West Bank Weddings Losing Some of Their Bling

Jihad Manassrah is promoting "The Decency Document," which sets limits on wedding expenses and dowries. (By Scott Wilson -- The Washington Post)

BANI NAIM, West Bank -- Of the many troubles that the economic slide has brought to this town on the edge of the Judean Desert, Jihad Manassrah saw none more threatening than the growing number of single women walking in prim pairs through its narrow streets.

Marriage, once a jubilant expression of love and status here, had become a tradition many could no longer afford.

So last month, Manassrah, the imam of a local mosque, presented a novel social contract to several hundred men gathered for a rare public forum. The agreement put a cap on the cost of weddings and bridal dowries that had swelled enormously in this once-prosperous town of merchants, day laborers and civil servants, who like many in the West Bank are now adapting to hard times.

The declining marriage rate here is one example of social change in the midst of what the World Bank calls "an unprecedented economic recession" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Political power, demographics, family structure and customs are being transformed by financial constraints in large and small ways that will likely outlast the crisis itself.

As the Palestinian government withers without foreign aid and Israeli tax payments, large clans are reasserting their authority as the enforcers of conservative rituals that have dictated life in towns like this one for generations. But they are often doing so at the behest of Islamic leaders, who view the economic decline as a chance to rein in secular excesses and promote a view of marriage as something to be engaged in early and often.

"This is an opportunity to use this siege to rid ourselves of these old habits we do not need," said Manassrah, 37, who was elected to the municipal council last year as an independent Islamic candidate. "This is going to be a new tradition we give to the next generation."

Across the West Bank and Gaza, young men are abandoning towns and villages to find work in Palestinian cities, leaving communities like this one with a high concentration of unmarried women. At the same time, more Palestinian women are seeking higher degrees and jobs of their own to help husbands make ends meet, a trend university registrars say has accelerated in the seven months in which Hamas has run the Palestinian Authority.

In Bani Naim, a town of 20,000 people that fills several narrow valleys east of Hebron, the exodus of young men began a few years ago, and town leaders say it has quickened this year. The trend was reflected in a summer wedding season that, by all accounts, was the most meager in memory.

Women here commonly marry between the ages of 19 and 22, but many have been staying single far longer.

"If they are unmarried at these ages there is a greater chance they will be diverted from the right way," said Yusef Manassrah, 50, a clan leader who serves as a mediator on issues of "blood and honor."

"We did this for all of them to get married," he said. "We want to protect them."

Islamic leaders also worried that men were increasingly reluctant to marry a second wife -- often widows in need of financial help -- because of the costs associated with the ceremony.