Mixed Marriage: More than love

At a recent exchange of marriage vows between two Indians in their late 20s, one a Hindu and the other a Muslim, I couldn't help but think of the way the former Yugoslavia used to be before religious fanaticism splintered its unity in diversity into nothingness in the early 1990s.

Yugoslavia had emerged after the Second World War as a six-republic federation of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzigovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonian and was home of the three faiths of Islam, Christianity and Catholicism, both Orthodox and Roman for nearly half-a-century. According to experts, Josip Broz Tito, the founding father of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and a Croat-Slovene himself, angered the Serbs by granting autonomy to the north-eastern province of Vojvodina and the southern province of Kosovo in 1974.

But as long as he lived, Tito was proud to be the leader of one country with eight ethnic minorities, five nationalities who lived in six republics surrounded by seven neighbours speaking three languages and practicing different religions. After the death of Tito in 1980, ethnic nationalism broke into bloody war among the republic's various groups and relations between the succeeding states continue to be tense to this day.

The situation in multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzigovina with a significant percentage of Muslims was most bizarre and equally tragic with ultra nationalists claiming that the Muslims were Turks and did not belong to Bosnia! The truth is that Bosnia Muslims are Slavs who after 500 years of Ottoman rule had converted to Islam. To distinguish themselves from Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats, these Slavs were named Bosnia Muslims.

This is the cause of much confusion as many Bosnia Muslim Slavs are secular and have married fellow Serbs and Croats. But once the pan Slavic state of former Yugoslavia collapsed, many mixed marriages ended as well. As I watched Yugoslavia dissolve overnight into a battlefield from across the border in Austria, it was not very difficult for me, an Indian Muslim, to identify with the plight of Bosnia Muslims, plenty of whom fled to Vienna and continue to live here as refugees, nursing a broken spirit.

The Hindu Muslim marriage that I attended in India seemed like a bonding back of the supreme idea of unity and a golden opportunity for members of two different communities to meet and to experience for themselves each other's cultural and religious traditions.

Professor Paul F. Knitter, author of No Other Name, who spends all his time exploring how religious communities of the world can cooperate in promoting human and ecological well-being, describes mixed marriages as the interaction of mutual presence, speaking, listening and witnessing the commitments, the values, and the rituals of others. This public display of mutual love and respect is the only way we can live in peace with each other," said an elderly member of the bride's family at the Indian wedding.

Another guest was inspired to quote Muhammad Iqbal, one of India's greatest poets: "Mazhab nahin sikhata apas mein bair rakhna, Hindi hain hum watan hai Hindustan hamara... (Religion does not teach to discriminate. We are all Hindi and Hindustan is our homeland).