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I am sharing this series of videos as a lead into my upcoming interview on Yasmine Mohammed’s podcast on Nov 15th. I’m excited about that interview, due to my great respect for Yasmine and how she overcame so much in her life. This interview will be the first time someone has given me the opportunity to tell my story of life in Luxor.
The two videos here are of a wedding celebration I attended in February 2018.
When I first came to Luxor, I was staying in the villa of a woman I had met while living for a few months in Costa Rica. She had gone to Egypt on holiday and next thing we knew, she had married a local guy and was using the money she earned online to turn this villa into an Airbnb. I was their first guest.
She and her husband took me to this wedding celebration. As a writer and artist, I was entranced by the light and shadows, the atmosphere. Not the music, if I can even call it that.
The first video above shows women dancing. This is allowed because it is just the two immediate families. There are other celebrations where men and women are separated. You can see one larger woman who flamboyantly joins in. She stands out as a foreigner. She and I were the only foreigners at this event, deep inside a village. I was not about to get up and dance. It was all too mysteriously unknown for me to feel comfortable joining in.
It’s common to have horse dancing and stick dancing at these outdoor family celebrations, as the video above shows. I had studied the Okinawan Bo (staff), so the stick dancing fascinated me. It was so different from the hard and fast moves I had been taught in katas.
Weddings are the biggest excitement in the villages, and they happen almost every weekend except during the hot summer months. It’s common to invite tourists, to get them connected to a family and then use that connection to extract money from the tourists.
These traditional Egyptian weddings are very different from the Orfi marriages local men arrange with foreign women. I will write more about them later. But even when these Muslim men legally marry foreign women, promising that they will never take a second Egyptian wife, it’s almost always a lie. Sometimes the men already have an Egyptian wife the foreign woman doesn’t know about. Often the men use the foreign wife to obtain a visa to her country, work for a few years or take her hard-earned money, sending it back to his family, lying that his mother is sick, or his brother lost his job, there’s a hundred different reasons. What he’s really doing is building a house or flat so he can marry an Egyptian woman chosen by the two families.
The Egyptian families and wives are always in on the plot. Sometimes, the Egyptian wife might not be happy about the foreign woman, but more often than not, her attitude is the same as her husband’s, the foreign woman is despised as an infidel, to be used for money.
I belong to a few online groups where foreign women share their stories of what happened to them. Over and over, it’s the same story of lies and abuse, and being used and then abandoned.
Today, I went into one of the groups and clicked on the first post and it was a warning to foreign women:
Ladies!
If you have children out of wedlock with a Muslim man ….the kids aren’t his kids even if he claims them
Yep, the kids are considered to be fatherless and only the mother can claim them
Why?
So only women can have the burden of this “ sin”
child's lineage to his biological father is severed and he only has a lineage to his biological mother only
Don’t be surprised if they don’t care about your kids and why they are ashamed of them
They have the right to do this according to Islam. Any woman whose husband abandons her and her children, and she still lives in her home country should feel grateful. Good riddance to the monster. She can carry on and make a new life for herself and her children.
If the foreign woman lives in Egypt, she has no rights. Her husband can abuse her, make her life miserable until she leaves the country (if she has the money to do so) and he will take the children. She will never see them again. I know of so many tragedies like this.
Here’s the next post that I saw, illustrating what happens to foreign wives:
No judgments, please! This is a long story, but I need to get it out of me.
Today, I received the most heartbreaking news.
I met my husband in the UK. We’ve been together since 2019 and have two children (one just turned 3 months). My husband has been away from Egypt for 10 years - he couldn’t go back before turning 30 due to military issues.
This summer, it was finally possible for him to visit, and I supported him fully, even though I had to stay in the UK with our newborn baby. I was genuinely happy for him, that he could finally be with his family.
He returned to the UK nearly two weeks ago. Today, while he was talking to his mum, someone else joined the conversation. I asked him who it was, and he lied to me. When I asked to see who it was, he refused.
After a while, I got hold of his phone and found out that he got engaged to a girl in Egypt. I feel like the ground has been pulled from under me. My mind is in chaos, and my heart is shattered.
I told him: “Leave her, choose your family” (I know, this isn’t something I should even have to ask). His response? He said he needs to think about it. Well, I guess that speaks for itself.
This is something I would NEVER have expected from him. Despite the usual ups and downs in our relationship, nothing would have made me believe he’d do this.
He claims there’s a lack of love from my side, and that this girl is “giving” him the love he’s missing. I told him: “Everything new seems wonderful, but can she keep giving you that love through a phone? (Since, for now, he still lives here.)”
I’ve always supported him and done everything for our family, and this is how he repays me.
I’m so devastated.
