“Kalau Dah Jodoh...”

Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif

Matsumoto was rather grey and quiet— it was still cold in March, and the hiking season, which usually brought swarms of tourists to the city, was still months away. I climbed up the Matsumoto Castle and marveled at the moon-viewing deck (only when autumn came did I understand the significance of such a thing). I had hoped to visit the Ukiyo-e Museum, but this, as with many shops on the city’s main thoroughfare, Nakamachi-dori, was not open for business. I suspect the owners were busy sipping on a piña colada in Okinawa, blowing off the financial aid from the government to close their shops or shorten their operating hours.  

Defeated by the cold and desperate to put my luggage down somewhere that afternoon, I decided to seek refuge from the drizzle at the Storyhouse Café, hoping for a chance to check-in early at the Nawate Guesthouse. Apparently, no worries there— I was the only customer at the café and the only guest in the guesthouse today. Hikari-san kindly checked me in, and I joined her downstairs where she was working at the café with Kazu-san, who, having been trained as a barista in New Zealand, made legendary lattes.  

Comforted by the roaring fire, the cozy atmosphere of the café, and the lively conversation with Hikari-san and Kazu-san from the other side of the bar, I felt at peace in the moment. And then in he walks through the doors of the Storyhouse, with his black hat and gentle confidence, a plot twist that, in my mind, could’ve only been written by the hands of destiny.

— —

When you’re studying marriage and intimacy in contemporary Malaysia, there’s no escaping the word “jodoh”— a ubiquitous concept translated broadly as “romantic fate”. Such a translation is barely adequate to describe the complex matters and logistics of the heart that take place when two lives become intertwined, but that is perhaps the beauty of jodoh: its meaning is as messy and mysterious as the phenomenon it attempts to encapsulate.  

Indeed, my Malay interlocutors often could not quite articulate with precision the meaning of jodoh themselves, probably because it is thrown around rather indiscriminately in discussions of love and marriage. When two people meet, this point of encounter—destined to occur at that precise time and location, not a second too early or too late— is called jodoh pertemuan (fated encounter). A couple’s union, especially in matrimony, is another common manifestation of jodoh. Destiny is the master matchmaker: it not only brings two people together, but decides how long they end up together. When a couple’s romantic relationship dissolves or their marriage ends in divorce, the Malays again invoke jodoh: “Dah tiada jodoh” (“There’s no more jodoh [between the two]” or “Their jodoh is up”).  

This unwavering belief in jodoh is directly linked to the Muslim Malays’ faith in the Islamic concept of qadr (destiny)—  the idea that our fortunes (“rezeki” in Malay, or “rizq” in Arabic) in life have been decided for us since the moment life is breathed into our fetal form when we were still in our mother’s womb. “Fortune” in this sense includes how much wealth we make, who we marry, how many children we will have, even how long and how well we live.  Yet this does not make us fatalists in love: though our jodoh— who we will meet and marry in our life— has long been written for us, we still have to work for it. And I had taken a somewhat unconventional path in moving between continents and setting off on many solo travels before stumbling upon my jodoh in Matsumoto. 

— —

I moved to Japan in the middle of the pandemic in 2021, right at the height of the Omicron craze. Three months after settling into Kyoto, I caught the travel bug. I could’ve picked any city in Japan to visit on this inaugural expedition, but something called me to the Japanese Alps. I was curious to see— with my own eyes, not through someone else’s filtered Instagram photos I’d consumed with an insatiable appetite during the strict confinements (lockdowns) in Paris – Matsumoto’s 500-year-old samurai castle; Takayama’s well-preserved Edo charm; and Shirakawa-go’s gingerbread homes with thatched roofs. And so I devised a route that would take me through Japan’s Hokuriku region, beginning with a hearty breakfast in Nagoya, followed by a scenic ride along the Kiso River on the shaky Shinano Limited Express that would take me up to the city of Matsumoto, before continuing onwards to Takayama, Shirakawa-go, finally ending my trip in Kanazawa.   

I picked the first of March to take my first ever Shinkansen out of Kyoto— the start of the new month being, in my superstitious mind, an auspicious time to embark on a journey. The moment I stepped off at Matsumoto Station and saw the majestic snow-capped mountains surrounding the city, I was spellbound. Perhaps I had been cloistered too long in my shoebox studio in the 6eme arrondissement of Paris, where I lived, wrote, Zoomed, and prayed for months continuously without ever taking a train out of town. My only consolation in those isolating times were the excursions we were allowed to take for an hour a day, no more than a kilometer radius from our domicile, which I spent on daily flâneries through the empty cobblestoned streets, with only my old, faithful Canon for company.  

