First published in Poskod in 2013.
Of a Malay Singaporean girl & a Dutchman; of syariah law & civil marriages.
When I was 21, my conservative parents found out that I
was dating someone whom I found to be smart, funny, beautiful, endearing, and
family-oriented. Even better, we were from similar backgrounds: being Malay and
Muslim. The only problem? She—there you go, the someone in question was a young
woman. At 25, having gone to The Hague to pursue a Master’s degree, I came home
ten months later with a man whom I’d met while looking for an apartment, with
plans to marry by the end of the year. He had come to Singapore with me during
my summer vacation to meet my family, and undergo a legal conversion at an
organisation for Muslim converts (even though there wasn’t much else that he didn’t
already know after doing his own reading).
My mother was married at the age of 23, and there I was,
at 25, already two years overage. Having never brought anyone serious home, having
disparaged most of the Malay men who never seemed to have the egalitarian
qualities I was looking for, and topped off with being suspected of being not-quite-heterosexual,
I think my aged parents might have been rather close to the edge of panic at
the thought of me never getting married.
I can only imagine my father’s relief and thought process when he first found out about the Dutchman. He’s white? No problem. He’s not born a Muslim? At least he knows the five pillars and six articles at least. He doesn’t know how to pray? He can learn. He’s not circumcised? Easily done. At least he’s a man! Plus, he likes you and you like him!
That summer vacation ended with a proposal
from my father to the Dutchman for us to do a ‘small and symbolic’ ceremony.
His suggestion that we either get engaged or married before we went back to the
Netherlands caught me completely off guard. After I explained to the Dutchman
the local concepts of engagement (his family traditionally would come and
‘reserve’ me for marriage) and nikah gantung (lit. ‘hanging
marriage’, an Islamic wedding without a public reception; sometimes without
state recognition), we decided to get married but without telling the
Dutchman’s parents (there was drama enough just from having converted). Since
we didn’t have the required documents for a state-recognized wedding, we told
my parents that we would do a nikah gantung.
That ‘small’ and ‘symbolic’ ceremony turned out to include 50 guests (my father’s wishes), searching for hours for specific traditional dresses in white (my mother’s wishes), and a full force of elderly men with authoritative white beards, who gave me some stunning pre-marriage advice such as obeying my husband in all rightful matters (clearly they had no idea of our feminist leanings).
The rebel in me relished in getting married outside the
law: in secret, without any official papers and without half of our families
knowing. But the level-headed part of me understood that things were not going
to be smooth from this point onwards, and that the sooner I accepted that it
would always be a little difficult, the easier it would be.
Just four days after the wedding, the Dutchman went back
home, as planned (all he had wanted in Singapore was a vacation—I guess he got
more than he bargained for). I spent two more months researching for my thesis
and also spent my last Eid ul-Fitr in Singapore for some time to come. I
endured questions from my extended family, who were all naturally curious but
limited themselves to dancing around the elephant in the room: who was this
tall and skinny white man that I was married to, without warning and in
semi-secret, and where was he now that they wanted to gawk at him and ask him
questions mostly centred around how “Muslim” he is?
When I got back to The Hague in September, I packed all
my things, said farewell to my flatmate, and moved into the Dutchman’s house.
This was a smart move (pun intended) for two reasons:
Contemporary Dutch society is overwhelmingly secular and people
today expect years of cohabitation before a wedding (if any). It was acceptable
and even preferable to live together for at least five years before getting
married (if at all), and I knew a couple who had married only after 10 years!
Some couples may also prefer the more discreet civil partnership, which
provides all the legal benefits of marriage, without having to announce it to
everyone and throwing a party. Others gave off vibes of contempt for religion,
marriage before cohabitation, and worst of all, religious marriage.
In contrast, in Singapore it is virtually impossible to
cohabit (either due to social norms against premarital sex, or prohibitively
high rental rates) and most Muslim couples get married in their mid-20s. After
a few years of living with their in-laws most of them are dying to move out
into their Built-To-Order apartments. By moving in with the Dutchman after our
secret marriage, his family saw it as a sign that we were serious about each
other and were moving our relationship to the next, correct, level according to
their social norms.