He wants me to accept this, but I would never agree. And I’ve always said that!
It doesn’t matter what he promises, these men will do and say anything to marry a foreign woman in order to achieve their goal of eventually marrying a Muslim Egyptian woman.
Children born to a Muslim man are automatically Muslim. It says so on all their legal documents. It doesn’t matter if the mother is Christian. Everything revolves around religion. Even when you come into a Muslim country such as Egypt as a tourist, you must declare your religion on forms that you sign.
If the foreign woman wants to escape the abuse of her , she cannot take her children with her out of the country. Her husband has all rights over the children. I know of so many women who stayed in horrific marriages in Egypt just so they wouldn’t have to abandon their children.
Here’s the next post that I saw today, obviously from an older woman:
I am due to marry an egptian man very soon and there is one bone of contention that I need honest opinions on ....
the second wife...
I am the first wife and he reassures me I am all he wants or needs everytime I bring this up BUT....there is an age gap and health implications which prevents me from giving him children in the future and I know one day he might want a child or two despite his denial
I know we love each other to pieces he has proved that over and over again ... but anyone in my situation ever allowed a second wife and how do you deal with it?
I might add I have told him if this ever happens I would divorce him (getting written in the marriage contract) but this upsets him and myself greatly as neither of us can bare to be apart......he said his biggest fear is him opening his eyes and I am not there ...that I have left him.....I have said if he chooses to take a second wife even just to have a child it is the only time I will leave but I don't know if I could due to how I feel about him.....how do you cope with sharing your husband ?
Here is one answer of advice:
Honey, the reason he gets upset is that he has it all planned out. He marries you, gets the visa, gets an Egyptian wife.
Most often, such advice falls on deaf ears. Women mistakenly think that if they put certain conditions in their marriage contract it will mean something. It means nothing. The men will break their promises without any feeling of guilt or shame. This is because to them, you are an infidel, to be used and abused however they wish.
People often think, well, these older women deserve what they get, but you haven’t been to Luxor and seen how seductive it is. And as I discovered, these men really don’t care if you are young or old, pretty or ugly, it is literally all about money. Western women are infidels, in fact, even worse, are prostitutes as I wrote about in The Lost Foreign Women of Luxor.
On a broader note, Muslim men are free to marry non-Muslim women, but Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men. This is another way to spread Islam throughout the world. Men are stronger than women, therefore they can influence their wives to become Muslim. Even if their wives do not “revert”, the children born are still Muslim. Muslim women who marry a Christian man, are more likely to convert to his religion, so it is haram for them to marry outside of Islam. In fact, if they try, their families have every right to kill them.
Haram is one of the first Arabic words you learn in a Muslim country. I learned it quickly in Luxor. It means forbidden. “It is forbidden”. (الأحكام الخمسة al-ʾAḥkām al-Ḵamsa is used to refer to any act that is forbidden by Allah and is one of the five Islamic commandments.
The photo below was taken at a different wedding, after I had lived in Luxor for over two years and had become a part of the life there. The woman dressed in gold on the right is the bride. The boy on my lap was such a sweetie. He followed me everywhere and often came to my villa to do boxing.
Once you are born into Islam, you cannot leave Islam. This is not an exaggeration. I was told this by the men of Luxor. If you leave, you will be killed. The way they said it was very matter of fact.
Men are free to have sex as much as they want with whomever they want (and this goes for gay sex, too, although these things are hidden), but when I asked men what they would do if their wives were unfaithful, I was told they would kill their wives. When I said, isn’t that a bit unfair, they did not understand what I was talking about. This was part of their religion, they explained. It came from Allah.
As I’ve mentioned before, girls are still subjected to female genital mutilation, just before they reach puberty. Girls must be virgins when they are married. They are then kept in the apartment for a month, and their job is to get pregnant, which of course, doesn’t always happen. Imagine the pain and trauma of that experience. They know nothing about sex, and they aren’t supposed to. If a girl were to show any signs of knowledge, of wanting to enjoy sex, or suggesting anything other than being used like a breeding machine, she is accused of being a prostitute, of knowing more than she should, otherwise, why would she act so nasty?
There is, therefore, a very clear distinction between unclean infidel women and pure Muslim women. Women are divided into these two extremes—you are simply one or the other. Neither is realistic nor representative of what any woman actually is. Women are reduced to caricatures. Dehumanized.
I knew nothing of this as I sat watching the wedding celebrations in these videos. It was all so magical to me.
Knowledge is power. It can also be dangerous. Once you have it, you must often make a choice about what to do with it. Many women who find out the truth of Islam choose to pretend it isn’t there. I am not one of those women. When I found out the truth, my life in Luxor became dangerous.
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The Light & Shadow of Egyptian Weddings