Re: …Nikah vs. Engagement…
I have a funny story on this topic again. Really. Promise this is the last one, and no more. :scouts honor vala icon:
A very close friend of mine was coming to America for the first time, and I went to the airport to pick him up. Now, this guy is an absolute gem of a person, very straigh forward, plain speaking and this was the first time he had travelled out of Pakistan. *Mausoof *had his nikah done in Pakistan, but no rukhsati date was set. Anyway, so while filling out the immigration form, he marked the checkbox which said “Married”.
The immigration officer was a friendly kinda guy, and just made an off-hand remark “sir, your wife didn’t accompany you on this trip?”.
Now, any person who had travelled around would tell you to keep your answers brief, when talking to immigration folks, and in this case a perfectly logical answer would be “No, she couldn’t come”.
Per nahi, this hazrat replied “oh, actually, we have a marriage contract, but we don’t actually live together!”
“Really?”, the officer was curious, “and why is that?”
“Well, you know we have done our nikah”, my friend explained, “but we don’t have rukhsati yet, and in our culture, unless you have rukhsati, you can’t live together”.
The officer was now totally confused “What is nikah and what is rukhsati and why can’t you live together”
Oh well… to cut a long story short, it took 15 minutes to explain the whole deal to the immigration officer, and just to understand how well he explained; at the end of the whole ordeal, the immigration officer, very sympathetically shook his head and said “Sir, I believe you have a made a mistake. You shouldn’t have checked the ‘Married’ column. Seems more like you are ‘Separated’!”
When my friend came out and told us the whole story, we were really ROTFL. 
I don’t think he ever bothered to explain this nikah-and-no-rukhsati thingy to anyone ever again.