These flâneries kept the anxiety and anticipation of moving to Japan momentarily at bay. The career path of an early-career academic like myself is never without a sense of mystery of where our next appointment might take us; but the greatest irony was that I went from completely jobless in the summer of 2020, to juggling two job offers at the same time from Paris and Kyoto. As the French were eager to sign me on, I accepted, only to hear from my host professor in Japan two weeks later that our joint fellowship application was successful too. I moved to Paris just after my 29th birthday, all the while exchanging hundreds of emails with my host professor speculating when would be a feasible time to plan my move to Japan. But there was always something or another that got in the way: the raging pandemic that winter; the Tokyo Olympics that summer. In the end, I had to suspend my plans for Japan and face the harsh possibility that I might end up being momentarily jobless in between these transcontinental moves— an inevitable risk of the academic life. Seeing the mountains that day, I felt a residual disbelief that I managed to slip through one of the strictest Covid border closures in the world. “Damn, I’m actually here,” I remember thinking to myself. “I’m finally in Japan.”  

We, in fact, owe our encounter to the pandemic: the owners of the guesthouse were supposed to check me in personally the day that I arrived; however, the whole family had to isolate themselves due to COVID, and had asked T to check me in. T, who was splitting his time between Matsumoto and Tokyo, happened to be there and agreed to check in this one pesky guest, as was his occasional duty as a long-term resident in the guesthouse’s staffroom.  

I could’ve chosen an entirely different time to come to Matsumoto. He could have decided not to leave Tokyo then and pursue the excitement of the big city over the tranquility of life in a small town in the mountains. The impeccable circumstances of our encounter, I came to understand, was a manifestation of that mysterious force of jodoh that my Malay interlocutors brought up incessantly in my fieldwork, and which I, with my nomadic yet culturally very Malay upbringing, also embraced unquestioningly as a fact of life. T, not as much of a believer in destiny, preferred the “chain reaction explanation” of our meeting— how various events in our lives sparked a chain reaction in the universe that all eventually boiled down to that second, and that moment, that brought this Jewish man and this Muslim woman to this obscure corner of Japan at the same time.  

— — 

From the first few words we exchanged in the Storyhouse Café, there was intrigue from both sides— we were two strangers who were almost completely out of place in this part of the world. I could not quite pinpoint his age nor his origins from the way he looked or the way he spoke: his accent carried the lengthy years and veritable flavors of his nomadic life, and he appeared virtually a decade younger than his actual age. Meanwhile, my own curiosities were reflected in his inquiries into my life— what brought me to Japan, my story. After all, a Muslim woman in a hijab is not a normal sight here, even more so in this rather provincial part of the country, at a time when the borders were strictly closed to tourists.  

We were pulled into the force of the other’s presence deeply and quickly, but with some effort, we managed to break away from conversation, with the promise that we would see each other again that evening. In the lounge of the guesthouse, he offered me beer, and I offered him a tuna-mayo onigiri from the 7/11 nearby. Neither of us could accept the other’s gifts— he was vegetarian, and I observed the Islamic prohibition on alcohol. So we exchanged other things— tales from our travels, the nearly three decades of his life in Japan and abroad; my life abroad up until my move to Japan. And with every story that we told, the we found ourselves falling deeper into the excitement and fascination of the encounter.  

Looking back, the things we discussed that night might hardly seem interesting to a fly on the wall— taxes and visas and residence statuses; the bureaucratic hassle of migrating from one country to another; the logistical challenges of moving from one apartment to the next (and why it suited him perfectly well to split his time in guesthouses in Matsumoto and Tokyo, rather than taking up his own place). Our nomadic lives, it soon became apparent, resonated more profoundly than we thought; that evening we learned, much to our amazement, that the trajectory of our lives around the globe actually already overlapped, long before we even met in this part of the world. He had spent time in Australia in his youth, eventually landing in the remote city of Perth, where I also studied French and Anthropology as an undergraduate— fifteen years later. In Japan, his path led him to Kyoto, where he lived in the same neighborhood I was living in when we met, before moving to Paris for another job appointment. The challenges we faced in France— though we lived and worked there nearly a decade apart— distilled upon us a low-key ambivalence towards the French; French customs; French language; and the Parisians’ obsession with Paris being the center of the world. He returned to Japan, glad to have left behind his dismal life in Paris, and, years later, went on to do a volunteering gig in the Gambia, almost next door to where I was growing up as an adolescent in West Africa.  

