughter off the same way he married off his others,” said Humeidat, fiddling with a loop of wooden beads. “These people say the dowry, its gold, is the woman’s right under the Qur’an. But when it comes to the dinners, the parties, the salons — this is not Islam.”
