Dowry Claims & Bride-Price-Justified or Not?

Dowry Claims & Bride-Price-Justified or Not?

“13 year old daughter sold to a 35 year old man”…..... “Young housewife burnt alive for dowry....... “Woman ends life due to dowry harassment”. Every morning our newspapers are full of such heart-rending and tragic incidents. Such cases are either hushed up by the in-laws by suborning the witnesses and authorities or in other cases not even pursued by the parents of the victim. As a result, most of the times, such incidents remain uninvestigated by the police who then record the death as “A Cooking-Stove” accident, having been assisted towards this conclusion with “a wad of rupees”. But the main issue over here is not the corruption of the officials in fact it is the system and the practices leading to such mishaps that need to be examined and the illegal systems and practices abolished. As far as my opinion is concerned both the dowry system and the bride price system as practiced in our society and culture are illegal, absurd and completely unjustified.

Now practiced primarily in Asian cultures, the dowry system originates from the ancient Greece, Rome, India and Medieval Europe. Bestowing dowry, then, involved the transfer of wealth in the form of money and/or property from the bride’s parents to the bride and its sole purpose was to provide a degree of financial autonomy to a bride who, otherwise, had no right to property at all. Today, however, people have changed both the meaning of dowry payment as well as its purpose. These days it simply means the transfer of wealth from the bride’s parents to the groom and his family, moulding marriage into a commercial transaction where a groom and his family instead of searching for a suitable life partner seek the status of the probable candidate so as to ensure a healthy dowry. This puts a lot of pressure on the middle and the lower classes who are either forced to give away all their savings or to take loans with heavy interests on them in order to meet the demands of the groom’s family. Increasingly inflated dowry payments are sometimes six times the bride’s family’s annual income. Thus most of the middle and lower class families find it extremely difficult to get their daughters married. The greed of dowry has reached to such an extent in our society that the brides bringing less dowry with them are tortured, humiliated, harassed and even killed by their husbands and in-laws. This sort of exploitation is strictly prohibited in Islam. In fact Islam has given women an edge over their husbands in so far as it obliges the bridegroom to pay meher(Its a gift as well as the amount of money that has to be given to the bride in case of a divorce. It can be a small amount or a large amount, depending on the financial situation of the groom) and maintain wife in a decent way. Still dowry practice is a common phenomenon of our society where Muslims dwell in majority.

Another evil that haunts our society is the bride-price system. Bride-price is basically an amount of money demanded from the bridegroom or his family by the bride or her family, usually bride’s father, without which the daughter will not be given in marriage. It was a common practice in the pre-Islamic era of the pagans who treated women as articles of trade. However, with the emergence of Islam such senseless and ridiculous practices got abolished and banned and instead haq-meher was introduced which is paid by the husband to the wife at the time of nikkah (marriage) as a form of security in case of the dissolution of marriage. In spite of that, in Pakistan, especially in the tribal areas, people are still practicing the bride-price system thus transforming the marriage agreement into a transaction of a commodity, i.e. the bride. Girls as young as ten, who do not even understand the responsibilities of a married life, are given in marriage to men as old as fifty. The poor class sells their young daughters due to extreme poverty but they do not perceive the perils that she will have to face after her marriage. Such men, who pay the bride-price to get married, consider it a right of ownership thus treating their wives according to their will. A married woman or girl can not even protest against the cruelties or ask for dissolution as this will mean risking additional violence at the hands of her natal family, whose worries about paying back the bride-price can take precedence over any concerns about the health and welfare of the daughter.

Eradication of such evils can never be achieved with the blink of an eye. But with time and consistent efforts we can free our society from both the dowry system and the bride-price system. The first and foremost step should be to pass legislations in the parliament against both practices. This, however, will not at all be a conclusive solution and there will be a need for the provision of adequate resources for law enforcement and support services in order to curb the practices. Secondly large scale awareness programs will also help in reducing both the crimes from our society.
Since Islam has granted women equal status to that of men and also grants her right to property, we as a Muslim country should not indulge in these absurd customs and traditions which are an imitation of the ancient Hindu culture in which daughters were not given any share in the family property, but were given payments, part of which might be In the form of household goods, as a measure of compensation. We should only follow what our Holy Prophet (PBUH) taught us and what is mentioned in the Holy Quran and refrain from practices that transform marriage into a mere transaction and thus depriving it of its real meaning and purpose.