After midnight, we parted ways, knowing that this would only be a pause in the conversation, not the end. When I settled into my warm and comfortable bed that night, I immediately regretted my plans to take the 7 a.m. bus to Takayama the next morning, and opted to take the 11 a.m. instead— a radical move for me, as I never travel without a meticulously-planned itinerary. Perhaps deep down, I was hoping to meet T one last time before leaving the guesthouse. I’d decided that a few minutes more in his company would be worth far more than the extra couple of hours I might gain exploring a new town in Japan on my own.  

I was not alone in this feeling— just as I was preparing to depart that morning, T emerged … and told me, half-jokingly, that Takayama might not have that much to offer; why not stay here in Matsumoto longer? Still, anxious to be getting on with my solo adventure, I bade him farewell with a heavy heart, and left him with an invitation to revisit his old neighborhood in Kyoto.  

To this, he made no grandiose promises, but simply said: “I will.” 

— —

Destiny only takes us halfway there; the rest of our story is to be written with our own hands.  

I left Matsumoto with the ball in T’s proverbial court. To my delight, the following week he appeared in Kyoto, frequenting a local guesthouse and café in the heart of the city where he could work remotely. With Japan still secluded from the rest of the world, Kyoto, which had been long suffocating from the deluge of pre-pandemic tourists, became a safe and secluded cocoon for our courtship. We walked and cycled along the banks of the Kamogawa River and ate at local restaurants and izakayas that would normally require a reservation months in advance. Strolling along the shōtengais downtown, T marveled at how blissfully devoid of tourists they were in comparison to his time living in Kyoto many years ago.  

This was exactly what both fascinated and perplexed me: I had met many well-traveled men, but none who had walked down almost the exact same paths as I had in my own nomadic life. With T, I could reminisce about Perth, grumble about Paris, and revisit the peculiarities of life in West Africa— he’d been there and done that, too. But the uniqueness of our individual experiences enriched our connections even more— there was no way that T, a Jewish man of Caucasian appearance and tall in stature, would be treated the same way as I was in these places as an Asian, Muslim, veiled woman.   

Our religious differences introduced a whole set of dynamics to the courtship that compelled me to question some of the long-standing boundaries and beliefs I held about dating as a Muslim woman. Up to this point, my experiences with men were nothing home to write about— the incessant moving around made it difficult to build the foundations of any meaningful affection and attachment with men. Most Muslim men I was getting to know romantically— online and offline— were full of contradictions: they were fascinated by the thought and possibility of being with an educated, working woman, yet they punished me for pursuing my ambitions abroad and having career aspirations that far exceeded their own. This was not news to me. I had somewhat learned to anticipate this, as so many of the second wives I interviewed in my own research had to resort to polygyny (one man marrying multiple wives) because all the single men were too threatened by their success and saw them as an adversary rather than a lover.  

This is all to say that when T and I sat side by side on the Keihan train to Osaka to meet his best friend of nearly 30 years, whom he had known in their undergraduate days in Perth, his cautious request to hold my hand took me by surprise. Heart palpitating, palms sweating, I said yes. But as I stared at my hand in his— too stunned to move, almost like a dead fish washed ashore— my conscience was flooded with moral qualms I could not quiet down until we reached Osaka. Here I was, holding the hand of a man who was neither my father, brother, son, nor husband— the general category of men unmarriageable by blood (muhrim) that Islam considers “touchable” for a woman. He was therefore, to me, untouchable. Yet I did not pull my hand away. I’d typically maintained firm physical boundaries with male acquaintances, friends, and colleagues, but I decided to allow myself this small concession. I cannot deny that I am, after all, a hopeless romantic at heart, and the thrill of pursuing the unknown with this fascinating man propelled me— us— forward.  

— —

T wasn’t religious or spiritual at all, being somewhat of a non-practicing agnostic Jew (his father identifies himself as an anarchist and is an active member of the anarchist movement that opposes the Israeli settler occupation of Palestine). Yet he had many biblical stories to tell. Growing up in Israel, he could not escape the absolutely unsecular education offered by the Israeli state in his formative years, which included classes on “bible studies” of the Old Testament.  

