mmh Blog

My best friend is Turkish. Her now husband (!!) is British of Indian heritage. The care they put into making every guest feel seen, every culture honoured, every dietary need respected, every language heard, still makes me emotional … more than a month later!

I made mental notes, because I’m still an anthropologist even when on bridesmaid duties! Here are the 6 things that just made sense at my friend’s beautiful wedding!

✨ 1) 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞

When your family is spread across multiple continents, the question of where to get married is never neutral. My friends chose a destination wedding in a city that sat as close to a midpoint as they could manage; somewhere guests flying in from Turkey, from the UK, and from across the world (some guests came from Australia!) could all reach without one group bearing an unfair burden. Such as that of getting a visa. Many of us in mixed relationships have different visa permits or have families that require a visa to travel. This is a hidden burden that is still not spoken much about. But there is some brilliant research being done in Birmingham by Dr Melanie Griffiths (see e.g., Griffiths 2021).

The location they chose then wasn’t just beautiful, and in a fantastic European city, it was also an act of love, and a big fuck you to stupid UK travel restrictions!

✨ 2) 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐡 𝐓𝐮𝐫𝐤𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡

The ceremony was officiated by a mutual friend who spoke both Turkish and English fluently. Vows and speeches were also translated in both languages. This was incredibly powerful because it meant that no one needed relying on a neighbour's whispered translation, no one's family was reduced to observers. 

Languages are at the core of research on intercultural and interfaith couples (see e.g., Kostoulas and Motsiou, 2022; Grant, 2017). They hold so much of a person, and a family’s history. Language is also such an important element of a “mixed” child’s identity, something that connects them to their origins, and families. I’m not perfectly bilingual, but I’m so proud and glad to speak some Arabic and be able to know my bearings when I’m in Egypt. Seeing my two friends honoring their two languages from the very start, with the groom even sweetly trying to speak some Turkish, was such a deep sign of love and respect.

Oh, and also it made everyone cry and laugh at the same time!

✨ 3) 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐮 𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬

My friends aren’t “religious,” nor their families are, which is why I’m using “intercultural” to talk about their wedding rather than “interfaith.” Yet, they still decided to follow some dietary requirements of Islam, and Hinduism. There was no pork, nor beef served at dinner.

Why did they do that? This is where the anthropology geek in me comes out! Often, we think of “being religious” as a black and white matter: you either follow all the rules, or you don’t. But in reality, it’s rarely like this. It’s more like a spectrum, or a rollercoaster. What a person does with their religion continuously changes over life. In academia, we use the term “religiosity” to talk about this (on this concept see: Ammerman 2007, 2016). It indicates people’s everyday experience of religion, which rarely perfectly matches the orthodoxy of a given religion. Before any of you say that this is just an excuse or a “Western” thing … one of my favourite papers that explains the gap between religion in the every day, and orthodoxy is Schielke’s “Being good in Ramadan: ambivalence, fragmentation, and the moral self in the lives of young Egyptians” (2009). I’d highly recommend!

Back to the wedding! Though not being “religious” in the common sense of the word, my friends knew that some relatives wouldn’t have appreciated to see pork, and beef at the table – so they skipped them!

✨ 4) 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐚 𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐡 𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬

Each guest left with Turkish ceramics and masala chai (see picture above!) Two objects, from two worlds, sitting side by side on the table.

I've been thinking about this since I got home. There's something in the act of giving your guests a piece of both of your worlds that feels like a small manifesto. And again, such a radical act of love, a reminder that worlds can be brought together, can merge, can re-emerge as something new, and creative.

P.s., I have personally tied the rope on those tiny bottles!

✨ 5) 𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐟𝐢𝐭𝐬, 𝐚 𝐝𝐡𝐨𝐥 𝐝𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐬

The bride and groom wore western wedding attire for the ceremony. Then, after a quick change, they re-entered the reception in a stunning Indian wedding outfits! They did so to the live beats of a dhol drummer. If like me you had no idea about dhol drummers, here’s a YouTube link (see references below) for you! Needless to say, that they looked STUNNING in both outfits, and that we had the best time dancing.

