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Before the wedding who is supposed to choose the furniture for the flat where the wife and husband are going to live? how does it work ?
I was told that in the Egyptian culture its the mother in law who is in charge to choose everything, is that true ? if not how it works ?
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Lol....I never heard of the Mother in Law choosing the furniture, but I guess every family is different. Glad mine didn't choose ours...
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and how did it happen for you ? did you and your husband have choosen everything ? or you did choose some of the stuff with his family ? and did you know where to buy them ? I mean did you know where to go and where to choose the material for the sofa example?
thank you in advance for your reply
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We chose things together, he and I. Sometimes members of his family accompanied us but it was always our decision what we purchased. We had some of our furniture made so we were able to design and choose the material and it worked out great. Posts: 13440 | Registered: Feb 2006
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the mother-in-law who usually chooses is the bride's mother by the way. basically a woman takes her mother along to help her choose.
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and what about the husband's mother ? has she also have the right to choose something ? and who is supposed to pay for the whole fourniture?
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In a perfect world the groom is responsible for paying for the furniture ... and pay the dowry too which is divided into two parts some upfront and some is delayed as (moakher) which should be paid to the bride later *in most cases if the divorce happen* but because of financial hardship the family of the bride ( in most cases) assist in purchasing the furniture and also the (moakher) never get paid unless there is a divorce ....
posted
This is part of an article that was written a while ago on the subject. It was written in 2003 so with the recent rate of inflation all this prices must have increased greatly by now:
Rules of engagement
The classic Egyptian marriage process typically involves collective consultations and extensive negotiations between the respective families of the betrothed couple. In all social classes, well-developed familial and social networks serve to facilitate marriage. Membership at the neighborhood social club, or nadi, for instance, provides a perfect courting ground for young people of similar social standing. Once a potential match is identified, the groom and the bride’s father must mutually negotiate the terms of the marriage contract, as well as a written timeline for complying with each clause. The first – and generally most important – obligation for the groom is to purchase an apartment. For the upper classes, this is usually a non-issue. Lower-income men such as Alam and Awad, however, plan to live in extensions of their parents’ homes, a common solution. Such an arrangement enables them to remain near their parents while having their own apartments for their own families. For those who don’t have this option, however, buying an apartment at current market prices – even by installment – can take years. But since most Egyptian families frown upon rented apartments, especially the furnished kind (generally considered the preserve of rootless expats and vacationing Gulf Arabs), they are given little choice. Amin El Kahky, real estate administrative manager for LinkdotNet’s realty website e-dar.com, estimated that only around 20 percent of Egyptian families would accept a groom planning to rent a furnished flat in the interim before a buying a home. “For the other 80 percent, everything must be in place before the marriage occurs,” El Kahky said.
The bridegroom’s burden
Another important marriage-related expense that must be borne by the groom’s side is the mahr, a sum of money paid to the bride’s family for the purpose of furnishing the newlyweds’ home. Going prices for the mahr differ based on the financial status of the families involved, but they usually start – in Cairo, anyway – at about £E 10,000, the bear minimum needed to furnish an urban flat. Sometimes, however, in lieu of the mahr, families agree to split furniture expenses between them. The groom is also expected to buy a shabka, or a token gift of gold jewelry, which he presents to the bride-to-be amid the oohs and aahs of family and friends. The bride’s family may request a shabka worth anywhere from £E 3,000 – for a wedding band, two bracelets and a necklace with a pendant – to more than £E 50,000 for a high-grade diamond jewelry set. Ever pragmatic, the possibility of divorce in also considered before the nuptial is forged. The ayma, for one, is a legal document included in the marriage contract listing the legal possessions of the woman, while the mu’akhar is a promise of payment to the bride in the event that the groom divorces her. The mu’akhar generally ranges from £E 5,000 to £E 20,000 in lower and middle income groups, and can reach up to £E 50,000 or more in the upper classes – or in cases where the groom has divorced previously. Families consider these two clauses as the primary authentication of the bride’s value. Following this rationale, the more money the bride is worth in the eyes of her husband, the less likely he is to divorce her. Still, parents of the groom often see this particular clause as an unfair tax. And once the cost of the wedding dress, wedding party, hairdresser and honeymoon – all of which are put on the groom’s tab – are considered, marriage becomes, for many young men, “a quasi- impossible option,” according to Rouchdy. Meanwhile, at any point in the negotiations, disagreements between the parties – over the size of the mahr, for example – can threaten to derail the entire transaction. Such disputes can be mended if the couple in question is willing to fight with their respective parents, but families often go their separate ways, only to quickly start negotiations with another family. “I know a marriage that was called off because of curtains,” Awad said, “and there was another that fell apart because of an argument over plastic garbage bins and bathroom accessories.” http://www.amcham-egypt.org/Publications/BusinessMonthly/November%2003/FEATURE.ASPPosts: 4576 | From: Cairo | Registered: Jun 2002
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And here is another much longer description, but well worth reading:
Marriage Negotiations: Strategies to Reduce Marital Conflicts
Marriage negotiations are considered the most important element in setting a marriage on the right path. As one woman who was helping her husband to build their very first small flat put it,
Marriage negotiation is just like a plan for a building. You have to realistically assess your resources and think of every little detail that is important for your comfort and the safety of the flat. If parents conduct a good and smart marriage negotiation for their children, it is most unlikely that the marriage would end in disaster.
Among low-income Egyptian families, in addition to financial matters, every detail of married life considered important by the parties involved is up for negotiation. Some mothers will even go so far as to negotiate whether the bride should use contraception the first year or have a child and then use contraception (see chapter 9).
After an initial meeting, when the groom or his family visits the bride's home and both sides indicate their consent, additional meetings take place to negotiate the details. Ideally, negotiations should take place between the elders from both sides: fathers and uncles, mothers, and aunts, and grandmothers. However, in the neighborhood, negotiations often began between the bride's parents and the groom, who might take a friend along. I know of only one case in which the groom's father participated and another in which the groom's mother, who paid for the wedding herself, negotiated all the aspects of the marriage with the bride's father. The groom's mother and sisters may be present at the final stage of negotiation to formally give their blessing. The exceptions were instances in which the two families were very close and the women of both sides played the key roles in negotiations.
The primary player in the negotiations is the mother of the bride, who, depending on her position in the household, may participate actively and openly or may sit more quietly and note the details being discussed and afterward convey her opinions to her husband. During formal discussions the bride's father, while making his wishes known, chooses his words very carefully, remaining noncommittal until later in the negotiations.
Negotiations start with the groom revealing information about his family and himself, such as the details of his education, job, income, worldly possessions, and future plans. The bride's father or his representative indicates his demands. Neither side expects that this first serious meeting will end in any concrete agreement, beyond the sharing of several pots of tea. Ideally, if the groom is not well known to the bride's family, after this meeting the bride's mother and friends set out to learn about the man and his family from his neighbors, colleagues, and employers. However, the degree to which families take this character investigation seriously varies substantially. In fact, since nowadays there is typically an engagement period of several years during which the bride's family has the opportunity to know the groom better, the importance of character investigation has diminished.
Marriage negotiations have two components: first, the material contribution of each side to the marriage and the new household; and second, other relational arrangements between the bride and the groom after the marriage. For the most part, the first includes the size of the bride's mahr. This is usually a considerable sum that varies with the social status of the bride's family. Theoretically a bride can demand all or part of the mahr at the time of the marriage or reserve it until some time during the marriage or in the event of divorce. In Egypt, the mahr is customarily divided into two sums. The first payment, called the muqaddama , is given by the groom to the bride before the marriage and is used to buy furniture for the couple. Sometimes the groom buys the furniture, which he then puts in the bride's name when the marriage contract is signed. The second payment, called the muakhkhara , religiously and legally may be demanded at any time after the signing of the contract but usually is used as a deterrent for divorce, since if a man wishes to divorce his wife he would first have to pay her this remaining sum. Therefore, the larger the sum, the more effective the wife's leverage.
