[LOS ANGELES TIMES] CAIRO - SHE sits in a cafe, her laptop unfolded, while at the next table a young man discreetly reaches for the hand of his fiancee, who blushes and laughs against a window in the night.

The couple whisper, almost conspiring. Ms Mai Hawas knows what that's like. She has been engaged twice, but neither romance lasted - one man was preoccupied with work, the other consumed with money.

Now she's 31 and unmarried, a state that bemuses her parents and leaves Egyptian society, with its customs and curious eyes, wondering whether there is something wrong with her.

Ms Hawas' passions are poetry, photography and her job as an architectural engineer sketching designs for Mecca's holy shrine complexes.

These, not a man, give her identity. She wants a family, but like an increasing number of educated, professional Egyptian women, she craves a wider degree of independence than men are willing to grant and cultural expectations traditionally allow.

'Getting married and having a family is natural,' she said. 'I don't want to live alone. But I also don't want to give up who I am.

'The men I meet are educated, but some Egyptian men don't like girls to talk about politics and culture, or to argue with them about ideas. But I have my own personality. I don't need someone else forming my mind.'

Marriage here is steeped in negotiations between families over dowries and money.

But increasingly career-oriented women, along with Egypt's high inflation and low wages, have complicated the scenario. Marriage is now often postponed by young men whose bank accounts are too small to win over a fiancee's family and by independent women less inclined to wed a rich man solely for children and security.

A United Nations study found that women here made up 18 per cent of the labour force in 1996, but the figures rose to 31.4 per cent in 2005.

The literacy gap between men and women shrank from 43 per cent in 1992 to 32 per cent two years ago.

The single, professional woman is 'a phenomenon that's definitely been increasing' across the Middle East, said, a sociology professor Madiha El Safty at the American University in Cairo.

'These women feel they have a number of things to offer, and to give up, so they've become selective and very choosy.'

Most unmarried men and women live with their parents. A single woman venturing beyond these walls to find her own apartment confronts the admonition of religious conservatives, the worry of her parents, the gossip of neighbours and reluctant landlords.

'You can't step outside these parameters,' said Ms Hanan Sheikh, a painter and college professor, who to the frustration of her parents remains happily unwed.

'Slowly our culture has started to recognise us, but it's with pity, like accepting someone who is ill or has cancer.'

In coffeeshops infused with hip-hop and Western motifs, college-age women are growing bolder, some having four or five boyfriends and leading lives that their parents, raised with arranged marriages and the rite of female genital excision, cannot understand.

But Ms Sheikh said tight European jeans and caramel cappuccinos have yet to alter the reality that 'Egyptian boys have a conservative mentality and will not marry someone like that'.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

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