Reciprocity not in the Islamic dictionary?

Another one of those "Internet romance" stories has come along: a 16-year old girl from Michigan met 20-year-old Abdullah Jinzawi of the West Bank on MySpace.com; they decided to get married; and she slipped out of her parents' house and onto a plane for the Middle East. True love lost another round, though, as the old fuddy-duddies in the State Dept. caught up with her in Jordan, seized her passport, and sent her home.

Why do I mention it, and why under the title above? The parents of the young man knew all about the tryst, in fact the mother went to the airport to pick up her new daughter-in-law to be, and according to the news report, the family says they "had no idea she acted without her parents' consent."

Would any such arrangement between Muslims have gotten far, without the parents of both parties contacting each other? A thousand times no. That is, if the youthful initiative developed at all--orthodox Muslim views would condemn the young woman as a hussy of the first order, to be chatting with young men on the net and discussing love. Evidently Mr Jinazawi's parents had no scruples about encouraging the child of Western parents to deceive her parents, come to another country to marry, and change her religion, all without their knowledge.

But then, the news report, goes on, "Sana Jinzawi [mother of the young man] said five other Jericho residents had brought American girls to Jericho in recent years and that all of them now live with their wives in the U.S." So maybe the gleam in the would-be groom's eye wasn't really true love. Young Mr Jinazawi had told the 16-year-old that he was a "wealthy businessman," but the reality is that he works in his father's business delivering goods to mini-markets. There might have been buyer's remorse on both sides, though, since the young woman might well have thought better of her promise to "convert to Islam and wear the head covering and live with us and adopt our culture" once she learned more about how much her teenaged life would have been changed.