Zakiya-Luna Siddique, 28, trainee doctor, and Harris Siddiqi, 29, banker, will marry today
“If I were a guy I’d be Harris,” declares Luna, who met her husband-to-be in May 2010. “Our core values are exactly the same.” High up the list comes a shared faith. Both felt it crucial to marry a Muslim. Brought up in Copenhagen Harris also sought a wife who was culturally at ease in the West.
“I see myself in Denmark as a very integrated Muslim guy but it is hard to find a female equivalent,” he explains.
He was delighted to meet Luna. “She is a good blend of East meets West. Luna is very pretty, strong-willed, well-educated and smart. We are partners. We stand shoulder to shoulder.”
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“Harris is not intimidated by me,” says Luna, a trainee surgeon who after studying at Imperial College, London went to Yale in 2008 to research cancer tumours. She was working in Miami, when she met Harris during a four-day trip to London to visit her younger sister. “Luna’s sister had lived in the same building where I’d lived in Baker Street when I moved to London four years ago,” says Harris. “We first met in the lift and would meet up socially. She sent me a text and said ‘my sister is in town and we’re going for drinks and dinner.’ ”
Much taken with Luna, Harris asked for her number. She gave him an e-mail address instead. His first message was not a success. “He sent me an email with loads of typos! I’m quite precise and Harris is very laissez-faire,” says Luna. Then, a couple of days later, having obtained Luna’s number from her sister, he sent her a long text.
“I felt a bit sorry for him. I was doing a crazy shift and it ended at 1am UK time — around 8pm in Miami. I used to call my friends the whole time, so I called him back,” says Luna. “He didn’t pick up but then he called back and we had a two-hour conversation.”
From then on, Luna would ring Harris for two hours each night. At 3am UK time he would stumble into bed. At 7am, Luna would call again as Harris made his way to work. Due to finish her job in the US on June 30 last year, Luna had planned to spend time travelling the West Coast before returning to England to start a new job. That was pre-Harris. After their six weeks of daily phone calls, and speaking via Skype, Luna opted to fly straight home. She arrived on July 2 at 9am and by that afternoon had met up with Harris. “It was the first time I got a call from Luna on a UK number and it started to feel more real,” says Harris. He was worried that there might be no chemistry. In fact from then on they hardly spent a day apart.
Luna realised how serious things were that summer when Harris announced that for her 28th birthday in September he’d take her to Copenhagen. “In our culture family is really important,” she says. “It’s ingrained in us that you are not just marrying for yourself but for your extended family.”
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Her BA flight was cancelled, and she arrived late. Harris was anxious too: “It was the first time I’d brought a girl to meet my parents.”
Luna hit it off at once with Harris’s dad and soon found that she was very like his mother. “My mum is a very strong, independent woman,” says Harris. “And when my Danish friends came around she would always cook for all of us. Luna does that too. I felt at home with that.”
Both sets of parents had previously tried to set their respective offspring up with potential partners. “Balancing a stressful job and trying to keep your personal life intact, is very hard. And then you meet the right person,” Luna says.
Harris proposed the weekend after Valentine’s Day this year, when Luna had come to visit him for breakfast. “Harris knows what I’m like — that I didn’t want to be taken away to Paris. I like to go for a holiday but not because I want to be impressed,” says Luna.
Their Muslim marriage or Nikah took place on April 2 in Regent’s Park Mosque. Today, exactly a year since their first “official” date, they will wed at Wrest Park, in Silsoe, Bedfordshire, in the Orangery. One hundred and seventy guests, including 40 of Harris’s relatives from the US, will join them for a Muslim blessing, a civil ceremony, fireworks and a seven-course “Mogul” feast. The honeymoon will begin on September 1, the day Harris turns 30.