The Visiting Husband Revisited: A Cautionary Tale

Abstract

In 1910, a distinguished ethnographer, Father Antonin Jaussen, described an unusual form of marriage among the Bedouin of northern Arabia and Transjordan. In this type of marriage the wife was always a widow with young children. In contrast to the normal type of marriage, she did not maintain a joint household with her new husband, the husband had no obligation to support her, and he had no authority over her. She remained with the children of her late husband in her own household, supported by the resources derived from her late husband’s estate. The new husband – the musarrib in Arabic – merely came to her in the evening and left again in the morning. In an earlier article (1998), Stewart analysed Jaussen’s data and also information about a similar type of marriage recorded by Hilma Granqvist among Palestinian villagers near Bethlehem in the 1920s. Musarrib marriage had not been reported again since that time, and Stewart believed it to be extinct. This turned out to be incorrect: during recent visits to the Bedouin of central Sinai, he discovered that musarrib marriages of the type described by Jaussen still exist. He also found musarrib marriages of a different type, in which the wife is not a widow and remains with, and is supported by, her natal family. Again, the husband merely visits her and has no authority over her. This article reports on and analyses this new material, which may also shed indirect light on the history of misyār marriage.