Rishta in Washington DC

How to read a Washington profile properly

Three jurisdictions, one metro: where you marry and who may perform it

In most American cities this question does not arise. Here it does, because the Washington metro spans the District of Columbia, the state of Maryland and the state of Virginia, and each of the three issues its own marriage licence under its own rules. A licence issued in one is valid only for a ceremony held in that one. So a couple in this region genuinely chooses: the masjid is in Virginia, the hall is in Maryland, the bride’s family lives on one side and the groom’s on the other, and the civil marriage will be registered wherever they decide to hold the ceremony.

What differs between the three is worth finding out rather than guessing, because people repeat what a cousin did four years ago and the rules move. Fees differ. Waiting periods between applying and marrying differ. Whether both parties must appear in person at the clerk of the court differs. What identification is wanted differs, and anyone previously married should expect to be asked for the date the divorce was finalised. One telephone call or one look at the website of the clerk of the court in the jurisdiction you have chosen settles all of it, and it should be done weeks before the date rather than in the last week.

Then the part specific to our community, which is who is permitted to solemnise the marriage. Maryland and Virginia both require the officiant to be authorised in that state, and a settled imam at an established centre normally is — but a visiting scholar, a relative who is a qari, or a young imam new to the country may not be, and that discovery on the morning of the nikah is a bad one. Ask the centre directly, in advance, whether the person leading the nikah can sign the licence, and if he cannot, whether the centre has somebody who can. The District has a provision that is unusual in America and extremely useful here: it allows a person of the couple’s own choosing to be authorised to perform a single ceremony. If the man you want to conduct your nikah is not registered anywhere, that route may solve it. Ask the District court what it currently requires.

Finally, and we say this on every American page because it keeps going wrong: the nikah by itself is a marriage before Allah, and it is not a civil marriage in the United States. Our United States page sets out why that matters and what the civil registration protects. Here the only addition is that with three jurisdictions in play it is easier than usual to end up with a beautiful ceremony and no licence filed anywhere. Fill in the nikah nama, and also get the licence, hold the ceremony in the jurisdiction that issued it, and keep the certified certificate. A spouse visa, a hospital, an insurer, an employer and a court will all ask for the civil certificate, and none of them will accept the nikah nama in its place.

Works at the World Bank: the status nobody explains

This city has a category of immigration status that exists almost nowhere else, and families in Pakistan routinely misread it because the employer sounds so impressive. Staff of the international organisations — the World Bank, the IMF, the development banks, the United Nations bodies — are not in America on a work visa of the ordinary kind. They hold a status granted because of the organisation, usually the G-4 category, and it behaves very differently from the visas described on our other pages.

Four things about it. It is tied entirely to the job: if the employment ends, the status ends, and there is no sixty-day grace period of the sort a technology worker in Seattle relies on. It does not lead anywhere by itself — years on this status do not accumulate towards permanent residence the way they do on other routes, and a man who has lived here for a decade on it may still have no green card and no automatic way to one. There is a narrow special provision for long-serving staff and certain family members, but it is specific, it has conditions, and it needs proper legal advice rather than community folklore. And, more favourably than the H-4 position described on our Boston page, the spouse of a G-4 holder can generally apply for permission to work, which for a professional woman marrying into such a household is a real difference and should be confirmed rather than assumed.

There is one more point and it is the one worth the whole section. A child born in America to parents on an international-organisation status is normally an American citizen, because those staff do not carry full diplomatic immunity. A child born to an accredited diplomat at an embassy may not be — children of foreign diplomats are one of the very few exceptions to birthright citizenship in this country. If either household is on a diplomatic visa, do not assume either way, and do not let anybody in the family assure you. Ask the consular or legal section of the posting and get the answer in writing before a child is on the way.

Which brings us to the diplomatic families, of whom Washington has more than any city on earth. A posting is typically three or four years and then the family moves to another country entirely. Marrying into that is marrying into a life of postings, and the sensible questions are when the current posting ends, where the service is likely to send them next, and whether the wife’s own status and her own career can travel. The same question in a milder form applies right across the development sector: a great many people whose profile says Washington spend two or three years at a time on field postings in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Ask where he will actually be living for the next five years, not where the office is.

And one deflating truth about this city, offered kindly. Washington pays in prestige. A fellowship at a famous institute, a post on Capitol Hill, a research job at a well-known think tank or a position at a respected non-profit can carry a title that impresses a family in Lahore and an income that would not cover a mortgage in Rockville. That is not a reason to refuse anybody. It is a reason to ask the plain question about what the household will actually have each month, in the region with the highest cost of living outside the two coasts’ biggest cities, rather than being satisfied by the name on the card.

