Marriage

Please do not think that I am fixated on marriage! I am sort of, but not to the extant that some other people are with marriage. Of course I believe in marriage a lot, it's  the main pillar of any society, without it the family unit will be extinct, and chaos will be the only replacement. Of course included in this is the defecto marriage of the west, even though those couples did not tie the knot in an official way, they live in the same place, deal with each other as if they are legally married, like feeling jealous or having kids, and so on and so forth. Of course this isn't my debate subject, you know me more than that.

What I am trying to debate here is who is going to marry who? Let me start with me, I got married to an Iraqi person, so my friends, relatives and everyone I know questioned my choice. I didn't realise then the reason for their inquisitiveness? So I blamed it on love. Well, with love you can do anything and everything, I guess? Also I know girls who married to persons from other nationalities and other religions, I do not recall discussions regarding these marriages or condemnations, still some resistance from parents and relatives did occur, but the couple got married, and had kids, sweet as! And if in any circumstances the marriage didn't succeed, it is not because of the different nationalities, religion, cultural background, it's because of the intolerance of the couple to each other, and the lack of patience towards certain behaviours or attitudes.

However what I heard in Saudi arabia was beyond belief. I was suggesting a boy to a friend of mine. She asked me about the name! Then she asked me to find out if he is a bedouin, or a civilian? And ask about his mother, where she comes from, also to find out if any of his brothers and sisters had married to a Bedouin? I thought she was making fun of me? But apparently she was not. In Saudi there are the original Saudi people who are Bedouins of course, then those that came to haj and settled in Saudi, and then those that came to work and settled, from neighbouring countries, or from countries as far as Russia and China. However they are all Saudis by nationalities, speak arabic, practice religion in the same way, and love the king like every other Saudi. But when it comes to marriage, no, these people should marry their own kind?

I am not saying that us the Bahrainis are different? We also think of nationalities, and language. I don't think we care about different sects in the same religion but we do not want to marry into another religion. Like my friend's daughter married a british guy, but he converted to Islam and learnt arabic? Also my other friend's daughter married a French guy who also converted, but he speaks French only, so the whole family speaks French with him, vous comprendes? These days however people ask, and prefer to marry a person from the same country, and preferably same neighbourhood, just to make it simpler.

So what is going on? In Quraan God tells us to travel, meet people, and get to know them well. Also no mention in Quraan that marriage between different tribes is haram? So where did this come from? Did some one woke up in the morning and thought that today we will start to discriminate in marriage? Or maybe someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed with a Bad hair day so he invented the stoppage of the inter tribal marriage! Of course we all know that the rules and laws are written by people like you and me, nothing sacred any more, and thus other people suffer because we wrote rules that are not based on concrete facts and scientific evidences.

On the lighter side, when my son got introduced to his wife, he of course never thought of the marriage discrimination, as his mum and dad were of different backgrounds, and when my daughter got introduced to her fiancé, she too didn't think of the nationality difference, but my husband first words were: also from Bahrain, so we will have three Bahrainis in the family!!!! Funny.