Sitting on the floor of my tiny dormitory studio in Kyoto one evening, sipping on a hot cup of houjicha after dinner, he recounted to me the story of Sarah and Abraham. In the Old Testament, he said, the bible did not exactly talk about the consummation of this union that changed the course of all Abrahamic faiths to follow; all it said was— and he quoted the book from memory— “And then Abraham knew her.” In the biblical text, Sarah and Abraham were visited by an angel messenger in human form, who bore her the news that she would bear her husband a son. Both of them being of advanced age (Sarah was 90 at that time) and believing her husband perhaps too old to perform sexually, and herself to be barren, Sarah was said to have “laughed” at this prophecy. Yet it was told to be fulfilled, and religious scholars have extensively discussed how Isaac was, in a way, born from Sarah’s “laughter”— an interpretation which must have been conceived (pardon the pun) from the Jewish belief that sexual pleasure and conception are causally related.  

In telling me this story, it was clear that T was beginning to feel for me the first buds of cinta— what we could roughly equate to romantic love, with all the consuming desires of the flesh that entails. T was not one to beat about the bush: in a clear but tactful way, he expressed his interest and intentions to take the courtship beyond handholding, and inquired where my heart and mind were on that front. The question threw the ball back in my court: I stopped us both in our tracks as we were walking through downtown Tokyo, and said that this was, quite frankly, “uncharted territory” for me. I needed to have a conversation with myself first about where I was willing to go from here. 

— —

I’d reached a conundrum that so many of my Malay interlocutors in the field had struggled with: how to navigate this moral and ethical minefield of what I call in my work “halal intimacy”— that is, ways of being intimate (emotionally; physically; sexually) condoned by Islam, the state, and society. Malaysia enforces strict moral standards for its Muslim citizens with the enforcement of shari’ah criminal laws that make it illegal to even be in the same enclosed space with an unmarried member of the opposite sex “in a manner that arouses suspicion” (a crime known as khalwat); being caught fornicating (zina, roughly translated as “adultery” or having sex outside of marriage) is a different level of immorality and illegality. If caught engaged in khalwat or zina, the Muslim offenders could be slapped with a fine or jailtime. A Vice Prevention Unit (Unit Pencegah Maksiat) deployed by each state’s Department of Islamic Affairs (Jabatan Agama Islam Negeri) to conduct moral policing in public places and spot checks in budget hotels would make sure that all sexual and physical intimacy remain a conjugal privilege.  

I was not physically in Malaysia, and would not have been held accountable to these laws. Yet I would be held accountable to God, and was not sure I could face my creator five times a day, knowing that I had broken my covenant. But my existential crisis aside, I also had to ask myself if I had found in T a man worthy of my most sacred inner world. There were too many moving pieces here: on a logistical level, neither of us could be certain that we would be in the same country anymore after my fixed-term contract in Japan ends. Marriage seemed like the furthest probability in my mind— how would I tell my mother that I wanted to marry a Jewish Israeli man more than two decades older than I was? Even if T would not be entirely averse to marriage, how would he feel about conversion? 

I debated these questions with my female Muslim friends in Kyoto, who were also trying to design a blueprint for getting to the other side of this ethical minefield safely in the dating scene. For us, that “safe zone” was marriage, where we could build a safe emotional home with our person, and not have to worry about the spiritual risks of sexual intimacy that abound in the rampant dating and hookup culture we were surrounded by. I wanted to communicate all this to T, but I feared that he might take this as a rejection of his interest in me, and I would lose him. But losing myself would be much, much worse.  

I reached a firm resolution one night after seeing my Moroccan friend— a fellow comrade in arms in the battlefield of love. We both decided that women— and men— are entitled to place firm boundaries in a relationship (within reason), and it was inevitable that we Muslim women too would have some, particularly when it comes to sexual intimacy. Men come and go; God is with us forever. And if we lose one man in our attempt to stay true to who we are, then God can easily replace him with a better— a more understanding— one. In other words,  I had nothing to lose.  

— —

I sat T down after dinner one night in my studio, and took the plunge. I said, “I’ve had some time to think about it, and I’ve decided that if you and I are to get to know each other in the biblical sense… I would like for us to be bound by a sacred covenant.” T was silent, listening intently. I summoned the courage to continue, even though my heart was about to burst in my ribcage. 

“Look, we can have fun for a night or two, but I know what’s gonna happen afterwards: I ‘ll find myself in an abyss of despair, because I would have compromised things I hold dear to me to be with you. And by then, I wouldn’t know who I am anymore. You would have lost me.”  

