Always over the head of the Arab woman hangs the shadow of divorce. Nowhere in the world does the law so facilitate the separation of man and wife. If a man grows weary of his wife's looks, of her temper, or of her dress; if he wishes to replace her with another; or if he is tired of married life and does not wish a wife at all, he has but scant difficulty in getting rid of her, for in North Africa a divorce can be had in fifteen minutes at a total cost of a dollar and twenty cents. In theory, either husband or wife may divorce the other by a simple formality, without assigning any reason whatever. As a matter of fact, however, actual divorce by the man is rare, the Moslem husband usually preferring to get rid of his wife by a process called repudiation, which bears with great injustice and cruelty on the woman. If he tires of her for any reason, or merely wishes to replace her, he drives her away with the words “Woman, get thee hence; take thy goods and go.” In this case, although the husband is free to remarry, the woman is not and can only obtain a legal release by returning to the man the money which he paid for her. The woman may apply to the courts for divorce without her husband's consent only if she is able to prove that he ill-treats or beats her without sufficient reason, if he refuses her food, clothes, or lodging, or if she discovers a previous wooing on her husband's part, all previous betrothals, or even offers of marriage, whether the other lady refused or accepted him, being considered ground for divorce.
The next time you happen to be in Tunis don't fail to pay a visit to the divorce court. It is the most Haroun-al-Raschidic institution this side of Samarkand. A great hall of justice, vaulted and floored with marble and strewn with Eastern carpets, forms the setting, while husbands in turbans and lawyers in tarbooshes, white-veiled women and green-robed, gray-bearded judges complete a scene which might have been taken straight from the Arabian Nights. The women, closely veiled and hooded, and herded like so many cattle within an iron grill, take no part in the proceedings which so intimately affect their futures, their interests being left in the hands of a voluble and gesticulative avocat. On either side of the hall is a series of alcoves, and in each alcove, seated cross-legged on a many-cushioned divan, is a gold-turbaned and green-robed cadi. To him the husband states his case, the wife putting in her defence—if she has any—through her lawyer and rarely appearing in person. The judge considers the facts in silence, gravely stroking his long, gray beard, and then delivers his decision—in nine cases out of ten, so I was told, in favour of the husband. Should either party be dissatisfied, he or she can take an appeal by the simple process of walking across the room and laying the case before one of the judges sitting on the other side, whose decision is final. A case, even if appealed, is generally disposed of in less than an hour and at a total cost of six francs, which goes to show that the record for quick-and-easy divorces is not held by Reno.
It is characteristic of the Moslem view-point that infidelity on the part of the husband is no cause for divorce whatsoever, while infidelity on the part of the wife, owing to the strict surveillance under which Moslem women are kept and the prison-like houses in which they are confined, occurs so rarely as to be scarcely worth mentioning. Should a Moslem woman so far succeed in evading the vigilance of her jailers as to enter into a liaison with a man, instead of a divorce trial there would be two funerals. To put his wife and her paramour out of the way without detection is a matter of no great difficulty for an Arab husband, for if any one disappears in a Mohammedan country the harem system renders a search extremely difficult, if not, indeed, wholly out of the question. In fact, it has happened very frequently, especially in such populous centres as Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, that a man has enticed his rival into his house, either keeping him a prisoner for life or slowly killing him by torture. Though the French authorities are perfectly well aware of such occurrences, neither they in Algeria and Tunisia nor the English in Egypt feel themselves strongly enough intrenched to risk the outburst of fanaticism which would inevitably ensue should they violate the privacy of a harem.
I am perfectly aware of the fact that it has become the fashion among those travellers who confine their investigations of African life to the lanes about Mustapha Supérieur, to the souks of Tunis, and to the alleys back of the Mousky, to pooh-pooh the idea that slavery still exists in North Africa. As a matter of fact, however—though this the European officials will, for reasons of policy, stoutly deny—slavery not only exists sub rosa in Algeria and Tunisia and in Egypt, but slave markets are still openly maintained in the inland towns of Morocco and Tripolitania, the French and Italian occupations notwithstanding. When a wealthy Moslem wants slaves nowadays he does not send traders to Circassia or raiders to Uganda, but he applies to one of the well-known dealers in Tetuan, or Tripoli, or Trebizond, a marriage contract is drawn up, and all the ceremonies of legal wedlock are gone through by proxy. By resorting to these fictitious marriages and similar subterfuges, the owner of a harem may procure as many slaves, white, brown, or black, as he wishes, and once they are within the walls of his house, no one can possibly interfere to release them, for, the police being under no conditions permitted to violate the privacy of a harem, there is obviously no safeguard for the liberty, or even the lives, of its inmates. As a result of this system, a constant stream of female slaves—fair-haired beauties from Georgia and Circassia, brown-skinned Arab girls from the borders of the Sahara, and negresses from Equatoria—trickles into the North African coast towns by various roundabout channels, and, though the European officials are perfectly well aware of this condition of things, they are powerless to end it. The women thus obtained, though nominally wives, are in reality slaves, for they are bought for money, they are not consulted about their sale, they cannot go away if they are discontented, and their very lives are at the disposal of their masters. If that is not slavery, I don't know what is.