Anyone over the age of forty can tell you that marriage expenses have increased since the 1970s. Elderly women told me that at the time of their marriage, a bed and canopy, a wardrobe, and a few other major items were provided by the groom, while the bride's family provided bedding, cooking facilities, and a small trousseau of personal items.[21] Often they just rented a room near their parents and expanded their quarters as the family grew, but times have changed. Parents, and young people themselves, expect that each generation will have a higher standard of living.[22] A couple preparing to marry now needs a gas stove, a television, a matching bedroom set, settees and a table, an electric washing machine, a food mixer, and a refrigerator. The bride's trousseau includes many nightgowns and enough clothing and personal items to assure she will not need to ask her husband for personal items for at least five years. The greatest expense incurred in setting up a household is the key money needed to rent a small flat, which runs from 1,500 to 3,000 pounds even in the most distant neighborhoods. This means that the groom has to work hard for a few years before he can get married. By contrast, as soon as a daughter is born many families start accumulating items for her trousseau.
The negotiation includes details of all items that both sides have agreed should be provided before marriage, what share the bride's family will provide, and what the groom's responsibilities will be. Once the items are accumulated and the marriage takes place, everything is carefully detailed in the marriage contract as the property of the bride. If the marriage dissolves for whatever reason, the groom must see that all nonperishable items are returned to the bride. All women agreed that this was important, to remind men to treat their wives well. This custom led to deferred marriage and encouraged potential grooms, who normally live with their parents and have few housekeeping expenses, to work hard and save money so that they can begin married life with a higher standard of living.
Many young women expressed bitterness about waiting as long as four years to get married. They were torn between wanting to have most of the basic household goods before marriage and not wanting to wait so long, particularly since many engagements were broken after a couple of years. Women are very conscious that during a long engagement they miss other marriage opportunities. As one mother pointed out, men can always find someone to marry whereas a woman's options diminish with age, particularly since men prefer to marry younger women.
This new trend in marriage practices has caused the average age of marriage to rise considerably for women and men. While the state, family planners, and some feminists may consider this a positive indicator for population control or women's increase in status, most women in my sample viewed it negatively. Women who were neither students nor employed resented having to postpone building their family. Many women agreed to marry older grooms who had worked and saved up enough to be able to marry. One young bride said, "I would rather marry a man just five or six years older than I am, but they don't have the means to marry. So my groom is fifteen years older. But my parents and I felt this was a better choice." This trend, which is increasing in the neighborhoods, has great implications for marital relationships and the status of women in the family. The age and experience of the husbands and the gap between men's and women's monetary contributions to the household place women in an even more subservient position in the marriage partnership. It also means that they will spend long years as widows who will most likely be financially dependent on their children. This in turn has ramifications for population policy as women try to have more sons to secure their chances for later economic as well as emotional support.[23] Many young men find a fiancée and, after an agreement is reached, migrate to the Gulf to work for a couple of years and save money to be able to marry. I asked women why they do not make smaller demands on their fiancés so they could marry sooner. They insisted that such strategies would mean poverty forever. One young woman, engaged to be married, said,
Today I can demand to have a gas stove before marriage. But once I am married, he will not buy it. He wants his lunch, but whether I cook this on a kerosene burner or a gas stove is not his problem.
Another twenty-year-old woman, who was expected to marry within a couple of months, explained that the difficult negotiation of the material aspects of marriage had nothing to do with greed, as she thought I was implying by asking these questions.
When a man has to work so hard to marry, he has a vested interest in trying hard to make the marriage work. Especially since if he divorces his wife, he will lose all that he worked for, because it all belongs to the woman. In this way, too, men who are of modest means are effectively banned from marrying a second wife because to provide all these items again takes them forever.
Given that divorce, even within the revised version of family law, is so much easier for men than for women, women tend to protect themselves through these strategies while simultaneously paving the way for a higher standard of living.
