When American recording artist Brittany Porter met Sultan Muhammad V, ruler of the Malaysian state of Kelantan, she thought their fairy tale romance led to an engagement. A year later, she discovered that the Islamic nikah ceremony was in fact a religious marriage, a revelation that came only after the country’s former monarch had cut off contact. “In April 2024, we went on our first trip together to Oman. I thought we got engaged there, because in my culture the big ceremony is a wedding which...