Renewing your wedding vows in the Maldives
I read the news story and saw the video of the European couple who went to ‘renew their wedding vows’ in the romantic Maldives. There they were smiling shyly as the sweet simple islanders blessed their love, not realising that the hotel employee conducting the ‘ceremony’ in the local language was alternately reading out hotel employment regulations and abusing them as infidels and pigs.
Maybe I’m a bad person, but I can’t help feeling a sneaking sympathy with the ‘celebrant’, and thinking the couple got what they deserved.
I mean, they had gone to the other side of the world to pay the nationals of a beautiful but poor country make a mockery of their own religion and customs by giving them a romanticised travesty of a local Muslim wedding ceremony, and pretend to bless and be happy for them. How much crasser and self-indulgent could cultural exploitation get? How stupid and insincere is it to “renew wedding vows” in a language you don’t know, by the ritual of a culture to which you have no kind of connection? (Actually, to my mind, the fact that the "script" for the ceremony was a couple of pages of employment regulations was sufficient comment in itself, without the abuse.)
And although the insults the celebrant was coming out with were unpleasant in the extreme, I felt a sneaking sympathy with him. If rich foreigners visited my community to indulge this kind of mawkishness, and my only way of earning a living was by pandering to their whims, I’d be desperately tempted to insult them too. It wasn’t nice, but by God it was understandable.