“Is this an arranged marriage?” A young man with an American accent asks someone off-screen. “I think so,” replies a young woman when the camera turns to her.
“Does she even know who he is?” asks the young man.
“It’s a Muslim thing,” the woman replies.
“A Muslim thing?” the man asks.
“Yeah.”
The camera turns to a young woman wearing a beautiful white dress and eating off a plate of fruits, and the young man asks her, “um, do you even know who he is?”
The bride, lifting the food to her mouth, looks straight into the camera and nonchalantly says, “not yet.” The young man and woman erupt into giggles.
The young man in the video uploaded it to his TikTok account and wrote the caption, “lol this is a joke😭❤️”.
Users in the comments laughed along. From one Instagram reupload of the video:
“The calmness of that bride makes this video 💯 times funnier 😂”
“Don’t worry it probably her cousin.”
A UK counseling psychologist who runs an “in-laws support group” made a video for her Instagram with the text “Arranged Marriage Edition”. In the video, she makes funny faces to the following sentences:
Yeah we met at a wedding
Our wedding
Yeah it was a love marriage
My parents loved him
We’ve already got a house together
With his parents
She captioned the video, “Just for jokes… but can you relate? 🙋🏽♀️” Many laughing emojis ensued in the comments of the video. “Your faces 😂,” one hijabi user commented.
Another user seemed upset, commenting, “Can we stop making people think we meet our spouses on our wedding days.. it’s just not funny .. it’s just making us Muslims looks extremists the media doing enough !” It’s interesting to me is this user is assuming that this woman is making fun of arranged marriages as a supposedly outdated, fantastical concept, rather than making a joke based on her own lived experience.
A YouTube search of “muslim tiktok marriage,” led me to a TikTok compilation video titled, “Muslims and their love/hate for arranged marriages”. At the 1:19 timestamp of the video, a young woman is covering her mouth while laughing as a caption above her head reads, “When you hear a cousin is getting married within the family so you laughing with your mum.” She stops laughing and moves her hand from her mouth and a face distorting filter changes her face. Text appears at the bottom of the video that reads, “Then realise your the cousin.”
One comment on the YouTube video with over seven thousand likes reads, “Fyi, arranged marriage is not the same as forced marriage. Forced marriage is haram since both sides need to agree, if they don't, the marriage is forbidden. Islam was actually the first religion to give women the right to choose who they want to marry.”
Indeed, a marriage that does not have the consent of both partners is invalid in the eyes of Allah (this includes the bride’s consent, though conveniently, her silence counts as her consent.)
However, how exactly did Islam “give women the right to choose who they want to marry”? I believe the opposite to be true. When the prophet Mohammed said, “No woman should arrange the marriage of another woman, and no woman should arrange her own marriage. The adulteress is the one who arranges her own marriage,” it sounds to me like he was directly removing a woman’s right to choose her own partner.
Furthermore, though I agree that there is a distinction between “arranged” marriages and “forced” marriages, I disagree with the implication that it is uncommon for an arranged marriage to also be a forced one.
Is it not forced if the girl or woman isn’t allowed to interact with men by herself, meaning that it would be impossible for her to agree to anything but an arranged marriage? Is it not forced if the same girl or woman doesn’t have the option to stay unmarried? Muslim apologists paint a picture that “forced” marriages occur by the bride being directly—physically or otherwise—threatened by her family. However, I would argue that the most common kind of “forced” marriage in Islamic societies is caused by the pressures of the community at large. This is especially the case in communities that practice sex segregation. How is a Muslim woman meant to choose her own partner when even casually interacting with a member of the opposite sex is a sin in itself, no matter how casual and non-sexual the interaction may be?
I really dislike these videos, because they make me uncomfortable. I’ve seen many of them now, and the punchline always seems to be one of the following:
Haha, aren’t arranged marriages so crazy? Good thing they don’t happen anymore.
Haha, look at this horrible thing that happened to me. Who can relate?
Punchline number one is offensively dishonest.
Punchline number two is depressingly honest.
Isn't the living with in-laws thing primarily a desi/south asian/Indian sub-continent thing? Is it common for African, Arab and Eastern European Muslim wives to also live in the house of her parents in-law?