no drinking, no dancing

One of my former colleagues got married this weekend. I was really psyched when she invited me because I'd never been to a Muslim wedding before. I thought it might be a little bit like my friend's Hindu ceremony/reception but really I didn't know. So I went with a group of folks and we arrived right at the time posted on the invitation. Unfortunately we were about 2 hours early. An hour or so after we got there, other people started to trickle in, but the wedding itself happened a bit after 9pm.

There was a sort of MC guy who I think was a relative of the bride or groom. He explained to the uninitiated what was going on. For example, there was a contract that the bride's father and 3 others took to her so that she could officially agree to the wedding. Then it was brought back out for the groom to sign. A guy sang some passages from the Koran and a girl read the English translation. Then the bride came out all decked in her finery but the weird thing was that she was looking down, moving very slowly, sort of like she had the flu. It turns out that she's not supposed to make eye contact or talk to people all evening.

Then the food began. They had it set up so that there was pizza for the kids. They got all filled up and then they opened up the adult buffet lines. Unfortunately our table was directed to the closest line and we got in line ahead of all of the Muslim folks in our area. I say unfortunately because since there was no line to follow, we were all over the place. Women on the men's side, men on the women's side; it was chaos. Luckily I believe we were given the whitey dispensation and although people gave us funny looks, no one said anything mean (at least directly to us!). By then it was about 11 and we had to get home to children and other obligations so we missed the cake.