RAS AL KHAYMAH, United Arab Emirates — The wedding lights sparkled, a brass band played the national anthem and the banquet was fit for a king. But as Rashid al-Kabali and his friends put on their ceremonial wedding cloaks for the event this month, the grooms were stoically aware of the battle they were waging for Emirati identity.
Grooms and guests at a recent mass wedding in Ras al Khaymah, set up by the United Arab Emirates to encourage marriages between citizens.
The grooms got fireworks; the brides got a separate ceremony.
Mr. Kabali was among 47 grooms marrying that evening in an all-male mass wedding ceremony in the parking lot of a convention center. (The brides would celebrate in separate ceremonies a few days later.)
It was a curious scene, but one with deep social implications. In this nation of five million, of whom only about 10 percent are native citizens, the battle for cultural survival begins with "I do."
"This is about preserving our ways and our culture," Mr. Kabali said, as he scanned the grooms seated in a row. "We must marry within our society as our ancestors did, or we will lose our way."
The United Arab Emirates, by most measures, is a model of Arab development and growth. Foreigners continue to stream in, seeking riches and making the country one of the world's fastest growing, with a projected economic growth rate of 14 percent this year. Citizens, too, have benefited from a benevolent government that provides work, living stipends and countless other benefits.
The rapid growth has also taken a toll on Emirati culture, seen most clearly in the numbers of Emiratis marrying outside their nationality and their borders. Divorce rates, too, have skyrocketed, to an estimated 46 percent in one study.
Native Emiratis "are 10 percent of the people here in the country," said Obaid Rashid al-Zahmi, director general of the Emirates' Marriage Fund, which organizes mass weddings. "If we don't encourage these people to get married and to have children, we will disappear."
But traditional marriages here can be prohibitively expensive: $20,000 to $50,000 for a representative affair, many grooms said, what with guest lists that typically run from 1,000 to 2,000. And that does not even include a dowry and furnishing a house. (The house itself is provided by the government.) Men often end up taking out loans to cover the expenses, putting themselves in debt for years.
For middle- and lower-middle-class men like Mr. Kabali, 27, who earns about $2,000 a month as a policeman, the costs of marrying a local woman can be prohibitive. To avoid the expense, many Emirati men have chosen to marry foreigners, or to postpone marriage.
In response, the government some years ago introduced the all-male mass wedding, a variation on the traditional Arab custom of segregating men and women in separate rooms during a wedding. In addition, it established the Marriage Fund, which now throws in as much as $20,000 to help defray costs for men who marry Emirati women. It also capped dowries at $5,400 and offered free counseling and therapy to help couples through those difficult first years.
Those who marry non-Emiratis do not qualify, nor do men who have been divorced. The grant is paid in two installments, half before the wedding and half several months later, provided the couple are still together. Since the program was started in 1992, mass weddings have proved popular, with the number of applicants increasing to 4,862 in 2004 from 3,547 in 1993. The government budgets $70 million a year for the Marriage Fund. There have been more than 70 mass weddings to date, ranging in size from 4 to 300 grooms.
Yet some academic experts here, pointing to other social shifts that are undermining marriage between citizens, doubt that the mass weddings will reverse the erosion of traditional Emirati marriages.
"The increasing intermarriage between national men and nonnationals is more related to the society opening up, getting more modern and more exposed," said Rima Sabban, a sociologist at United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain.
Emirati men who travel or study abroad, for example, often marry women they meet overseas. Men have more freedom to marry outside the society, and they are discovering dating, too. And as women earn advanced degrees and enter the work force, their aspirations are shifting, and they are delaying marriage.
"When women seek to get educated, they don't think of their marriage prospects and take years to study and miss on the chances of getting married," Ms. Sabban said. "Usually, males in a traditional, male-dominated society prefer not to marry women who are more educated or paid more than them." For grooms like Bader Muhammad, Hair Abdullah and Saif Muhammad, all childhood friends, the mass wedding proved a catalyst to marry. When the men saw announcements for the wedding months ago, they and three other friends collectively decided to marry, Bader Muhammad said. Their families found them brides, they completed the religious wedding ceremonies and they attended the event ready to show off to the community.
"When we heard about this, we decided to take part in it together," Bader Muhammad said. "All six of us grew up together and we wanted to do this together." The men said they planned to go to Malaysia on their honeymoons — but separately, they emphasized.
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