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Brittany Porter said she went through a Muslim marriage ritual with Kelantan Sultan Muhammad V, thinking it was an engagement ceremony
Published: 2:06pm, 6 Nov 2025
Updated: 2:40pm, 6 Nov 2025
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 we planned for January 2025. So I was confused. In Oman they brought an imam out and I did the whole conversion, but he didn’t teach me all that much about Islam,” said the California native, who is now releasing music inspired by her break-up.
Porter, 30, said that she only recently learned that a
nikah constitutes a legally binding marriage under Islamic law. The aspiring pop singer has since broken her silence on her relationship with Muhammad V, who previously reigned as King of Malaysia from 2016 until his abdication in 2019, when he resumed duties as the ruler of the religiously conservative Kelantan province.