He was quiet for a moment across the tiny foldout table. Finally, his reply— gentle and reassuring. “I understand completely. You do not need to justify yourself to me.” I breathed a deep sigh of relief. And then: “So do I need to get baptized the Muslim way?”

— —

T was born Jewish, and had once been “baptized” as a Christian when he was a student in Perth. In his  mind, embracing Islam would simply complete the course of his spiritual evolution in all the Abrahamic faiths. Not having to convince him to convert was a huge worry off my shoulders, but his possible conversion without conviction also filled me with doubt. Ideally, T should embrace Islam and make the proclamation of faith (the shahādah – that there is no other god than Allah, and that Muhammad is His prophet) based on exactly that: faith. If he converted because of me, would his conversion be merely a temporary initiation into the religion, or a lifelong commitment to it? And if he did embrace Islam, was I well-equipped to guide him on the right path?  

T made no pretense about his intentions behind conversion: he said he wanted to be with me, and if this is what was required of him, then so be it. But converting to Islam would not change his faith— or rather, the lack of it, he said. He would very likely remain a “MINO”—  “Muslim in name only”.  

I listened to his declared intentions and tried to imagine what our spiritual life would look like in the near and far future. As a practicing Muslim, I had always thought that I would marry a fellow practicing Muslim. This seemed to be one of those non-negotiables. My family— including my three older brothers who lived in Egypt for more than a decade, and who were all Azharites, having studied at the Al-Azhar University widely known as a prestigious centre of Islamic learning— also probably expected no differently. If I were to ever find the right Muslim man to marry, I imagined going on many worldly adventures together with my him, and also embarking on pilgrimages of the soul. We would raise our children in the Islamic faith, and celebrate Ramadhan (the fasting month; one of the holiest months for Muslims) and raya (Eid-ul-Fitr, the celebration after Ramadhan ends) together with our families.  

Some expectations, it became clear, had to be adjusted. I’d heard of too many inter-religious couples involving a Muslim and a spouse who was newly-initiated into the faith fall apart under the immense pressure of having the new revert live and breathe as a practicing Muslim. I didn’t want us to suffer the same fate. Would our religious differences tear us apart in the future? I wouldn’t know, but what I did know was that after a decade of studying Muslim marriages and polygyny in Malaysia, even couples of the same religious background could end up divorced, in an extramarital affair, juggling secret polygynous marriages on the side, or simply unhappy with their marriage. It was becoming rather obvious to me that worshiping the same God and sharing the same faith was the ultimate and only determining factor for marital happiness or longevity— what we, as mentioned above, call jodoh.  

Besides, I believe that faith should be a personal choice; and that belief in the faith should precede religious practice. I decided that if T were indeed to become Muslim for me, then I had a responsibility to welcome him into the faith gently. I could not impose the same set of religious expectations that I myself had been subjected to, having been born into Islam and socialized by my family and society to observe certain Islamic practices and beliefs. I knew so many born-Muslims who still struggle with the basic tenets of Islam, such as keeping five prayers a day. These expectations could deter a new revert away from the religion, rather than ease them comfortably into it.   

So who was I to deny a new member to join the faith of his own accord? The lips could lead the way, and the heart may eventually follow; God gives guidance to whom He pleases, and when He pleases.  

— —

With T’s promise of conversion, I felt more confident to tell my family that I’d intended to marry a Jewish man I met in Japan. My brothers received the news with some degree of surprise and fascination – that I would want to marry a non-Malay man was anticipated, given that I was, due to my life and education abroad, not entirely suited for a traditional Malay match. But to bring home a Jewish man from Israel was not at all expected. They were thrilled to welcome a Jew as their brother in the family, and as a brother in Islam. 

This gave me courage to break the news to my mother next, who was also not as fazed as I thought she would be. In fact, she was relieved to hear that I had at last found a companion for my nomadic life abroad; it was about damn time I got hitched! Ever the practical one, the first thing my mother thought about was what would I wear to my solemnization ceremony – the nikah? The ceremony would be just two months away, and there would not be enough time to get something made. 

There are, however, other more pertinent issues to be discussed when a Malay daughter tells her parents of her intentions to marry: has the hantaran from the groom been decided? And how much will it be? 

In Malay tradition, the hantaran (or the mahr in Arabic, as it is referred to in other Muslim communities) is the brideprice that the groom must gift to the bride at the time of the nikah, typically given in the form of money. It is usually negotiated between the parents of the bride and the groom, and the amount varies according to the bride’s education, work experience, both families’ socio-economic standing, and the like.  

