Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/320

 282 Marriage Customs of the Bedii and Fellahm.

is invited by all her neighbours, and, after four days, she invites her parents, and is then "at home" to all and sundry.

II. The Felldhin.

The Fellahin, the agricultural population of Syria, are a people of, for the main part, other traditions than those of the Bedu, by whom they are despised as mere labourers whose rough stone or clay-built villages and toilful lives, albeit more comfortable surroundings, contrast widely with the freedom, the hospitality, and the lawlessness of the tent-dwellers of the desert.

With the Fellahin, the first consideration in seeking for a wife is utility. The Shech of a village would not marry his daughter to one of lower rank than her own, unless the bridegroom offered him considerable financial inducement thereto, but another man has other aims. His wife must help him to wrest a scanty living from the over-taxed field and orchard ; she must have physical strength and capacity for work, or, failing that, she must have property of her own ; if these qualifications be lacking, she must at least be clieap. To have more than one wife at a time is very unusual among the townspeople or the Bedu ; to the Fellah an additional wife means an extra hand at farm-labour, and the potential mother of wage-earning sons. Matrimony is so much the more incumbent upon them. A Fellah, however, will not willingly give his daughter to a townsman ; trousers are an indecency, and a hat prevents one from looking up to heaven. A girl is often betrothed at birth. " Blessed be the bride " is the form of announcement of that event. A neighbour possessed of a boy a few years older will probably claim her at once. This is a formal engagement. The fatiha is read, and a sacrifice offered. A popular arrangement is to affiance a boy and girl of one family to a girl and boy of another. Such a mutual