Cohabitation before marriage: Is this the future for relationships in Egypt?

A little-known lawyer has stirred up a hornet's nest by inviting couples to move in together before getting married, contradicting social and religious norms in a country known for long for its religious conservatism.

Hani Sayed, a member of the Committee on Freedoms at the Bar Association — the independent guild of the nation's lawyers — told a local television channel earlier this month that Egyptian laws do not prohibit premarital cohabitation.

His remarks came in response to fury by the religious establishment, especially al-Azhar, the highest seat of Sunni Islamic learning, against revelations by a famous female film director in this regard.

Enas al-Deghedi, known for her daring movies and controversial views about relations between men and women, said in an interview with an Arab television channel that she lived with her husband for nine years before marrying him.

Her disclosure sent shockwaves across Egypt but brought out into the open veiled support for cohabitation as an idea that can help couples see whether they can get along before pledging their lives to each other before God and their families.

'This is a way for people to know each other better' 

Sayed said he would even encourage his daughter to live with the man she loves for some time before marrying him, claiming that this would help the couple increase their odds of relationship success.

"This is a way for people to know each other better, especially with the law allowing it," Sayed told The New Arab.

"Nobody can prevent women from opting for cohabitation so long as they are making this of their free will," he added.

The argument about cohabitation comes as Egypt witnesses a surge in divorces, with most happening in the first five years after marriage.

In 2022, there were 1.8 new marriages in this country every one minute and one case of divorce every two minutes, according to the official statistics organisation, Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics.

Local sociologists attribute growing divorce rates to a long list of reasons, including economic ones, especially with most people's incomes being dwarfed by the dramatic rise in commodity prices, particularly food.

Nevertheless, people like Sayed, argue that cohabitation will give couples a good chance to know each other better and move beyond superficial interactions to see in greater detail how they behave in different social settings.  

"Men and women living together before marriage have a good chance to judge whether their relationship will succeed if they get married," he said.

Probably mindful of the devastating social consequences of his country's growing divorce rates, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi proposed a ban on verbal divorce in 2017.

Instead, he suggested husbands who want to divorce their wives should do so in a written form by visiting a marriage/divorce official to register the divorce with them.

Sisi's view was that by doing this would give the husbands another opportunity to think before destroying their families.

However, his proposal was met with rejection from al-Azhar which cited religious grounds for allowing verbal divorces to happen.

Celebrities spark dialogue

Sayed's remarks have been met with a negative reaction, especially from the Bar Association which froze his membership and vowed to take disciplinary action against him.

Nonetheless, his outspoken support for couples to move in together before marriage is probably the thin end of the wedge.

The same support may throw light on the change that can be happening in social attitudes towards premarital intimacy, even as few people are ready to speak openly about this like Deghedi, the film director, did.

However, two people, a man and a woman, who live with their partners without being married were approached by The New Arab but refused to talk about their experiences, even anonymously, highlighting the sensitivity surrounding the debate. 

Soon after Deghedi made her revelation, social media users shared several videos of local and Arab celebrities expressing positive views about the idea and relating their experiences of living together with their loved ones, without being married.

One of these videos was of Egyptian singer Mohamed Attia, saying he prefers to live with the woman he loves, without getting married to her.

Another video was of Lebanese female singer Maya Diab, saying she backs premarital cohabitation as an idea.

Diab even noted that she lived with the man who became her first husband for some time before marrying him. 

These views can perhaps be an expression of a much larger support for cohabitation, even as this support is so far limited to celebrities and the upper crust.

Pushback from religious entities

Egypt's predominantly Muslim population views premarital physical intimacy with aversion, with this attitude being predominantly rooted in Islamic rules against physical intimacy outside the framework of marriage.

Al-Azhar has equated cohabitation with adultery and described the act of unmarried men and women moving in together as a "violation against women's dignity and a loss of women's rights that can only be protected within the marriage institution which involves the registration of the marriage and the rights of each party in this union."

"Cohabitation is synonymous with adultery in Islam," Sheikh Osama al-Hadidi, the head of the Fatwa Centre, the al-Azhar body responsible for issuing religious edicts, told The New Arab.

"Men and women can only live together through marriage, or their relationship will run against the rules of Islam," he added.

Sayed and Deghedi are also falling afoul of religious conservatives, including the nation's ultraorthodox Salafists who view the lawyer's and the film director's remarks as an invitation to vice.

"Those encouraging men and women to live together without marriage invite them to get involved in irreligious relations," Sameh Bassioni, a senior official of al-Nour, by far Egypt's largest Salafist political party, told The New Arab.

"They only want to destroy society and do away with its values and unity," he added.

Amr Emam is a Cairo-based journalist. He has contributed to the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Al Majalla