Yeah, I thought about saying “…in any Muslim society?” Maybe I should have.
Lets not go overboard here. I deliberately avoided any reference to Christianity in my OP. I have often heard the term Western society and western democracy and western culture and no one has felt the need to point out that British society is remarkably different from Dutch society nevermind Japanese society or that many other subcultures exist in the west.
I’ve been to a lot of Irish-Catholic weddings, nobody has ever fired an AK-47 off at the reception.
I was in Egypt last September. There was a wedding reception at the airport hotel in Cairo that I stayed in. The hotel guests who had rooms adjacent to the garden where the reception was held said the wedding reception party was quite loud. Although there were no AK-47 fired, AFAIK.
One of the funnier things I’ve seen was a Pakistani buddy running around looking for visine and mouthwash to hide the evidence of the beer and pot we’d spent the afternoon consuming before he went home to break the Ramadan fast with his family.
Needless to say, he wasn’t a very good Muslim.
As an infidel among infidels and resident of the Great Satan, I would actually consider that the best possible kind of Muslim.
Yep, pretty much.
And I’ve drank with practicing Muslims - they just weren’t terribly observant in that regard ;). I remember chatting several years back with an urbane young Canadian Muslim of my acquaitance ( not Iridium, who is actually apostate ) at the Cliff House about her faith. Believed in God, prayed, attended a mosque, didn’t eat pork. But dated a nice white agnostic, drank ( lightly ) and dressed like any young, fashionable twenty-something woman. She didn’t believe in getting shit-faced, but figured as long as you weren’t getting overly intoxicated, she was following the spirit of law, if not the letter.
Muslims come in shapes, sizes and iterations. And very every hardcore Wahabi that shuns music, drinking and viewing unrelated adult women, there are plenty of others who will let their hair down. It ain’t just Christians swilling all that vile arak in the Levant :).
Here, a link to some poems by the late Ayatollah Khomeini ( the Persians are a thoroughly poetry-besotted people in general ). Not the liberal and conflicting usage of wine in his poems 
:
People are compex, even cranky old zealots.
They are called weddings.
Honestly, how often do formal events like the above happen in the west these days? Once in the spring for prom and once in the fall for homecoming, and the occasional awards dinner for the older crowd. Most parties and ‘courtships’ are informal affairs. I also have several Muslim friends at college and they party just as much as any other group, though most of them dont drink. They love their hooka though.
That makes me look at Iran in a whole new way. Very informative.
Perhaps you’re right and the late poet and mass murderer Ayatollah Khomeini was a wine imbibing party animal deep down inside.
However, there is this statement made by him regarding wine from the ‘The Little Green Book’ Torrent.pdf
You’ll find it on page 14 of the Green Book, a free 242 Kb PDF which you’ll need to download to read. (WARNING – despite its small size the download could take hours).
Khomeini’s Green Book is, according to the site: -
Eh? I never said any such thing, nor did I mean to imply it. Far as I know a drop of alcohol never passed his lips. It may merely have been a metaphor for any forbidden pleasure. Though those poems were written when he was in his 20’s and student, so who knows - he may have had a sinful moment or two.
My point was more the cultural milieu it illuminates. If someone known for his fanatical piety ( and he was functionally a “seminary” student doing religious research when he wrote them ) can write poetry which so frequently and prominently mentions wine in glowing ( if ambivalent ) terms, what does it say about the greater, less pious society around him?
I did not mean to imply that you meant to imply that Khomeini was a closet toper. I merely put forward another wine related aspect of his complex, if highly predicable, character. 
In a society that separates boys and girls ,there is still sex. At weddings it is men dancing with men.
I saw a program on TV last year saying there is a lot of gay sex in Muslim societies. It is not talked about to Christian societies,
I attended an evening gala at the Indonesian consulate in Houston last year, complete with formal wear, live music, dancing, food, etc. The vast majority of attendees were Muslim. There was no alcohol served, though one could go out into the parking lot and find dozens of people pouring liquor and wine into cups to take inside. Also, the guest of honor, some Indonesian diplomat, was visibly drunk. The event resembled any similar event in American culture. As stated before in this thread, there is no monolithic Muslim culture. I’ve had a lot of exposure to Indonesian culture, and have been surprised to find out how similar Indonesian urban culture is to American/European/Indian urban culture. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation. I would guess that Indonesian party life is closer to the American version than to another Muslim country such as Saudi Arabia.
(My wife’s step mom, father, and brothers are Muslim, step mom being Indonesian)
If you talk to a bunch of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan as I have, they mention this with interesting regularity as well, and the way they have described it to me is that “women are for babies, boys are for fun” being the commonly held view…not saying that I believe that this is pervasive, but as to the OP’s post, Muslims party, and since they are human, some are also gay. I suppose they just have to be more circumspect about it.
Most of the Muslim weddings I have been to here in the Arabian Gulf are single-sex affairs - I go to the women’s wedding party, while my husband traipses off to the men’s wedding party.
I have found the women’s parties to be thoroughly boring affairs, consisting of a bunch of over-dressed (or maybe that should be under-dressed), overly made-up women dancing with each other to belly-dance style music and eating sweets and nuts for 2-3 hours (starting only from 8:30-9pm at night), before the DJ (separated from the women by a curtain) announces the arrival of the happy couple at around midnight. The wildly coloured birds of paradise then madly wrap themselves back up in their drab black covers before the bride and groom parade around the room then sit on the stage to be greeted and congratulated by all the women. (It is at this stage that the groom usually presents all the wedding jewellery (part of the wife’s dowry) to the bride)
The groom then leaves after about 30 minutes, at which point dinner is served (yes, at about 12:30am) and the ladies go back to gyrating like cheap hookers for each other. I try to avoid going to the things nowadays - very, very boring!!!
ETA: definitely no alcohol at these things!
Grandmother used to rent rooms and, soon, word of mouth had given her a steady stream of young Iranian men attending the nearby university.
They would go through elaborate planning and rituals to prepare for the weekend nights, when they would go out drinking. The planning and rituals concerned what to eat and drink, and when, and what remedies to have available. They explained it all to me in great detail. The idea was that you could get roaring drunk without getting a hangover, if you understood and did all this right. Allah wasn’t involved at all - it was more about aspirin and vitamins and fruit juices and so forth.
Several posters have pointed out that it is very difficult to generalize, but I think it is possible for some broad outlines to be sketched.
In many conservative societies, inter-gender mixing might happen, but not as part of a “society” event. In other words, at social occasions that have the veneer of sanction from the elder generation, the sexes will be separated, even if they are in the same building. When grandma’s not looking, though, other things might be going on.
Generally speaking, I think that in a lot of countries, the richest and the poorest have the fewest societal rules to contend with. It’s the people in the middle who are burdened with ensuring that they have good reputations.