I’ve always harbored ambivalent feelings about the hantaran. Long before there was even any talk of marriage from me, our relatives would sometimes speculate that my hantaran would be basically unaffordable for a man of similar age who might find me the least bit marriageable. It was like listening to stock brokers from Wall Street speculating on the market. The thought of having a price tag put on me annoyed me, because I felt like I was measured not by all the academic achievements and success I had worked so hard for, but rather by the amount of money a man was willing to pay for my hand in marriage. 

In the couple of times that I had intimated to T that my family hoped to uphold certain Malay marriage traditions – that is, a hantaran of some monetary value from his part – T had replied that he found this practice of the groom giving money to the bride to be something atrociously akin to “buying a bride”. “You, to me, are priceless,” he said; no amount of mahr would even come close to justifying my worth. In his mind, paying me a mahr would be severely undervaluing me; but to my mother’s mind, this would only be so, if I were married off without receiving a hantaran. 

I thought of doing away entirely with the hantaran, but pondered whether this was too radical a move for my Malay mother. I was her only daughter, and the last to be married, so I felt obliged to grant her the satisfaction of marrying me off according to our customary traditions. Us Malays say, “Biar mati anak, jangan mati adat” – literally translated as, “Better to have a child die, than to let traditions die”. But I wondered whether “tradition” in our case could be rejuvenated a little, to accommodate the diversification in the ways of thinking, living, and being from our impending union. 

After days of postponing, I finally bit the bullet and had the hantaran conversation with T. I was nervous and overwhelmed by the fear that the hantaran would make him change his mind about marrying me. He listened closely and calmly, but did not give a definitive answer that evening, only promising that he would mull it over when he got to Tokyo. A couple of days later, he took the Shinkansen back to Kyoto to give his response. His visits are usually planned and expected, but this time, it was neither. I could sense a foreboding feeling growing at the pit of my stomach. 

“What brings you to Kyoto this time?” I asked when we sat in my office on that warm September evening. He’d bought me my favorite tuna mayo onigiri, but I’d lost all desire for food. 

His body tensed a little before he began. “I came here to tell you that I won’t be paying the mahr.” My heart sank to the bottom of my ribcage. “I think it is distasteful, having to pay for a bride. And frankly, I am very disappointed that you didn’t shelter me from your family, knowing how I already feel about it. And you know, this actually makes me realize that we don’t really know each other. We’ve never lived together, so how do we know that we’ll be compatible? We are already so different in terms of culture, religion – what if these differences are insurmountable after all, and things don’t work out between us? Have you thought about that? Of course, I would be hurt too, but I’m afraid it would devastate you.” 

I took a couple of minutes to process what I’d just heard. My nerves were tethering at the edges, driven by the fear that I could very well lose this man I had slowly come to love and had begun to envision a future with. Whatever I say next may well determine the course of that future. 

“You mean the world to me,” I began as the words slowly came to mind, “and I would never want to make you feel like you have to give up yourself to be with me. If you have to give the mahr out of compulsion, then I don’t want it. But I am answerable to my family, which was why I raised the subject of the mahr anyway. They need to know that you are dependable, and that you have the means to take care of me.” 

Trying not to choke on my emotions, I continued: “And of course I’ve thought about how different we are culturally, religiously, and in age. It is all I’ve thought about since we met. I don’t know whether we will be compatible when we live together, but you knew my limitations from the start. The only way we can find this out is if we get married. And I don’t know whether we will work out – I don’t think anyone can tell – but I know that I’m willing to work on our differences and try this with you.” 

I communicated the sincerity and intensity with which I wanted to be together; if our hearts were on the same page, we’re good to go. He held and kissed my hand tenderly, having clearly received the message. My reassurances managed to assuage the fears he had about our future somewhat, but the hantaran issue remained unresolved. That night, he embraced me tightly as we parted ways, but I was so emotionally spent from our conversation that I could not reciprocate in his arms. Would my mother let this marriage continue, if there were no hantaran in the picture? 

I cycled home past midnight still feeling a little numb. When I got to my studio, I called a friend in Malaysia, Iman, to hash out how the conversation with T went that evening. Iman has known me for a decade, since we both moved to England together as graduate students. We bonded over our similar experiences of growing up abroad as Third Culture Kids, and of always feeling a little out of place in Malaysia. She was the perfect person to talk about this cultural crisis in our marriage negotiations. 