Additional negotiations take place closer to the marriage date. Most women, particularly those recently married, considered these negotiations vital to a harmonious marriage. All details of financial and other responsibilities, the specific contributions of husband and wife, and often the location of the marital flat are discussed. For brides, the location of the flat is very important, particularly if they are employed outside their neighborhood or intend to enter the labor market in the future. Most brides prefer to be close to their mothers so they can help with child care responsibilities. This preference often means putting up with smaller flats and higher rent, but this is a sacrifice many women feel is worthwhile.
Financial arrangements include the amount the groom should pay as housekeeping money, what expenses this covers, and what he can expect from his wife. Some negotiations are so detailed as to specifiy whether he should expect one meal a week with meat, or two. Fatin had divorced her husband at the age of nineteen. Now in her thirties she had not expected to marry again. But she found a suitor, the mahr was successfully negotiated, and everybody was excited and preparing for the engagement ceremony. But the engagement came to a halt because the potential groom had agreed to pay 90 pounds per month but would not consent to buy food or clothing for her. After family members consulted, they decided that if he agreed to bring home a kilogram of meat every week they would agree to the arrangement, but he refused. Fatin had worked as a semiprofessional seamstress in the neighborhood for many years, had bought all her household goods, and had a rented flat of her own. This liberated the groom from providing or paying for all those items. She thought that he was taking advantage of her, that he wanted a wife, a comfortable home, and good food but did not want to contribute very much. She said,
If he only wants to pay 90 pounds a month, then I still have to work many hours to keep our standard of living from falling. He's thinking that if I want to improve our life, I can work and earn money, while he can spend all the income from his second job on himself. I am old enough to know that a man who wants to start in this way will probably be even meaner once we are married.
Women are keenly aware of the importance of these negotiations for relationships with their husbands. Some of the younger women who were experiencing problems with their husbands over financial affairs blamed their mothers for not having negotiated well. Many men try to get out of their obligations, but a good negotiation before marriage helps assure a woman's security. "It hurts a woman's dignity if she has to talk money with a husband she has just married," said one unhappy bride.
Talking about money matters and trying to negotiate and get a better deal for yourself will be interpreted as being too materialistic, when you are supposed to enter into a relationship based on good faith and understanding. It is the parents' duty to arrange these matters in advance and try to prevent future problems for the couple.
Men generally felt an agreement before marriage was fair, because if the conditions are not acceptable, a groom is free to end the negotiations and look for another bride. A newly married man added,
Since parents and others are usually involved in this negotiation, if problems arise the couple can always ask them to intervene and find a workable solution that is acceptable to all sides, rather than leave it to two inexperienced people to solve their problem.
Another groom said, "Beginning married life and putting two people from two different households together to live is difficult enough without them having to solve money matters and other details. Best is to discuss these matters in advance, and if years later they are unhappy, things can be changed.
Premarital negotiations may also include how often the bride should be able to stay with her family. I never heard of this matter being written in the legal marriage contract, but such a discussion was intended to help ensure a smoother marriage with little room for conflict.
According to my older informants, detailed negotiations regarding the daily life of a married couple have emerged only in the last few decades. In the past, people married within their communities, where customs and norms were shared, but now people may marry across regions and social classes with vastly different customs and expectations. Moreover, life is changing very rapidly, and most young couples do not live the way their parents did. Some young women whose mothers were not very influential in the family or had little experience in such matters would ask a relative or a neighbor to participate in the negotiations. On the whole, as a result of social changes, the bride's mother is taking a more prominent role.
Although most negotiations focused on the demands of the bride and her family, increasingly men bring their own conditions to the negotiating table. For instance, more men, especially educated men who choose to marry educated women, are now objecting to their wives working outside the home, particularly if the job is located outside their area of residence. This even includes men who have chosen their brides from among their colleagues. This demand often creates a dilemma for some women who, to increase their chances of finding a secure job, finished high school at great sacrifice to their parents and sometimes their siblings. Men's objection to their future wives' employment is often framed in terms of the costs involved and the threat to a husband's honor (see chapter 4). Though not always successful, women try to make compromises by agreeing to stay home after having children or if they feel they cannot cope with both domestic responsibilities and their jobs. Occasionally they also suggest taking up the veil to protect the family's good name and honor. This situation has encouraged many younger women in the neighborhood to return to more traditional female activities such as tailoring or hairdressing, since these skills allow them to operate from home and circumvent their husbands' objections.
