Cinta Suci Zahrana

Title translation: Zahrana’s Sacred Love

Siti Zahrana’s academical success makes her parents worried. Zahrana hasn’t married by her early thirties. There have been many men who solicited her, but she has refused them all politely.

Zahrana’s conflicting issues spring up: to follow her parents’ wish or to pursue her own dreams. Actually she has relented once. She turns down a teaching post at Gadjah Mada University. The reason, her parents who live in Semarang don’t want her to be away. So Zahrana teaches at a Semarang university and stays with them. Then she also passes up a doctoral scholarship opportunity from China.

Zahrana’s inner conflict winds up when Sukarman, a widower and a dean, proposes her upon his return from Thinghua University to receive an award. She turns him down albeit her parents’ disappointment. But Zahrana’s reason is simply because that dean is known to hold transactions with students who want to upgrade marks and even have sex with them. Plus, she also doesn’t think that she can be with someone who’s over 50.

Following her refusal, Zahrana gets fired but she has enough time to bid a resignation first. She then teaches at a vocational school. Realizing that she needs to get married soon, she still believes that she should pursue a higher education once she has a husband. An advice comes from a friend’s relative who is a head of a pesantren. He matches Zahrana with a young man with a humble profession, a crackers seller. This suits Zahrana, so she commits herself to devote her life to Allah through her household.

Woe is her, the future husband dies after a train crash not far from the kampong. Not long after that, her long-ailing father passes away on account of a heart disease. Zahrana feels she can die any moment. Sitting at home, dumbfounded, she receives visits from her friends and relatives. One of her visitor is a doctor who once treated her. She has a son called Hasan whose undergraduate thesis is supervised by Zahrana. It turns out that the doctor’s visit also helps Zahrana heal.

She tells Zahrana that Hasan is going to propose her. Zahrana agrees on one condition: if Hasan really means it the marriage must be held that night after tarawih prayers. Requirement fulfilled. At seven o’clock that night Zahrana and Hasan are bound in holy matrimony at a mosque, witnessed by the congregation of tarawih. The first night of Ramadan thus marks the end of Zahrana’s misery.