Iman knew very well that I didn’t ask the hantaran for myself or for the money, but because on some level, we still found ourselves unwillingly obliging and internalizing the societal expectations that have come to define us Malay daughters. Both of us cursed the shackles of culture and family expectations that bound us in our society, and wondered what was the way out. 

Iman and I also debated whether I had gone a little too far in making my Malay customary demands, or if I was actually making the bare minimum. T had already converted to Islam the week prior to this difficult conversation. I’d asked if he would wear the traditional Malay baju melayu at our nikah, and to attend the  Malay wedding reception (kenduri kahwin) we would have with my family and friends in Malaysia. To these he also agreed, albeit reluctantly.  

It was clear that the issue here was not so much the value of the mahr itself, but T’s (perhaps sudden) realization that despite having known me as a Western-educated, open-minded, well-traveled, financially independent, and religious Muslim woman here in Japan, I was still culturally very Malay. I would bring into our marriage my own social, cultural, religious, and familial customs and traditions that he was unfamiliar with. And more worryingly, there is the possibility that I might expect him to partake in these traditions, as I already had. This was a lot for the man to process, certainly in the brief six months of courtship we had before our marriage. 

Was I asking too much of the poor man, making him feel as if he was losing his own identity and “masuk Melayu” – becoming Malay – before we even tied the knot? I shuddered. That had not been my intention. But I also wanted him to partake in the celebration of my culture, and to think of it not as an obliteration of his identity, but rather as an addition to it. He would be a fool to marry an anthropologist, and think he won’t be in for a wild ride on a cultural roller coaster. 

T had made incredible sacrifices that gave me no doubt that he wanted to be with me. The hantaran dispute threw into sharp relief all the cultural and religious differences that threatened to divide us. But perhaps this was exactly the kind of conflict we needed to cultivate the conviction to move back towards each other, and to move forward together. 

— —

After a few days of deliberation, I accepted T’s decision not to pay the hantaran. He did not see the sense in it, and I did not see the sense in imposing our traditions on him. The possibility of money – of any value or currency – changing hands was now out of the question. Yet the mahr remains an obligatory requirement of the nikah that must be given to the bride. A woman’s right to the mahr is given such immense importance in Islam that she can deny her husband sexual access to her until he has given her the mahr in its entirety, as promised at the time of the nikah. But nowhere in Islam does it say that the mahr has to be money, as traditionally dictated by Malay expectations with the hantaran. 

Some of my friends in Kyoto recommended giving up the hantaran entirely, as I had my own income and could support myself financially. I did not want the mahr to be money masked as a customary gift – I could always earn money on my own. I saw the mahr as an opportunity for the groom to express not only his seriousness in taking the bride’s hand in marriage, but also his sincere affections in so doing. If chosen carefully and thoughtfully, the mahr can simultaneously offer economic and emotional security to the bride and her family. 

I came to realize that there was so much frustration and confusion around the hantaran, because I was trying to make us conform to societal expectations and traditions that others have laid before us. These certainly wouldn’t work for a Muslim-Jewish / Malay-Israeli union like ours. T and I are an unconventional couple; this meant finding an unconventional solution to our current predicament – that is, thinking beyond the prism / prison of tradition, and creating our own. I decided that I had to reduce the concept of the mahr down to its core purpose in Islam, and strip all the cultural baggage that had distorted its original intention. After much deliberation, even some serious consultation with my fellow anthropologist friends in Kyoto and across the Pacific, I came to an epiphany that I hoped could finally liberate us from the mahr maze we found ourselves in. 

A week before our nikah, T and I spoke on the phone again. This time I revisited the hantaran question, with the resolution to resolve it once and for all between us. 

“The more I think about it, the more it doesn’t make sense to me,” he said, immediately on his guard. 

“I know. And I respect that. But it is still a requirement for our marriage, so something must be given as mahr – though it doesn’t have to be money,” I replied. “So let me ask you: if there is one thing that you would like me to have as we begin our marriage journey together, what would it be? That way, you get to define what my mahr is, while still meeting the requirement in Islam. It would be something meaningful for both of us, and we would be creating our own traditions in a way.” 

“Well,” he replied hesitantly, “There is something I’d like to get you, but I don’t know if we have time to get it before the nikah.” 

“What is it?” I asked. 

