The Wedding that United Their Muslim and Jewish Communities

Under a huppah in a cornfield in Glenwood, Iowa, Sammi Rose Cannold and Safiullah Rauf took turns reading excerpts from a notebook that she had written in nearly every day for several months.

“Day 32 of captivity. I dream of the day that I get to read this sentence back to myself, while sitting next to you on a porch somewhere, or something stupid like that,” Mr. Rauf read from Ms. Cannold’s notebook. “But today’s the first time since this started that I have fully doubted if that day will come.”

In December 2021, two months after becoming a couple, Mr. Rauf, an Afghan American humanitarian who goes by Safi, was taken hostage by the Taliban. Ms. Cannold wasn’t sure she would ever see him again.

Even better than sitting on a porch, on July 20, Mr. Rauf recited that sentence as they were married in front of 300 guests. His father, an imam, had led them through the nikah, the Muslim marriage ceremony. Ms. Cannold’s 98-year-old Jewish grandmother read a variation of the seven blessings in Hebrew and English.

Mr. Rauf was dressed in a sherwani, and Ms. Cannold wore a lehenga — outfits they had purchased on a recent trip to India while working on the first film for their production company, Beyond the Barricade, which aims to produce work that builds bridges between Jewish and Muslim communities.

Truthfully, the two, both 30, feared they would not be able to end up together. “We had both been taught in life, not by anyone in particular, but by society, that the two of us aren’t really supposed to be together,” said Ms. Cannold, a Jewish Broadway director who grew up in Armonk, N.Y. Mr. Rauf, a Muslim refugee who grew up in a camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, relocated to Omaha at age 17.

But if there’s anything their wedding embodied, it was the notion that love triumphs. Ms. Cannold joked that their wedding was like the “basis of a giant sitcom”: “One-third Muslim Afghans, one-third Jews, and one-third gay men who work in theater, all in a cornfield in Iowa.”

Their story began in August 2021. After the Taliban took over Kabul, Mr. Rauf and his two brothers scrambled to do what they could to help Afghans in need. He had been planning to attend medical school that fall, but he put that dream on hold to start a nonprofit called Human First Coalition, helping at-risk Afghans evacuate the country.

At the same time, Ms. Cannold was trying to help a friend, Zarifa Adiba, evacuate her family from Afghanistan. Ms. Adiba was a co-conductor of the Zohra orchestra, Afghanistan’s all-women orchestra.

About a week into their efforts, Ms. Cannold saw a segment on CNN about Mr. Rauf’s work. She reached out to him seeking help, and he explained that since he was trying to help thousands of people evacuate, her best bet was to volunteer for the organization. He sent her the address of the operation center in Washington, unaware that Ms. Cannold lived in New York. With no sleeping bag or hotel arrangements, she took a train to Washington.

When she walked into the center on Aug. 27, 2021, at about 6 p.m., a giant operation was in full swing to transport 500 Afghans to the airport in Kabul.

At around 1 a.m., they were all bleary-eyed, and Mr. Rauf asked her if she wanted to take a walk and get some fresh air while fielding calls for the operation. They ended up at the luminescent Lincoln Memorial, the light reflecting off the nearby pool.

“Suddenly, we were like, ‘In another world, this would be like a really weird first date,’” Ms. Cannold recalled.

Ms. Cannold stayed in Washington for a week and a half, sleeping at the operation center or at a hotel that offered rooms to volunteers. She then returned regularly from New York to continue volunteering while directing three new musicals.

They got to know each other better, and Mr. Rauf learned about her work in theater. He had never heard of Broadway before. (“I’m a theater convert,” he said.) Their mutual attraction grew stronger.

One night in mid-September, she and Mr. Rauf were working late with a team member, who eventually realized that he was something of a third wheel.

“He was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to go work at home,’” Ms. Cannold recalled. During a break, the two went out to the balcony and kissed.

On Oct. 3, 2021, Ms. Adiba’s family got on a flight out of Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. The following morning, Mr. Rauf called Ms. Cannold on the phone and asked her out officially.

Later that month in London, Mr. Rauf saw his first musical: “Les Misérables.”

“He came out of the theater singing the songs on the sidewalk,” said Ms. Cannold. “And I was like, ‘Oh, thank God. He likes theater.’” (Mr. Rauf found the musical aspect of it similar to Bollywood, which he grew up watching in Pakistan.)

In December, Mr. Rauf traveled to Kabul to do some on-the-ground humanitarian work with his team there. He was guaranteed amnesty and protection by the Taliban.

But on the morning of Dec. 18, members of the Taliban’s intelligence agency rounded up the seven foreigners at their hotel, including Mr. Rauf and his brother, Anees Khalil, and told them they needed to ask a few routine questions. But as soon as they were inside the headquarters, their phones were taken away, and they were escorted to a basement. For the first three days, they were all separated and didn’t hear a word from anybody. For the first two weeks, none of their loved ones had a clue where they were.

“For all we knew, he was dead,” Ms. Cannold said.

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Eventually, Mr. Rauf and his brother were in the same 8-foot by 8-foot cell. Together, they were able to persuade guards to give them information and smuggle phones into their cell.

