Arab Weddings in Israel
The bride sat sadly on a dais decorated with palm fronds in a very large room in her home. I sat among the women in the room who chatted and ate the variety of fruits, nuts, and drinks continuously served to us. It was a Druse wedding in Shefaram, Israel, in 1986.
Druse, who share Arab culture and language, have a very separate religion with its own traditions. Men and women are separated at celebrations, and often there is neither music nor dancing. Feasting, however, is a major part of the wedding with huge quantities of meat, rice, and vegetables heaped on hundreds of plates. I was taken into a side room to view the dowry — basically clothing and furniture that this bride would bring to her new husband’s home.
The chatty, informal atmosphere changed abruptly when several women began to cry. The bride herself cried rather hysterically. I, who was used to only gaiety at weddings, was confused. I was told it was sad because the girl was leaving her family even though she would actually be living quite close by.
The bride’s father and brothers, who had been together at the groom’s home next door, entered the room and came up to the bride. They placed a cloth over her head and led her out of the room, down the steps, and over to the next house. Young girls threw flower petals along the way and we women followed her. Once she was settled in a chair in a room in the groom’s home, a very nervous young man approached apprehensively, threw the cloth off her head, and immediately ran out. This was the ceremony that marked their union forever. The women and the bride intensified their crying as each woman came up to wish her well. Then we were given extremely bitter, unsweetened coffee. When I commented to a woman I knew how strange it was to see so much crying at a wedding, she said, “I cried much harder at my wedding.”
Since that time I have also been to a Druse wedding without the bride who was in her own village having a wedding celebration at the same time as the one in her groom’s village. A Christian Arab wedding has quite a different tone. There I ate excessively and danced too wildly — the woman is supposed to restrain her exuberance while the man is the showy, more active dancer.
It is still common in the Arab culture to have an arranged marriage, sometimes putting together people who have never met, or are actually first cousins. Unfortunately, as evident in Shefaram, deformed children are often the result of first cousins marrying. When I asked a young Arab co-worker if he wanted his parents to choose his bride, he surprised me by saying, “Yes, because my parents can choose better than I can.” While I, from a Western tradition, worried that a loveless marriage would be an unhappy marriage, I discovered instead a solidarity among the women in an extended Arab family that was a strong, secure, support system. Unlike the Western tradition, the husband was not expected to be the “best friend” in the woman’s life. While it is also true that Arab women suffer from gross inequality and the subservience expected of them, I was impressed that the marriages I saw worked as well as they did.
This is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.
Tags: Druse weddings; Arab weddings; Arab culture in Israel, Travel