Receptions, late dinners, and what the job actually asks of a marriage

A Washington career is built in the evening. Receptions, embassy events, conference dinners, delegation hospitality, fundraisers, launches: this is where the work of this city is genuinely done, and attendance is not optional for anybody who intends to rise. Which means a Pakistani household here has to settle something that households in Houston or Birmingham never face. There will be alcohol on the table. There will be mixed gatherings, handshakes, photographs, travel with colleagues of both sexes, and dinners that end at eleven. Pretending otherwise before the marriage and discovering it afterwards is one of the more avoidable ways a good match turns bitter here.

Draw the distinction clearly, because it is the distinction that lets most families settle this comfortably. Attending a reception where alcohol is served is not the same as drinking, and a great many observant Muslims in this city go, hold a glass of juice, do the work and leave. Some are not comfortable with that and keep to daytime meetings. Both are honourable positions. What is not workable is one side assuming the first and the other assuming the second, discovered at the first event after the wedding.

So put it on the table during the rishta conversation, in these terms. Does the job require evening attendance, and how often. Is a spouse expected to come — for some diplomatic and institutional roles the presence of a wife at certain events is close to assumed, and she is entitled to know that before she agrees, not after. If she goes, how does she want to handle what is served, and is her husband going to defend that position in front of his colleagues or quietly leave her to manage it. If she would rather not go, is he content to attend alone for the next twenty years, and will his family read her absence as a failing.

The same questions are asked of women in this city too, and they are asked far more harshly. A woman who works in policy, at an institution or on the Hill has the identical diary: the evenings, the travel, the delegations. If a family intends to ask her to give that up after the nikah, the decent thing by a long way is to say so before it, so that she chooses with her eyes open rather than finding out in the third month that the job she built was understood by everyone else to be temporary.

When she needs a religious divorce and he will not give one

This belongs on a Washington page because the national bodies that deal with it are reachable from here, and because nobody raises it until it is needed. A civil divorce in America is available to either party through the courts and no husband can prevent it; a woman can end a marriage legally whatever he says. But many women, and most of our families, also want the marriage dissolved religiously — and there, in the classical framework, the straightforward route runs through the husband’s talaq, or through khula, or through dissolution by a qadi. America has no Islamic court with legal authority. So where a husband refuses to pronounce talaq and refuses to agree a khula, a woman can find herself divorced in the eyes of the law and still married in the eyes of her community, unable to remarry, held in place by one man’s refusal.

Two things are worth knowing. The first is that this does have an answer: there are established scholarly councils and fiqh bodies in the United States that hear exactly these cases and issue a religious dissolution where the husband will not act, and the larger Islamic centres in this metro know how to refer a woman to them. She should not accept from anybody that nothing can be done, and her own family should make the approach with her rather than leaving her to it. The second is preventive and costs nothing at the time of the marriage. The Pakistani nikah nama contains a column by which the husband delegates the right of divorce to the wife, and our piece on the nikah nama clause by clause explains what it does and what crossing it out takes away from her. A couple marrying in America can also put into a written marriage agreement a clause naming a scholarly body to arbitrate if the marriage ends. Neither step predicts failure, any more than a seatbelt predicts a crash.

And a word to the men and to their families, because this is not only a problem for women to solve. Withholding a religious divorce to punish a woman, or to extract money, or because an uncle has decided she should be made to wait, is condemned by our own scholars in the plainest terms. It is not strength and it is not piety. If a marriage is over, both families can end it cleanly in a fortnight, return the haq mehr and the belongings that are owed, and let two people get on with their lives. Everybody in this metro knows a family that did the opposite, and nobody admires them for it.

One market across three jurisdictions, and the corridor beyond

Search this metro as one pool from the first day. The Virginia side, the Maryland side and the District are the same community: the same employers, the same centres, cousins on both sides of the river, and matches made across it constantly. If you are in Silver Spring or Rockville, the Virginia towns should be open in your filter immediately, and if you are in Herndon or Fairfax, so should the Maryland ones. Our Virginia page covers the Virginia towns in depth and should be read alongside this one.

Be realistic about distance inside the metro, though, because the map lies here. Gaithersburg to Woodbridge is fifty miles through the worst traffic in the United States and in the evening it is a two-hour drive; Bethesda to Tysons looks like nothing and the river crossings make it an ordeal. The rail network helps for the inner suburbs and is no use at all for the outer ones. So when a family says the two sides are close, ask them to say it at six in the evening. For practical purposes this metro has three arcs — the Dulles corridor and Fairfax belt, the Montgomery County and I-270 side, and the Prince William and Prince George’s side — and families within one arc see each other far more easily than families across two.

Outside the metro, this is the easiest place in America from which to widen a search. Baltimore is an hour, with a community of its own. Richmond is two hours south. Philadelphia is two and a half and New York is four, or less on the train from Union Station, and the whole north-east corridor is comfortable for a weekend sitting. Charlotte and Atlanta are a short flight. For Pakistan itself there are two airports: Dulles, with Gulf and Istanbul connections, and Baltimore for the cheaper onward routes, which is one reason families here travel home more often than families in the interior — and one reason the embassy, twenty minutes away, is worth using before you need it.