ethicalweddings.com

[Part 1 is here]

After I got in the mosque, I wasn’t allowed to sit next to the groom. Again, as we were not ‘official’ yet. So I sat behind my father and the Officer of Marriage Registration Office, next to my older brother.

In Islam, we are not allowed to sit in chairs inside mosques. But below, there was an exception for the officiant who sat in a plastic chair. He just got an accident, he wasn’t able to sit on the floor. This is the part when the officiant led the groom to pray first.

Behind the groom are the wedding witnesses; my uncle (in glasses) and the groom’s older brother.

Behind the photographer, we separated the rows of the women and the men, as it is the rule in our religion (you can’t see the row of men in the above photo, by the way).

And before the photographer are several boxes of the groom’s gifts for me, the bride (I’ll talk about that in another post later), as a custom in Indonesian weddings.

In Muslim weddings, it is not the officiant who has the main ‘power’ to let a bride married to the groom, but the bride’s nasab guardian (nasab = has blood relationship—father/grandfather/uncle/brother; with the father being the ‘main’ man). When a bride no longer has living paternal family members, the officiant can be the guardian.

In my case, my father has the ‘power’ to let me married in a session called ijab-qabul, while the officiant became the registrar. But before that, the officiant re-checked the bride and the groom’s readiness (both administrative and mentally) and he also gave a short wedding sermon for us.

The peak of the ceremony was the ijab-qabul:

The ijab is when my father said a line that he ‘gave’ me to the groom. The loose translation would be something pretty much like “[Insert groom's full name], in the name of Allah [the way Muslims call God], I let you married to [insert bride's full name], with the dowry in term of [insert what the groom gave the bride as the dowry or mahar, for example a gold ring], cash.” (this line and the groom’s line below were given by the officiant weeks before the wedding, when Mr. H and I visited the Marriage Registration Office to attend the pre-marital advice session)

And the qabul is when the groom responded with something pretty much like “I take the marriage of [insert bride's full name] your daughter, with the dowry in term of [insert the dowry], cash.”

The two witnesses have the right to determine whether or not the ijab-qabul is ‘valid’. They judge that based on the clarity of the guardian and the groom’s voice and words. In some weddings, either the guardian or the groom have to repeat the ijab-qabul for several times when they uttered it unclear or if the words aren’t as the same as what the officiant tell. So, this is really a serious stuff.

After the witnesses declared that the ijab-qabul A Mighty Wind hd was valid, Mr. H and I i became husband and wife, and then the officiant led everyone to pray.

I was allowed to take over my father’s seat before my husband and the officant led the groom to utter words in giving me the dowry (you can see what the dowry is by seeing the red heart-shaped box on the small table in front of us). I was also led by the officiant to respond the husband’s words in receiving the dowry. After that, my husband put the ring (yup, that’s the dowry) in my right wedding finger (no, not left, and no, I didn’t put a ring in his finger—but more about this on another post).

In Muslim weddings, after the marriage ceremony was done, the husband uttered/read and signed the taklik talak (sighat taklik), a kind of vow (the line of the vow is as exact same as the one stipulated on the marriage certificate) in which my husband promised before me to treat me with love, and that if he abandoned me in any ways I had the right to report him to the court, etc.

The next tradition is for the bride and groom to do sungkem to the elders and immediate family members (parents, brothers, in-laws, uncles, aunts, etc.). I don’t know how to translate ‘sungkem‘, but it’s when we ask for both blessing and forgiveness from the elders and the people we respect to.

Below is me, doing sungkem to my mother:

Me, doing sungkem Death Wish on dvd to my mother-in-law and my husband to his aunt:

The ceremony was ended with the symbolic giving of the groom’s gifts to the bride, done by each side of the family’s representation (on the left is my neighbor and on the right is my husband’s cousin):

Still more stories to come