On your mark, get set… get married
He is getting on my nerves, said a young unmarried Pakistani woman. She was referring not to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's recent resort to military courts in Karachi and Sindh, but to the 'prohibitions on marriage' he chose to impose through a notification issued in late November.
The new order, as originally reported in the press, said that all marriage ceremonies for the next three years will have to take place in the period between two of the five daily Muslim prayers of Asr and Maghrib. The Asr prayers are said in the late afternoon and the Maghrib prayers at sunset. Effectively, it leaves people—depending on the time of the year they choose to get married—between one to two hours in which to get it over with.
The order made an allowance for weddings for which invitation cards had already been sent out, but strict implementation is planned for after the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Fitr in the third week of January. A day after the notice was issued, a spokesman clarified that the government did not intend to restrict wedding times to between the Asr and Maghrib prayers, adding that "all" it wanted was to ensure that wedding ceremonies were held before sunset.