“I want to get you a bicycle that’s even better than my own!” Knowing how much he loved his black Fuji carbon-framed bicycle, which he’d traveled the world with, I knew that this was not an empty promise. More than a gift, it was also an invitation for me to delve deeper into his passion for cycling, and for us to explore the world together on our bicycles. 

I thought back to the first month of our courtship in late spring that year. T had picked me up at Narita Airport when I returned from Bavaria for work, and we spent a few days in Matsumoto together. I’d barely recovered from jetlag when T suggested a cycling trip to a wasabi farm in Azumino, about 15 kilometers outside of Matsumoto. The spring weather was too beautiful to pass up this invitation; we rented an electric bicycle for me, and sped off into the countryside. The wasabi farm was a rather unremarkable destination in itself, but the ride through the green rice fields surrounded by the snow-capped Japanese Alps in the distance took my breath away at every turn. I knew I will forever cherish my memory of this trip like a treasure.    

There were no other tourists in sight when we reached the wasabi farm. Except for the sound of running water from a nearby stream, all was still, quiet, and tranquil. As we were walking hand in hand down a dirt path lined with sakura trees shedding the last of their petals that season, I remember feeling a sense of contentment that could only come from being in the right place, in the right company, at the right time. I didn’t know T very well yet then, but I had a presentiment that he could take me places, and open me up to new experiences. I was curious and eager to explore what laid beyond the horizon for us. I looked up at T to my left, and was surprised to find myself thinking, “I could see myself being with this man.” That was perhaps the moment when I knew that I was all in, and that there was no turning back.  

“I gratefully accept,” I replied to him on the phone, already looking forward to the many adventures on wheels we would have as husband and wife. “Maybe I could give you a mahr too, to honor you as my husband.” 

He laughed and said, “I would like just one Nurul…” 

— —

My family accepted T’s uncustomary choice for my mahr, and respected my decision to receive T’s offer. My mother and brother came to Kyoto in the last few days of summer for our nikah. We’d bent traditions and had a lot of difficult negotiations to come this far; T and I were thrilled to see “road bicycle” officially recorded as my mahr in our nikah certificate.  

Exactly 222 days after our nikah, we finally brought my mahr home with us. We have since cycled nearly 500 kilometers around Japan together before the heat and humidity of summer kicked in. On these cycling trips, I’ve had to summon a level of physical and psychological strength I never knew I had, but the sweet satisfaction of having completed a course after so much sweat was unsurpassable. It’s hard, but it’s worth it – perhaps a premonition of what married life is like, I mused to myself as we cycled through the lush green rice fields of Nagano on my mahr. Best of all, we have received many compliments on my shiny red mahr, and we are always proud to tell the story of how it came to be in my possession – in other words, the story of us. 

After our nikah, my colleagues at the office – fellow anthropologists who had become friends and mentors to me – used to joke that I am now finally getting to the heart of my research by doing “applied anthropology”. There is some truth to that. My marriage to this man is the most ambitious anthropological experiment I have undertaken so far, and perhaps ever will. My mind, heart, body, and soul are committed to this cause – to figuring out how to live with difference while nurturing deference; and to finding out what it means to be integrating our lives together, without losing sight of the particularities and peculiarities that make us who we are as individuals.  

Every time T and I have an argument about religion, politics, or any other incendiary topics that come up in the news, we reach a wall; on the other side of the wall is enlightenment, reachable only if we are able to engage the other’s worldview with kindness and respect. From these debates, we’ve learned that compassion is more important than consensus. We can agree to disagree; what matters most is the feeling of having been heard and understood, no matter how unconventional or radical we think our views might be. Then we can go back to enjoying our toast with milk tea at the breakfast table, as we move on to other news. 

Jodoh, I now understand, encompasses so much more than simply the pleasure of meeting another soul; it is actually a meeting with that one soul you never knew you were actually looking for all along. T and I had traveled the world extensively in search of a place we could call home. Unbeknownst to me, I had actually been following this man’s footsteps around the globe, before finally catching up to him in this corner of the world. It is here, in this small town nestled in the Japanese Alps, where we learn that home is not a physical place, but a person who had unknowingly been searching for you, too. 

And that is jodoh – that moment of clarity that came to me when I realized that all the roads I have taken in my life have led me to this man and to this moment; and that henceforth, as our lives finally merged, we would be sailing in the same ship heading towards the same shores... As we Malays say: “Kalau dah jodoh, tak ke mana” – if it is meant to be, you can’t run away from destiny.