"Amputation is not Sex": Competing Visions of Marriage and Mahr in Classical Islamic Law

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2014
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Haverford College. Department of Religion
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Thesis
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eng
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The predominant understanding of mahr and other monetary exchanges related to marriage in classical Islamic law among contemporary scholars is that the mahr represents the husband's symbolic purchase of his wife. Moreover, contemporary scholars hold that, with the transfer of the mahr, the wife comes under the dominion of her husband, who gains control of her sexual and reproductive capacities. This thesis shows that, while this was one way in which mahr and marriage were understood in the classical legal tradition, it was only one among many ways in which mahr was imagined in the legal tradition. There was in fact a plurality of ways in which classical jurists conceptualized and described the mahr, including those who explicitly resisted the marriage-sale analogy. Many of these jurists used language such as "affection" and "nobility" to refer to the mahr, while others even considered the mahr to be an act of worship. I explore how the idea of mahr being an act of worship brings the mahr into the realm of God's rights, reflective of a theocentric ethics that goes beyond interpersonal relationships and transactions. My thesis also demonstrates that there was an internal logic to why consummation was so important in discussions of mahr--consummation was considered the "seal" of Islamic marriage, without which the marriage was not actually complete. Thus, we should not assume that because consummation and mahr are closely connected in the juridical texts, it is simply because mahr is payment for a wife's "sexual service."
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