In those cases where the European authorities have ventured to meddle with native customs, particularly those concerning a husband's treatment of his wife, the interference frequently has had curious results. A wealthy Arab from the interior of Oran, starting on a journey to the capital of that province, bade the wife whom he adored an affectionate good-bye. Returning several days before he was expected, he seized the smiling woman, who rushed to greet him, tied her hands, and dragging her into the street gave her a furious beating in the presence of the astounded neighbours. No, she had not been unfaithful to him, he said, between the blows, nor had she been unkind. He not only was not tired of her, so he assured the onlookers, but she was a veritable jewel of a wife. Finally, when his arm grew tired and he stopped to take breath, he explained that, passing through a street in Oran, he had seen a crowd following a man who was being dragged along by two gendarmes. Upon inquiry he learned that he was being taken to prison for having beaten his wife. Therefore he had ridden home at top speed, without even waiting to complete his business, so that he might prove to himself, to his wife, and to his neighbours that he, at least, was still master in his own house and could beat his wife when he chose.
And here is another incident which illustrates the fashion in which the French administrators in Algeria deal with those ticklish questions which involve Arab domestic relations. A farmer and his wife were travelling through the interior; he was on a donkey and she, of course, on foot. Along came an Arab sheikh on horseback and offered the woman a lift. She accepted, and presently, growing confidential, admitted that she was unhappily married and detested her husband. Her companion proposing an elopement, she readily agreed. Accordingly, when they came to a by-road, this Lochinvar of the desert put spurs to his horse and galloped off with the lady across his saddle-bow, paying no heed to the shouts and protestations of the husband toiling along in the dust behind. Though he succeeded in tracing the runaway couple to the sheikh's village, the husband quickly found that plans had been made against his coming, for the villagers asserted to a man that they had known the eloping pair for years as man and wife and that the real husband was nothing but an impudent impostor. Unable to regain his wife, he then appealed to the French authorities of the district, who were at first at somewhat of a loss how to act in the circumstances, for the Europeans in North Africa are always sitting on top of a powder barrel and a hasty or ill-considered action may result in blowing them higher than Gilderoy's kite. Finally, an inspiration came to the juge d'instruction before whom the matter had been brought. Placing the dogs of the real husband in one room, and those of the pretended husband in another, he confronted the woman with them both. Now, Arab dogs are notoriously faithful to the members of their own households and equally unfriendly toward all strangers, so that though her own dogs fawned upon her and attempted to lick her hand, those of the sheikh snarled at sight of her and showed every sign of distrust. The judge promptly ordered her to be returned to her lawful husband—who, I fancy, punished her in true Arab fashion—and had the village placarded with a notice in Arabic which read: “The testimony of one dog is more to be believed than that of a townful of Arabs.” To appreciate how much more effective than any amount of fines or imprisonment this notice proved, one must remember that the deadliest insult an Arab can give another is to call him a dog.
Perhaps it is because they live so far from the contaminating influence of civilisation, or what stands for civilisation in North Africa, that the lives of those women who dwell beneath the black camel's-hair tents of the Sahara are far freer and happier than those led by their urban cousins. Which reminds me of a little procession that I once met while riding through southern Algeria. It consisted of an Arab, his wife, and a donkey. The man strode in front, his rifle over his shoulder. Then came the donkey, bearing nothing heavier than its harness. In the rear trudged the wife, carrying the plough. Though the Arab women may, and probably do, till the fields yoked beside a camel, a donkey, or an ox, their faces are unveiled and they are permitted free intercourse with the men of their tribe. Even among the nomad desert folk, however, women are regarded with indifference and contempt, the Arabs saying of a boy “It is a benediction,” but of a girl “It is a malediction.” With the Arabs a woman is primarily regarded as a servant, and long before a daughter of the “Great Tents” has entered her teens she has been taught how to cut and fit a burnoose, to sew a tent cover, and to make a couscous, that peculiar dish of half-ground barley, raisins, honey, hard-boiled eggs, and mangled fowl, stewed with a gravy in a sealed vessel, of which the Arabs are so fond. By the time she is ten her parents have probably received and accepted an offer for her hand—and praise Allah for ridding them of her!—and by the time she is twelve she is married and a mother. When a match has been decided upon—and it is by no means an uncommon thing for an unborn child to become conditionally engaged—several days of haggling as to the price which is to be paid for her ensue, the bridegroom eventually getting her at a cost of several camels, cattle, or goats, her value being based upon her looks and the position of her parents. On the day of the wedding the bride—on whose unveiled face, remember, the bridegroom has never laid eyes—concealed within a swaying camel-litter which looks for all the world like a young balloon, preceded by a band and accompanied by all her relatives, is taken with much ceremony to her new home. When the long-drawn-out marriage feast is over, the hideous racket of the flutes and tom-toms ceases and the wedding guests depart. Alone in her tent, the bride awaits her husband, who will see her face for the first time. Seating himself by her side, her husband makes her take off, one by one, her necklaces, her rings, and her anklets, so that, unadorned, she may be estimated at her true worth. If, thus stripped of her finery, she is not up to his expectations, the man may even at this late hour declare the marriage off and send the girl back to her parents. Should he be satisfied with his latest acquisition—for it is more than likely that he already has three or four other wives—he produces a club, which he places on the floor beside her, a custom whose significance requires no explanation. An Arab husband does not confine himself to a stick in regulating his domestic affairs, however, for only a few months ago the French authorities of Oran divested a desert sheikh of the burnoose of authority because, in a fit of jealous rage, he had cut off his wife's nose.
AN ARAB BRIDE GOING TO HER HUSBAND.
“Followed by rejoicing relatives, the bride is taken to her husband's home in a swaying camel litter which looks like a young balloon.”
Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra.