At Afghan Weddings, 600 Strangers

[summer]

NY TIMES

KABUL, Afghanistan — When Shafiqullah walked into his wedding celebration, he was surprised to find 600 extra people in the room, none of whom he recognized.

Still, he knew his obligations.

“If I didn’t serve them, it would have caused me dishonor and taken away all happiness from my wedding day,” explained Shafiqullah, a genial 31-year-old car salesman.

So he told the caterers at the Kabul wedding hall he had rented to double the food order, bringing the cost of his wedding to nearly $30,000 — a small fortune in this impoverished country.

[http://static01]

A strip of Kabul is nicknamed “Las Vegas” for its neon lights.

ANDREW QUILTY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

It is a familiar tale in Afghanistan, where weddings are vital demonstrations of two tightly held values: commitment to hospitality and devotion to family and community.

But the strain of having to host a party the size of a small village — or two small villages if strangers turn up, as they often do — is proving ruinous for many young Afghan men, who find themselves taking out loans to get married that will take years to pay back.

Enter the Afghan Parliament, which recently took aim at Kabul’s wedding-industrial complex, as typified by the gargantuan and garish wedding halls that have increasingly flooded this capital’s night skies with neon over the past decade. With the fervent support of young Kabul residents, lawmakers passed a bill to cap the number of wedding guests at such establishments to 500 people. It is awaiting final approval.

In many countries, young couples might struggle to find 500 guests to celebrate with them. Afghans have no such problem.

As receptions are segregated by gender, the draw of strangers is not the chance to meet women, but food.


Consider Shafiqullah’s original guest list of 700 for his wedding six months ago. Besides the guests on his bride’s side, Shafiqullah invited “my cousins; my cousin’s cousins; my neighbors; also people who live in the surrounding areas; and, of course, people from my village, the one I came from before Kabul; and 100 to 150 colleagues, other car salesmen.”

But among the 1,300 gathered, he strained to pick them out from the strangers. “I didn’t recognize more than half of the guests in the male section,” he said. “It was amazing, but also disturbing as these were people I had never seen before in my entire life.”

Even so, he ruefully noted this month, “I still have some friends who are complaining that I did not invite them to the wedding.”

The crowds that stream into Kabul’s wedding halls each night have given rise to a subculture of “toi paal” — wedding crashers. They are uninvited men who hang around the stretch of the airport road that has been nicknamed “Las Vegas,” for the bright neon lights and mirrored glass of the wedding halls. They show up in droves to places with names like Crystal or Evening of Paris, complete with a miniature Eiffel Tower, and City Star, with a glowing crescent several stories high.

At the City Star hall in the city, a wedding car awaited at a celebration that hosted about 700 guests.

Because weddings are generally segregated by gender, usually by huge partitions, the draw is not the opportunity to meet women so much as it is the banquet fare of lamb, chicken, kabuli pulao (a traditional lamb pilaf), yogurt, fruit and pudding.

Most young men in Kabul seem to know the expression, “With a wedding every night, there is no need to go hungry.”

People across Kabul still speak of the wedding several years ago of a vice president’s second youngest son. Two of the capital’s giant wedding halls, as well as two of its nicest hotels, were booked to accommodate the 4,000 to 7,000 guests, according to the lore among wedding hall owners.

Young men whose fathers are not vice presidents are among the bill’s most ardent supporters.

“I demand that the president sign this law,” said Jawed, 24, who sells fabric in a small stall in an underground shopping mall. “I beg him to sign this law as soon as possible so people like me can get married soon.”

In some cases, the high cost of weddings has delayed marriages here for years.

Ahmad Walid Sultani, who owns a stationery store, said he hopes someday to print invitations for his own wedding, not just for his customers’ weddings. He has been engaged for seven long years while saving money “for all the extravagant expenses needed for a wedding.”

Like many young men in Kabul, he worries that his fiancée’s family, which by tradition does not pay for the wedding, expects a bigger, more lavish party than he could afford. He has good cause: When his fiancée’s cousin was married recently, his future in-laws invited 1,500 people.

“I know that my in-laws are going to place a big burden on me at my wedding,” he said.

Though Mr. Sultani is already engaged, many young men first worry about finding a way to pay long before they start searching for a bride.

“I need to work hard and for a long time before I make enough money to marry someone,” said Fayaz, 19, who sells bootleg DVDs in a traffic circle. He figured a wedding would cost him more than $8,500.

To pay for such weddings, young men in Kabul seek loans from banks, siblings and an extended network of relatives. They swap stories about doomed marriages in which young grooms, shortly after their nuptials, go abroad to Iran or Dubai as migrant laborers to pay off the debt. The most popular versions of these urban legends have the husbands returning years later as drug addicts or not at all.

Booking a wedding hall and feeding the guests account for only a fraction of the cost. Grooms must also buy gold jewelry for the bride. And they must pay what is known as a “bride price,” a certain sum the groom gives to the bride or her family so that she has some property of her own to control.

The current bill has passed both houses of the Afghan Parliament, though with discrepancies — the lower house limited guests to 400, while the Senate put the cap at 500 — that need to be reconciled before it reaches the president’s desk.

The legislation faces opposition by women’s rights leaders, wedding hall owners and the union of hotel workers, who plan to lobby President Ashraf Ghani to veto it.

Shukria Barakzai, a member of Parliament, said she objected to requirements in the bill that wedding halls segregate parties by gender and inspect the bride’s clothing for modesty. “This involves the privacy of life and fundamental rights of citizens,” she said.

The wedding hall owners have their own arguments. They say that forcing families to trim names from guest lists is not only an affront to Afghan values, but will only invite discord between families and weaken the social and tribal ties that undergird much of Afghan life.

“If you don’t invite us to your wedding, please don’t expect us to shoulder your coffin, either,” is how many Afghans will react to being excluded from weddings, said Hajji Ghulam Sadiq, the owner of Oranos wedding hall.

Down the road, at the Sultan City wedding hall, one of the managers, wearing a black shirt and a pressed brown suit, said the new law would cripple the wedding hall business — one of the few thriving industries in an ailing Afghan economy.

“What will they do if they lose their jobs?” said the manager, Sayed Yaqoot, referring to the thousands of waiters and wedding hall workers. “Go join the Taliban?”

[iammalcolmx]

Don't let black people see the name"Shafiqullah" cause they gonna get ideas.

[summer]

Apr 19, 2015 6:30:34 GMT -5 iammalcolmx said:

Don't let black people see the name"Shafiqullah" cause they gonna get ideas.

“If I didn’t serve them, it would have caused me dishonor and taken away all happiness from my wedding day,” explained Shafiqullah, a genial 31-year-old car salesman.



So he told the caterers at the Kabul wedding hall he had rented to double the food order, bringing the cost of his wedding to nearly $30,000 — a small fortune in this impoverished country.
"


Can you imagine? This is just fascinating to me. 

[Deleted]

I would have guessed COL would be enough lower in Kabul that food costs would be lower.

It is fascinating to me cultures where they can come up with that many people to invite. I would have had to invite everyone in my 700 person office building and everyone in my neighborhood for 1500 guests.

I do have a coworker who is Laotian who got married here who said her wedding was 1000 and an Indian friend who had 800 people. That's just nuts! They had to rent convention center space!

[pamela]

Why do cultures do this to themselves? You make it so your young families start out behind, how is that good for your daughter?

[summer]

Apr 20, 2015 0:34:23 GMT -5 pamela said:

Why do cultures do this to themselves? You make it so your young families start out behind, how is that good for your daughter?

I ask myself this, too.  It's hard when you grow up in one culture, to really understand another. Honor is everything to so many people, in a way that I just won't ever be ableto understand.  

[Michelle]

Apr 20, 2015 5:03:31 GMT -5 summer said:

Apr 20, 2015 0:34:23 GMT -5 pamela said:

Why do cultures do this to themselves? You make it so your young families start out behind, how is that good for your daughter?

I ask myself this, too.  It's hard when you grow up in one culture, to really understand another. Honor is everything to so many people, in a way that I just won't ever be ableto understand.  

In some cultures where everyone brings their grandma and 5th cousin to any wedding they are invited to, many people bring food or drinks as well. So it becomes a sort of potluck celebration.

Or they do they money dances, and pay generously.

This afghan situation seems altogether different though.

[ttt]

Apr 19, 2015 6:30:34 GMT -5 iammalcolmx said:

Don't let black people see the name"Shafiqullah" cause they gonna get ideas.

I think you know where to go. 

[ttt]

It is interesting that crazy-expensive weddings are not just an American or even Western phenomenon!

[iammalcolmx]

Apr 20, 2015 9:53:15 GMT -5 ttt said:

Apr 19, 2015 6:30:34 GMT -5 iammalcolmx said:

Don't let black people see the name"Shafiqullah" cause they gonna get ideas.

I think you know where to go. 

You know I am right though.

[janetplanet20]

Apr 20, 2015 0:34:23 GMT -5 pamela said:

Why do cultures do this to themselves? You make it so your young families start out behind, how is that good for your daughter?

I'm wondering the same thing. I know another poster mentioned that it has to do with honor in the Afghan culture, but how do you then reconcile that with grooms leaving for another country to work off their debt, leaving their wives behind? Where is the honor in setting up young couples to fail?

[ttt]

Apr 20, 2015 11:39:33 GMT -5 janetplanet20 said:

Apr 20, 2015 0:34:23 GMT -5 pamela said:

Why do cultures do this to themselves? You make it so your young families start out behind, how is that good for your daughter?

I'm wondering the same thing. I know another poster mentioned that it has to do with honor in the Afghan culture, but how do you then reconcile that with grooms leaving for another country to work off their debt, leaving their wives behind? Where is the honor in setting up young couples to fail?

I think they just don't see it that way. Much like we don't see oppressive student loans that can't ever be forgiven as setting our young people up to fail - we see it as "personal responsibility" and "choice." The whole idea of hospitality and providing for guests no matter the cost to you is so deeply ingrained in that culture. 

[Deleted]

How terrible. I think I'd rather be dishonored than spend $15k on feeding strangers but I don't live in that culture. I hope they pass the law.

[pamela]

Apr 20, 2015 11:45:42 GMT -5 ttt said:

Apr 20, 2015 11:39:33 GMT -5 janetplanet20 said:

I'm wondering the same thing. I know another poster mentioned that it has to do with honor in the Afghan culture, but how do you then reconcile that with grooms leaving for another country to work off their debt, leaving their wives behind? Where is the honor in setting up young couples to fail?

I think they just don't see it that way. Much like we don't see oppressive student loans that can't ever be forgiven as setting our young people up to fail - we see it as "personal responsibility" and "choice." The whole idea of hospitality and providing for guests no matter the cost to you is so deeply ingrained in that culture. 

But do we as a society really think insane SL's are ok? Like $120k private school in social work?

[ttt]

Apr 20, 2015 15:54:45 GMT -5 pamela said:

Apr 20, 2015 11:45:42 GMT -5 ttt said:

I think they just don't see it that way. Much like we don't see oppressive student loans that can't ever be forgiven as setting our young people up to fail - we see it as "personal responsibility" and "choice." The whole idea of hospitality and providing for guests no matter the cost to you is so deeply ingrained in that culture. 

But do we as a society really think insane SL's are ok? Like $120k private school in social work?

We do, overall. We think that if someone chooses to take that on and fails and ends up living in poverty, that's their responsibility and they should have just made a different choice. "It's unfortunate but that's the way it is" is our cultural way of thinking. It's similar with these extravagant wedding - "that's just the way it is" is how they think about it. 

Here's another interesting article: 


www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/world/asia/14weddings.html?scp=1&sq=big+weddings&_r=0 

[LadySusan]

Apr 20, 2015 5:03:31 GMT -5 summer said:

Apr 20, 2015 0:34:23 GMT -5 pamela said:

Why do cultures do this to themselves? You make it so your young families start out behind, how is that good for your daughter?

I ask myself this, too.  It's hard when you grow up in one culture, to really understand another. Honor is everything to so many people, in a way that I just won't ever be ableto understand.  

I think it is part of a social contract from tight-knit village days?  The thinking is that it doesn't matter if I attend a wedding on the other side of town for some kids I've never met because next year I will invite everyone to my kid's wedding and I'll foot the bill for dinner.  And everyone brings good wishes and cash and presents to the young people who are just getting started.  It is like me getting the dinner bill this time with the knowledge that it will all work out.  But then the social contract breaks down and you have all these single dudes who want free food.

I believe that this used to happen in the United States too, when immigrants lived in same-country communities. I can't remember which countries anymore.

And can you imagine spending your wedding reception (as a groom) in a giant neon/mirrored room teeming with entitled dudes you've only just met?