Now, on dancing … all the guests learnt and Indian dance choreography to perform an impromptu sangeet. In Indian weddings this is a dance celebration when family and friends from both sides perform choreographed dances, and sing folk songs. We also all learnt and performed halay. This is a traditional Turkish folk dance central to wedding celebrations. Dancers form a semi-circle or line, link arms or hold pinkies, and move to the rhythm of music. I linked YouTube videos of both dances at the end of the blog post ;)

To this day, I still don’t know how we pulled them off, but we did! There’s a video proving it which I wish you could see.

The academic in me would now want to start a riff about embodied practices, and how culture and traditions live in us through things like dancing but … it’s a blog post, not a dissertation so email me if you want more on this!

Long story short, if you are planning your intercultural/interfaith wedding get your friends doing the dance(s), they’ll succeed in it!

✨ 6) 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐥 𝐞𝐲𝐞 𝐩𝐢𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Ok this is my favourite one. My best friend, the bride, pinned a little evil eye pin (in Arabic is nazar - see picture above) to her wedding dress. It is believed to protect from misfortune.

I noticed she was doing it as she was getting ready, and loved it immediately, not just as a Turkish detail but as an intercultural/interfaith one. The evil eye is a belief that sits across many religious traditions and cultures, it appears in Islam across North Africa and the Middle East, in Greek Orthodox Christianity, in Jewish tradition, and … I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, but you got the gist! It's one of those symbols that belongs to many worlds at once.

That, to me, is mixed heritage in miniature: not a grand reconciliation of contradictions, but a lived, embodied, everyday practice of carrying more than one world with you.

💙 𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓣𝓱𝓲𝓼 𝓦𝓮𝓭𝓭𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓣𝓪𝓾𝓰𝓱𝓽 𝓜𝓮 💙

I have spent years thinking and writing about mixed families, what they navigate, what they grieve, what they build. My whole research is about shifting away from the narration that intercultural and interfaith love is a “problem to manage.” If you’ve read my past blog posts you know that I hate, whole heartedly, that this is how we are usually represented by media, and most of academic discourse.

Well, sitting in this wedding was such a powerful reminder that we do really need to make our own representation! Intercultural and interfaith love is not a problem to be managed, it is a radical act of creativity.

My friends built a day that was full of their worlds, their families, their cultural-religious traditions, and they just invited everyone in to share.

That is the gift that mixed families bring, not just to their own households but to everyone around them: a refusal of the idea that you have to choose. They show us, in the most joyful possible form, that there is room for everyone, and for more than one thing to be true at once.

I’m so grateful to have been part of this special day. Raising a (virtual) glass once more to these beautiful souls! 🎉

𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦,

𝘋


What did your interfaith or intercultural wedding look like? Or what would you want it to look like? Share your story in the comments, or get in touch. I want to hear it!

If you're navigating the planning process for your own mixed wedding, explore our Resources page, or join the MMH community and connect with others who get it.

✉️𝑹𝒆𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒔 ✉️

➤ The article by Griffiths (2021) is available at: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-les/gees/research/deportability-families-report-2021.pdf
➤ The article by Kostoulas and Motsiou (2022) is available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050.2020.1715915
➤ The article by Grant (2017) is available at: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/opth-2017-0001/html
➤ Schielke's article, "Being good in Ramadan" (2009) is available at: https://www.samuli-schielke.de/schielke_being_good_in_ramadan_jrai.pdf
➤ Ammerman's work on religiosity and lived religion (2007, 2016) is available respectively at: https://academic.oup.com/book/25763 AND at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311342605_Lived_Religion_as_an_Emerging_Field_An_Assessment_of_its_Contours_and_Frontiers
➤ YouTube Link to see dhol drummers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIEjaOlsBcQ
➤ YouTube Link to see sangeet performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy6CTfiQQgk
➤ YouTube Link to see halay performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2YRxvPRrjk
➤ MyMixedHeritage Resources Page: https://www.mymixedheritage.com/resources