Twenty-five days in, on Jan. 11, 2022, Ms. Cannold received a text from an Afghan number in all capital letters: “Hi, how are you? I love you very much.” He then called her, and they spoke on the phone for the first time, for four minutes. She told him that everyone was working very hard on his behalf. “It was extremely emotional,” she said.

Then, for six weeks, she didn’t hear from him at all. During that time, he went on two hunger strikes, he said. Eight days into his first hunger strike, he said he was tortured by a group of guards.

Starting about 70 days in, he was able to consistently communicate with Ms. Cannold. “We would have these long conversations at night on the smuggled phone,” she said. “Our bond was really cemented during Safi’s captivity.”

In March, Ms. Cannold found herself in a head scarf at the airport in Doha, Qatar, “trying to be respectful,” she recalled, finally meeting her boyfriend’s parents for the first time without his presence. They had no clue who she was, and while she spoke English, they spoke Pashto. It was his sister-in-law who explained to them that she was their son’s girlfriend.

The four stayed in a condo together in Doha, where negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban were taking place. Though Mr. Rauf’s parents were initially disappointed to learn that his girlfriend was not an Afghan woman, they all got close as they worked together to secure his release. Small moments, like her asking to help his mother cook, helped forge their relationship.

Over 100 days into his captivity, a deal was struck, and on April 1, 2022, he landed at a U.S. military base in Doha. She stood waiting in a nearby hotel, and they reunited. “We just kept saying, ‘Can you believe it?’” she said.

Not wasting any time, he immediately moved into her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

Just after midnight on April 1, 2023, one year after his release, the couple took a walk to Lincoln Memorial to recreate the first night they met. Mr. Rauf proposed with a custom ring that included a piece of metal that he had obtained from the lock on his prison cell door.

Ms. Cannold graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in theater and performance studies. She also received a master’s degree in arts education from Harvard. She directed “How to Dance in Ohio” on Broadway, “Endlings” and “Evita.”

Mr. Rauf graduated from Georgetown with a bachelor’s degree in human science. In 2021, he helped evacuate thousands of at-risk Afghans, including 1,400 U.S. citizens, and has since continued to provide humanitarian aid to Afghans in need. Both have made it on the Forbes “30 under 30” lists: Ms. Cannold under “Hollywood & Entertainment,” and Mr. Rauf under “Social Impact.”

The couple are also keen on using their love story as a way to call attention to Gaza. “The degrees to which we have touch points to the present moment are greater than just the fact that we are Jews and Muslims. It is that we are also a hostage family. We have empathy for all civilian families affected by captivity on both sides,” Ms. Cannold said. “And at the same time, we are appalled by the exponentially growing number of Palestinians that have been killed, injured, displaced by the Israeli government.”

Her devoutly Jewish grandmother, Beverly Cannold, and his devoutly Muslim mother, Halima Rauf, have become close friends. “We have watched our families come together and hope to pull from that as a microcosm for how we hope to affect change on a larger level,” Ms. Cannold said.

On July 20, the couple were married by Haji Abdul Rauf, Mr. Rauf’s father, at the Fountains Ballroom in Glenwood, Iowa — about 25 miles from Omaha, Nebraska, where nine of Mr. Rauf’s siblings and their families reside. Abdul Rauf became an imam in Logar, Afghanistan, but he also got ordained by the American Marriage Ministries for the occasion.

Jhanay Johnston, 31, a close friend, said that as the sun set on the wedding day, she and her husband, Darren Johnston, watched the festivities in awe.

“This is what it’s all for,” she recalled thinking. “As a first-gen American myself, being in a room in the fields of Iowa, coming from New York and seeing Muslims, agnostics and Jewish people coming together and just celebrating love. Folks who spoke little English or not all, all talking to each other, it was just a really beautiful moment. This is what makes me proud to be American. This, to me, felt like the American experiment gone right.”

On This Day

When July 20, 2024

Where The Fountains Ballroom in Glenwood, Iowa

The Seating The couple arranged the seating chart so that most tables had a few Jewish family members, a few Muslim family members and a few theater friends.

“I think I heard from four or five of my family and friends that they were invited for breakfast the next morning to an Afghan household by their seatmate,” Ms. Cannold said. “Which is the most Afghan thing ever.”

The Bottle Dance Mr. Rauf and two friends performed a dance from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” “For theater people, it’s a very iconic dance,” Ms. Cannold said. In the show, the dance is performed during a Jewish wedding. “The idea that you have a Muslim doing it as a tribute to his Jewish wife is very meaningful,” she added. “That was when my 98-year-old grandmother burst into tears.”

The Henna Dance During the reception, Mr. Rauf’s cousins and sisters danced to “Nakreeze Attan,” which translates to “henna dance,” as they carried trays of henna to the stage where the couple was seated. Mr. Rauf’s mother squeezed a bit of henna onto the palms of the couple. According to an Afghan tale, whoever has the darker henna the next morning loves the other person more. When asked whose henna was brighter, Mr. Rauf flashed his palm.