Evidently Married: Changing Ambiguities in Creating Family Ties in Morocco

Abstract

What does it take for a couple to stand out as married to others? In Morocco, an ideal scenario to marry today involves families celebrating three stages: an engagement, a legal contract, and a wedding. Yet, as I will show, couples may also turn out to be married without such ceremonies. Other elements can make for evident marriages. Still, legal recognition has, over the past decades, become increasingly essential within people’s own creations of conjugal bonds. Moreover, family and penal code revisions, together with the civil registry’s expansion, have profoundly changed proceedings and possibilities to legally marry. These processes defy simple binaries of legal versus licit domains. Legal and licit understandings of marriage interlace both in people’s own evaluations and in state officials’ approaches. However, as I will argue, increased emphasis on legal registration also heightens state control over family ties and reduces people’s opportunities to leave marital definitions open-ended as this suits them over time.

Muslim Marriage and Non-Marriage

“…In the eyes of local communities, the wedding party often signals the start of the marriage; only after a public wedding is cohabitation socially accepted. Such a variety of perspectives allows for considerable ambiguity and flexibility (Mir-Hosseini 1994;Fioole 2020). The period between the conclusion of the marriage contract and the wedding ceremony allows young couples, especially in settings where gender segregation is valued, to get to know each other better and engage in some form of dating.…”

“…In some countries, such as Kyrgyzstan, it is still common for people to first enter into a religious-only marriage, to be followed sooner or later by a state-registered marriage (McBrien 2020). In other settings, such as Morocco, the push by government officials for the formal registration of marriages has also had the effect that people themselves increasingly value registration (Fioole 2020). Among Syrian refugees in Jordan, misunderstandings emerge as refugees' more positive signification of unregistered marriages clashes with the more negative views of both Jordanian state actors and the wider population in their country of settlement (Zbeidy 2018).…”

“…The novelty in these cases, moreover, is not simply that women like Sadiyya can legally marry of their own volition, but also that legal recognition of marriage has become more essential toward establishing conjugal ties. State officials here do usurp defining power over family ties, as some arguing against the 2004 family law reforms feared (Fioole 2020).…”

Love, relationships and couple happiness: A cross-cultural comparison among Spanish couples and Moroccan couples in Southern Spain

“…Studies about couple relationships in Morocco are particularly conditioned by core values such as family stability and honour (Phạm, 2013) traditional gender relationships and religion. However, changes in Morocco have begun to define new forms of couple and love relationships (Fioole, 2020). The modernisation process that the country is undergoing has been reflected in legislative measures such as the "Moudawana" family code, which allows divorce, sets a minimum legal age for marriage and punishes sexual harassment (Benlabbah, 2008), as well as the emergence of a liberal romantic subjectivity that understands marriage as a choice, an endeavour, and the fruit of love and considers that it involves new forms of intimacy, despite the survival of Islamic elements such as predestination (Elliot, 2016) and although these changes tend to encounter resistance in the traditional family institution (Menin, 2015).…”