Also, my parents were extremely concerned about how
others would perceive my (im)morality, as filtered through Facebook, if I had gone
back to The Hague as a single woman, living independently, and dating a white
Dutchman. My parents had previously met my Indonesian flatmate, with whom I was
sharing an apartment, through video calls on Skype, and even received a 360
degree tour of our apartment. However, they didn’t seem too convinced that I wasn’t
in fact enjoying my free and liberal life by immediately shacking up with the
first Dutch guy I found (I would later discover that my father had given my
younger brother the impression that I was indeed cohabiting with the Dutchman
before we were married.)
Or at least they were not convinced that others wouldn’t
think that about me, and they worried a lot about how our extended family and
their friends would perceive me. By marrying the Dutchman, my family (and
whoever else who knew about the marriage) stopped worrying about the
possibility of us cohabiting and having sex outside of marriage.
Meanwhile, there was some tension with the Dutchman’s
family after he told them that he was planning to convert to Islam. He had
pre-empted them of his decision before he left for Singapore. This had caused a
cryfest at his mother’s house, and at his father’s house, a barrage of quotes
from Geert Wilders, a Dutch far-right politician famous for his Islamophobic
speeches.
This hateful phobia of Islam from his family had always stumped
me, and still does. While I had never made overt admissions of my religion to
any of his family, such as requesting a space to pray at their house, or
refusing meat on the counts that it was not ritually slaughtered, I had also
never consciously hidden this aspect of myself. I remember sharing with them
that I had worked in a mosque and an Islamic school, and even showed them
photos of myself or my family members who were visibly Muslim (including but
not limited to wearing hijab, for example). It was almost as if
tolerance meant that it’s okay for me as a foreigner to be Muslim and never
talk about it, but it’s definitely not okay for me to force this abomination upon
their white Dutch son. Today, we adopt the policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ towards
his family – we avoid all topics related to Islam and Muslims, and if it inadvertently
comes up (when talking about travelling to Cairo, for example), we quickly
change the topic.
Eventually, things calmed down and we announced that we
were “engaged” and planning for a wedding. My parents were hoping that we would
do the state wedding and reception in Singapore about five months after the
secret wedding. But it proved to be beyond our acting and diplomatic powers to
squeeze an engagement and a wedding in five months. At the same time, I had
been thinking very hard about whether I wanted to have a state wedding in
Singapore or in the Netherlands.
My concerns about where we would register our marriage
was the wedding process and then the legal and social implications afterwards,
including the possibility of divorce and death (not to be a wet blanket here,
but these are possible scenarios).
I was not at all keen to apply syariah law to our
marriage, with what I perceived to be inequality and unfairness, as interpreted
by the semi-government bodies of Islamic Religious Authority of Singapore
(MUIS) and the Registry of Muslim Marriages (ROMM). As a registered Muslim in
Singapore, these laws applied to me through marriage registration at ROMM,
unless I declared myself to be a non-Muslim in order to have the Women’s
Charter apply to me through registration at the Registry of Marriage (ROM)
(clearly something that would not fly with any average Muslim family, let alone
mine).
My idea of spousal equality under Islam was not the same
kind of Islam as it had been institutionalised in Singapore. I didn’t think the
Singaporean syariah laws were perfect (and remember, influenced by
colonial British law) and they certainly didn’t fit my vision of marriage. In
particular, the main problem I had was with the way that the Islamic marriage
ceremony was conducted. I didn’t like having to sit behind the Dutchman during
the secret nikah, and I didn’t like having it justified and explained
away with “Islam”. I didn’t like my father passing on his “guardianship” of me
to my husband instead. I didn’t like being preached to, by elderly bearded men
whom I barely knew, that if I just obeyed my husband, I had a pretty good
chance of going to paradise.
I was uncomfortable (okay, more than that—I absolutely
disagree!) with polygamy. Hypothetically, the Dutchman could marry three more
women under Singaporean law if we married in ROMM, and even if I said no, he
could still seek legal permission to do so without my consent. Under Dutch law,
polygamy is illegal. Most importantly, the Dutchman says that marrying another
woman will never cross his mind, but to me it was more important to verify if a
set of laws would indeed protect my rights and wishes, and not merely to take
claims of ‘protecting women’ for granted.
Another issue was unilateral divorce. The divorce process
is different for Muslim men and women in Singapore. Even though both parties eventually
have to go to court for all the four types of divorce, a man may still divorce
his wife by verbal repudiation. According to Dutch law, there was only one type
of divorce, and both parties had to go to court to settle it.
