At the drop of a veil
Alireza, marianne
- Publisher: houghton mifflin & co
- Date published: 1971
- ISBN: 9780395120903
boston: houghton mifflin & co, 1971. Hard cover. Good in fair dust jacket. Signed by author. signed by author. 275 p. At the Drop of a Veil: Marianne Alireza-SIGNED BY; AUTHOR-HARDCOVER-Marianne Alireza (Author)-CONDITION GOOD-DJ FAIR-SIGNED BY AUTHOR-COPYRIGHT1971 11TH PRINTING-275 PAGES-PUBLISHED BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN CO, BOSTON This review is from: At the Drop of a Veil (Hardcover) This book tells the tale of Marianne Alireza, an American college student who married a Saudi citizen in 1943. In 1945, Alireza moved to Jeddah with her husband and infant daughter, and from there witnessed Arabian lifestyle firsthand for 12 years. She describes her experiences as part of the Alireza harem, composed of her mother-in-law, 2 sisters-in-law and their various children, of which Marianne herself eventually had 5. Alireza discusses how the family traveled to the mountains of Ethiopia to escape the summer heat in Jeddah, and how development changed all of their lives. She also details the events that led to the end of her marriage, and how she abducted her children from their school in Switzerland. The details of this book make it invaluable for anyone wanting to learn about living conditions for women in affluent Saudi Arabia in the 1940s and 50s. The story of Alireza's marriage and its demise should also serve as a warning to any Western woman considering marrying a Muslim. Under Islamic law, a Muslim man is usually granted sole custody of his (weaned) children following divorce and a Western woman who is divorced from a Middle Eastern Muslim man stands a very high chance of never being allowed to see her children again. From the man's point of view, his child custody rights are guaranteed by God, and he would be devastated to lose his children. It was exactly this sort of situation which put Marianne in the position where she felt she had no choice but to abduct her children and try to escape back to the States. All marriages these days face a relatively high risk of divorce, but cross-cultural marriages bring added stress and tend to have even higher divorce rates than marriages within a culture. Thus, a Western woman who decides to marry a foreign Muslim man is entering into a situation where there is a 1 in 2 chance of divorce, and if divorce does happen, she has an extremely high chance of losing her children forever. And this is true no matter how happily the marriage starts off, as it happened in Marianne's case. Interestingly, a quick 2001 Web search for Marianne's children turned up a traveler's note stating that all 5 of her children decided to return to Saudi Arabia upon reaching adulthood
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