Arabic Wedding

So as you may recall, the son of my host mom's aunt got married back in November and so I got to go with my family to all of the wedding festivities, which was a really interesting experience. Though the wedding itself was on Friday, the fuss surrounding it really got started on Wednesday, when Niveen's older sister Nisreen and her younger son, who is four, arrived to stay at our house. That first night, Niveen and her sister shared the bed with the three kids on mattresses on the floor and Hamada on a mattress in the living room.

On Thursday, in the evening, all of us but Hamada went to a pre-wedding party at the groom's mother's house. It was all women (except for the bride, who was probably somewhere else getting her henna done) so there was music, dancing, and de-hijabing, which is always really interesting. (I love it when we're with Niveen's sisters without any men around so they can take theirs off - it makes such a difference.) At the end of the evening, Niveen's youngest sister Naimeen howed up, with her husband, son and Nisreen's older son in tow. They had a car so we all (if you're counting, that makes a total of ten) drove back to our house together. The sisters took the bed again, with the littler kids on the floor in the bedroom and the older son by himself in the living room, while Hamada and Naimeen's husband went to stay in Niveen's brother's apartment in Jabal Amman.

Friday, the wedding day, was mostly just sitting around the house entertaining the guests. In the morning, since it was just Niveen's sisters in the house, it was pretty relaxed. Part way through the day Niveen's other sister, Suher, came with her husband and three kids, and then the other men came back, which made everything a lot more formal. There was a lot of sitting in the living room with tea, coffee, a cake that Niveen baked, plus seven little kids chasing each other around.

And then in the evening there was the wedding itself. Now there were two cars for the sixteen of us, and since that number included the seven kids this was a lot more comfortable than the night before, although as it turned out the wedding hall was just down the road from us while the aunt's house was out near the airport. When we arrived, there were a lot of men standing around outside, but the women and some of the children (some of them stayed with their fathers) were directed to a room upstairs. There were a bunch of tables scattered around the room for guests and a platform in one corner for the bride and groom, decorated nicely, with a fancy couch and low table on it. There were just women, so there was dancing again for a while. On a screen on the wall, they had a video feed of the bride's progress. She wears the hijab, so while she was outside surrounded by men she wore a cloak with a white hood.

Eventually she and the groom made in inside and upstairs to where we were all waiting for them. The first step was to take about a million pictures together. There were no vows or that kind of elaborate ceremony that Americans expect. They just exchanged rings and danced two dances together, one slow and one fast. After that the other women started dancing for a while, until the cake was brought it. It was multi-tiered, really pretty, and the bride and groom cut it together like at an American wedding - except that they used a sword. Which I thought was pretty cool. Then there was the feeding each other the first bite, which was familiar, although there was no cake smeared in anyone's face. Then they went through a few other cute little food-sharing rituals: there was a slice of pineapple that they both bit into from opposite ends at the same time so they were almost-but-not-quite-kissing (public displays of affection, even between married couples, are not really approved of here) which I actually thought was a lot more romantic than I've made it sound here, then they took sips out of each other's glasses, then out of the same cup (using straws) - I'm not sure what they were drinking, though I can say pretty confidently it wasn't champagne.

After that, they returned to their couch for the "Wearing of the Gold." There was a red heart-shaped box filled with various pieces of gold jewelery - in Islam, a man is supposed to give his wife a certain amount of money when they get married, and often this comes in the form of gold - which the groom then had to put on the bride. He actually did pretty well, though he needed a little bit of help from her sister for the earrings.

After that, it was mostly just more dancing - the bride and groom danced together again, and some other women danced, and then the bride put her cloak back on and all of the men came in. At this point a lot of the women left - probably their husbands and family left as well, but that was less noticeable for me. However, the dancing continued. In addition to just dancing to the music, they do a circle dance called the dubkeh, which is mostly pretty simple once you get the hang of it, but looks really cool when everyone is doing it. I know the most basic steps, but I'm not very good at it. At this point I think it was mostly just the closest family of the bride and groom, and everyone was really happy. They lifted the groom up onto one of his friend's shoulders, and then also his father, I think. My host mother's younger brother jumped up onto a table where a lot of his aunts and older female relatives were sitting and started dancing, which everyone found really entertaining.

In the end, everyone filed out, with a lot of people packing into two buses or their cars, and the bride and groom getting into a nice, new, well-decorated convertible. I think generally there's some sort of car procession, with everyone honking and yelling, but if there was I didn't get to see it because we were just driven back home - not without some honking, though - and all of the Irbid families set off home (hamdulliliah).