The final straw was the issue of faraid, or inheritance
law. As a Muslim convert in Singapore, the Dutchman had a different set of laws
applied to him. For example, if he died without a will, his assets would be
seized by the central authority and up to one third given to me, some to our
children (if any) with boys receiving twice the share of girls, and the rest to
the community. His parents would get nothing because they are not Muslim. It was
perplexing for me to hear my father give this as an argument to me in favour of
a registering in ROMM, since he had himself tried to circumvent inheritance
decisions in situations that he found unfair to the female parties involved.
Why was I being pushed towards a system that clearly would
not work for me, as it didn’t for some people around me whom I had seen suffer?
Women who silently but tearfully accepted their husband’s second and third
wives, or children who fought for their “rightful” share under faraid to
the point of harassing their elderly parent? I had seen this happen in my own
family. The same people who agreed with syariah law as a concept were
also working around these problematic laws in practice by writing their own
wills with specific conditions that went against the faraid laws.
This was not something I wanted for my own marriage. I
wanted the Dutchman and I to be able to think for ourselves, and for our own
situation, knowing that this will change materially and ideologically over
time. We found that Dutch law could provide the most space for this to happen,
and we prepared a pre-nuptial agreement in anticipation of some of the issues
that we were worried about.
Not many people agreed with us however, because Singaporean
Muslim community has been socialised to defer to authority and fear their own
opinions – especially when authority appears in the form of an elderly male (beard
optional) with a diploma from a Middle Eastern university, or official
representatives of Islam like ROMM and MUIS. In our society, most people feel
that the official interpretation of Islam is correct and should not be
questioned by laymen. One friend considered marrying in ROMM as a way to
“follow what syariah tells us”, without knowing the exact differences
between syariah and civil law. Another friend who was in the same
situation as I was, and was aware of the differences, decided to go along at
the final moment so as “not to upset family and friends”. I was beginning to
get the impression that marrying under syariah law was just a way to confirm to themselves
and to others they there were indeed Muslim – making the contents and material
consequences of the law itself irrelevant (at least in that moment).
I was told by parents and friends that I was reinventing
the wheel—the religious authorities speaking on behalf of Islam had created
this wonderful marriage system with all its inbuilt roles and obligations for
me (like how I didn’t have to work, my husband should provide everything for
me, and in return I only had to obey him and give ‘sexual access at all lawful
times’), and here I was trying to recreate it in the Dutch system. To make
matters worse, some people back in Singapore had picked up on the term “civil
marriage”, hearing that I was going to go through one in the Netherlands.
The term “civil marriage” is loaded with socio-political
significance in the Muslim community. Because the Singaporean marriage courts divide
couples along religious lines (non-Muslim and Muslim), it is assumed that a
couple marrying in the civil court are both non-Muslims, (or no longer Muslim),
and that a couple marrying in the Islamic court are both Muslims. If a Muslim
person has a “civil marriage”, it is assumed that they are no longer Muslim. Or
that their marriage ceremony did not fulfil the Islamic requirements (a male
guardian, two male witnesses, and a gift from the groom to the bride). Add a
white foreigner to the mix, and you have a recipe for assumptions of apostasy
gone wild.
I loathed this narrow-mindedness. Indeed, when I spoke to
an official from ROMM, she could not even fathom the idea of Muslims who
undergo a “civil marriage”, which is the case for Muslims who live in countries
without parallel civil and syariah courts. Both ROM and ROMM
recognise state marriage certificates from virtually all countries in the world
(including the Netherlands); they consider these marriages as valid. This means
that ROMM does indeed recognise the dreaded “civil marriage”, and that the
fears and shame that Singaporean Muslims attach to it is simply irrational.
After waiting eight weeks for our marriage application to
go through (being a foreign bride is suspect enough for Dutch immigration
authorities), we finally performed an official wedding ceremony in a small
office in the outskirts of The Hague. We wanted it as small as possible, so
some of the Dutchman’s family was present, and some of my closest friends.
How happy I was to be able to stand with the Dutchman at
the same table, hold his hand, and read our own vows to each other (like
promising to buy him a popsicle if I ever made him cry). It was a vast change
from the first, secret, wedding, and I was above all relieved to not have to
hide anymore.
Even if I did have to pretend to be a blushing, first-time bride.
