Governing marriage

As Lisa Taraki’s description of Umm al-Shariya notes, the area is full of wedding halls – places where urban Palestinians go to celebrate their nuptials. (Marriage itself is a legal process, and takes place in a Sharia court). I’ve noticed that these halls are not only busy on weekends, but also during the week. This surprised me a little, although when I mentioned this to a friend, he said it was because Ramadan begins in August this year. Since you can’t get married in that month, everyone who wants a summer wedding, which is most people, have to do so before then.

The reason I was having this conversation with my friend was because he was going to a wedding party that evening in his village, which is in the Ramallah district. This led me to wonder, in villages where traditionally everyone is invited to celebrate weddings (thus preventing more than one wedding each night), how do people decide which couple gets the prime Thursday night spot, and who draws the short straw and has to settle for Monday? The answer, at least in my friend’s village, is that the village council maintain a diary, and decide who gets which date. The village council in question have also taken other steps to regulate marriage. They decreed that people should not invite the entire village to the celebration, only friends from other villages and extended family (although this can still leave you with a massive guest list). Otherwise, as my friend suggests, you can spend 10,000 shekels on the meat alone. The village has also set the price of a dowry at US$ 1000. No haggling any more. While these ordinances governing particular economic aspects of social reproduction are confined to this locality, they are apparently based on similar measures that other villages nearby have taken.