Social Interactions 91should marriage be your intent, find the woman’s appropriate
male relative with whom you should negotiate to establish a
marriage contract and proceed from there.
A foreign woman who starts a conversation with a male
stranger also runs the risk of compromising her respect
as well as her reputation if the
conversation is for anything other
than a bargaining, academic
or business type interaction.
Socially acceptable behaviour
quite simply prevents Egyptian
women from engaging unknown
men in conversation. To do so,
even as a foreigner, leaves you
open to lewd suggestions or
offers of marriage. Keep in mind
that the goal of all Egyptians is to
have a good marriage, therefore
any unmarried female is fair
game. (More on the marriage
issue later in this chapter.) Most
typically, immediate marriage
proposals are intended only to
flatter the unsuspecting foreign
woman and mean no real intent.
The reasoning goes as follows: if
the woman’s morals were high,
she would not be engaging in
this type of unacceptable behaviour, therefore any type of
comment is OK.
However, do not discount the fact that some Egyptian
marriages are still arranged based on nothing more than a
casual smile across a room. This doesn’t occur as frequently
as in the past, but the arranged marriage does still happen.
Additionally, some Egyptian men, especially lower middle-
class men, would like nothing better than to have a foreign
wife, assuming it would provide them a passport to a more
affluent life. Others simply think it would improve their social
standing among their peers to have a foreign wife.
While this may seem unfair, it
is based on logic according to
local perceptions of acceptable
behaviour. On the whole,
average Egyptian men on
the street do not have a high
regard for the morals of Western
women. They are, of course,
basing this judgement on their
own standards as compared
with their limited understanding
of Western women and life.
For the most part, average
Egyptian men have few ways
of learning about Western
women. Direct learning is usually
gained from interactions with or
observations of tourists. There
they may see women drink
alcohol, wear revealing clothes,
or behave in other ways
unacceptable for respectable
Egyptian women. Indirectly,
many TV programmes and
movies, broadcast via cable
or satellite, provide another
basis for judging the morals of
Western women.