A second, now common, condition men attached to their marriage proposal is that the bride take up the veil.[24] Although until 1986 only a few educated women in the neighborhoods wore the veil, the practice is now quite widespread. It is now rare for women who get married to remain unveiled, particularly if they are educated or aspire to be considered modern (though not afrangi, which implies Westernized) as opposed to baladi (traditional). Husbands' demands to this effect are now far less controversial from women's point of view than they were a decade ago. During the first few years of my fieldwork, women felt very strongly that veiling should be done of a woman's free will and that a husband had no right to impose it on his wife. Nahed, for example, was excited because her friend had found her a handsome, educated suitor who had the financial means to marry within a few months. However, her excitement soon withered away after a couple of meetings with her suitor because he demanded that she take the veil at once. Nahed, disillusioned and disappointed, explained to me,
If he had put forward any other condition I would have accepted to marry him because he is from a very decent family and I liked him. However, his demand for me to veil because he wishes and not because I might decide it is best for me indicates that he will not respect his wife as an equal partner and also that he has not understood what Islam is all about. I have thought from time to time that I might like to veil and I admire women who do it, but I feel I have not reached that point yet. I will veil when God wants me to and when he gives me the strength, but not when a man demands it of me as a condition of marriage.
Nahed's mother, an illiterate woman from upper Egypt respected in her neighborhood for her long struggle to educate her four daughters as well as her four sons, regretfully agreed with her. Nahed was not the only young woman in the neighborhood who had resisted a suitor's demand to veil. Some women had successfully confronted their suitors and had convinced them that veiling was a matter for the woman, not her husband, to decide. Many of these women, including Nahed and her sisters, subsequently veiled of their own accord a few years after their marriage. By the time of my visit in 1992, the situation had completely changed. It is now rare for an educated woman not to be veiled. In fact, many young women veil while still in high school and some even before that. Others veil as soon as they find a job. Most women, with the exception of those who were least educated and young women in the neighborhoods who saw themselves as part of the rapidly changing baladi culture of Cairo and still dressed in the traditional manner, planned to veil at the time of marriage if they had not already done so.
Though taking up the veil no longer seemed to be a major issue during marriage negotiations, the question of employment remains quite significant for educated women. In the face of rapid social change, women and their families feel they should try to safeguard their future and old age by having a secure formal sector job.[25] However, the salary for low-level clerical jobs in the formal sector has not kept up with the rate of inflation, and many men felt that their wives' employment would not contribute much to the household income but would cause great inconveniences (see chapter 4). Some men added that women's wages may also make them "big-headed" and lead them to question men's authority as head of the household. Other men framed their objections in terms of not wanting their honor tested for nothing.
Once the marriage agreement is reached, the groom brings a piece or two of gold jewelry (among low-income families this can be a very modest pair of earrings and a watch or piece of cloth). The groom and the father of the bride read the fatiha —the first chapter of the Qur'an—and shake hands, acknowledging that they honor their agreement, and the groom comes to the bride's home to visit her. However, unless it becomes very evident that the marriage will take place, the bride and the groom do not appear in public together without a chaperone. If after some time it becomes clear that the groom is not serious, the bride's family may cancel the engagement. Contrary to attitudes among the middle classes, breaking an engagement did not harm the bride's chances of finding another suitor or the honor of her family. When asked, women who broke an engagement often said simply that it was not meant to be. Some young women in the neighborhoods had been engaged two or three times. http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft0f59n74g&chunk.id=d0e3237&toc.depth =1&toc.id=d0e2882&brand=eschol
Posts: 4576 | From: Cairo | Registered: Jun 2002
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I was going to say (before Newcomer gave such great info) that it's all about negotiation. You can negotiate anything having to do with this subject. Posts: 13440 | Registered: Feb 2006
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woow that was long.
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