Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Egypt by Kenneth M. Cuno (review)

Kenneth M. Cuno’s Modernizing Marriage is likely to be the definitive history of marriage in Egypt for avery long time. There are several reasons for this. One is Cuno’s mastery of the archival material related to his study. Another is his ability to provide the social, political, and legal context in which modern marriage in Egypt evolved. As Cuno notes, debates about the family and marriage were really about society and the nation, which creates a wider context for his study. Although Cuno’s history encompasses the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it also provides the information needed to understand marriage and divorce in contemporary Egypt.

Chapters 1 and 2 address the changing political, social, and demographic factors that influenced patterns of marriage and family formation from the mid-nineteenth century. The dramatic changes that took place in Egypt’s marriage system occurred for a number of reasons, including the decline of polygyny among the upper class. This decline is attributed to the end of the slave trade and the example set by the family of the Khedive, in particular the crown prince Tawfiq, who married Amina Ilhami, the granddaughter of the late viceroy, Abbas Hilmi. Their marriage marked a turning point in Egypt because it signaled the decision of the Khedival family to eschew slave concubinage and polygyny in favor of monogamy, leading to growing disapproval of polygyny in society at large. Following World War I, the middle classes began to abandon large multiple-family dwellings in favor of apartments and to adopt the conjugal model of the family. As Cuno notes, not only did the crown prince want to present the Khedival family as enlightened and modern, but before his wedding there was a significant change by imperial edict in the system of succession from the eldest male to primogeniture. In this way, monogamy and endogamy became embedded in the system of marriage, and Tawfiq’s example of monogamous marriage spread to the urban upper and middle classes.

The ʿUrabi Revolt and the British occupation also affected the turn to monogamous marriage and the end of concubinage and polygyny. The occupation resulted in the British taking control of state finances, which in the past had been used to pay for the imperial harems, including those of Ismaʿil, with seven hundred concubines, and Tawfiq, with sixty. Tawfiq’s son was placed in charge of arranging marriages for the women of the harem. Finally, the Egyptian ruling class was keen to be regarded by the British as enlightened, which meant the modernization of marriage practices and the demise of polygyny and concubinage.

However, joint family households and polygyny remained fixtures among landowners who wanted to keep land in the family. While polygyny became a hardship for the urban middle and upper classes, it became affordable to the lower classes of merchants and government employees, because their wives worked, many of them in spinning factories, and paid for their maintenance.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the reform of marriage and family life. The conjugal or monogamous couple and their children became the “family,” companionate marriage was valorized, and children were regarded as the future of the nation. The new family form led to the elevation of the status of women, since they managed the household and raised the children, and eventually resulted in the demand that women be educated so they could fulfill their domestic role. The new ideology of the family that was accepted by the middle and upper classes was promulgated by modernist intellectuals, including the women known as the first feminists, such as Aisha Ismat al-Taymur, Zaynab Fawwaz, and Malak Hifni Nasif. This new understanding of the family and of women’s roles led not only to support for women’s education but also to an awareness that every woman needed expanded access to divorce, to opposition to unilateral divorce by her husband, and to the...