Page:The young Moslem looks at life (1937).djvu/108

 priests have been the legal as well as the religious authorities. To perform the marriage ceremony was one of their exclusive rights. Today regulations have been so changed that recently two converts from Islam were married by a Christian clergyman in the mission chapel with a Christian ceremony. What a change from the old days, when often the bride was forced into the marriage knowing her husband to have other wives, or to be twice her age.

But let me describe the typical Moslem wedding of my good friend and former pupil in the Teheran Girls' School—Fatima Ahi. When we arrived we were ushered through a passageway into the courtyard.

I wish I might give you the feel of it all at once. Excitement, gayety, flowers, fountain, music, dancing, bowings, twitterings, smiles—and yet all with a dignity, a ceremoniousness, a suppressed noisiness that seems only to be achieved by the Oriental. In the center of the court is a lovely pool with a playing fountain, surrounded by flowers blooming in a dignified formal border. A row of chairs with a table in front of every second one is ranged primly around three walls of the garden, the ones at the back facing the veranda of the house. French doors open off this porch into a reception room. Although there are vacant chairs in the garden we are honored by being ushered into the drawing room or, as they call it, the guest room. The room is arranged in the same formal manner as the garden, chairs lining the walls, small tables in front of them. There is a mantel decked in bright silk and holding stiff bouquets. There is a center table covered with a beautifully embroidered red felt on which is a basket of flowers, cut and wired in the conventionally stiff Persian style. There is an empty chair just under the mantel which we feel with excitement is intended for the bride.

The bride's sister is leading us and we crowd by the seated dowagers to our places very near the chair. After