The Social Practice of Mahr Among Bimanese Muslims Modifying Rules, Negotiating Roles

chapter 1 The Social Practice of Mahr among Bimanese Muslims Modifying Rules, Negotiating Roles

Atun Wardatun

Social anthropologists have long emphasized the importance of studying payments attendant on marriage (Evans-Pritchard, 1946; Goody & Tambiah, 1973; Moors, 1994). In many societies, these payments form a material outline of rela- tions of status, economy, and gender. Furthermore, only by following payments across families, social classes, and villages can we grasp these complexities. The ramifications of material gifts and exchanges are not captured by statements of rules, but require an ethnographic study that allows us to capture consider- ations that often are not announced publicly (Bourdieu, 1977). Such is surely the case in majority-Muslim societies. Islamic regulations on mahr, or payments made by husbands to wives as part of the marriage con- tract, are flexible in some aspects but rigid in others. While there are no exact standards as to the amount of mahr to be paid, or consensus on whether it should be paid upon consummation of marriage or deferred, there are, at least, three mahr principles that have been specifically addressed in Islamic texts and legal structures. However, these have been modified, extended, and comple- mented by social practices. The focus of this chapter is on the gap between these mahr principles and empirical practice, which has received scant schol- arly attention, and in particular the mahr practices of the Bimanese Muslims of eastern Indonesia. The first principle is that the mahr provider should be a man and, as stressed by all schools of Islamic law, this is related to a husband’s unilateral right to divorce his wife (Al-Shan’ani, 1960). In practice, however, mahr is not always provided only by the man: through negotiations, it can be provided by either the husband (and/or his family) or the woman (and/or her family) or by both. In Bima, it is common for women and/or their families to provide mahr, locally known as ‘ampa co’i ndai’, and it is viewed as a means to maintain family sta- bility by discouraging extramarital affairs that could lead to divorce. Second, mahr is an obligatory marriage payment, the only one clearly stip- ulated by religious law. Monsoor (2008) describes it as a religiously sanctioned obligation of grooms to provide property to brides, signifying a man’s respon-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386297_003 16 wardatun sibility to initiate marriage. In fact, mahr frequently accompanies other payments such as dowry or bride wealth, as well as many other types of local payment arrangements. Rapoport (2000) for example, writes that in early Islamic Egyptian marriage, there was jihaz or shiwar, terms that refer to dowry, a mat- rimonial gift brought by the bride into her marriage as a counterpart to the mahr referred to locally as ‘shadaq’. In contemporary Egyptian Muslim mar- riages, mahr is overshadowed by other payments borne by the groom, such as gihaz (house and furniture) and shabkha (jewellery for the bride signalling the couple’s engagement that becomes the wife’s property once the marriage takes place) (Salem, 2001). Meanwhile, among Sasak Muslims in Lombok, eastern Indonesia, mahr coexists with pisuke (bride wealth) to compensate the wali (marriage guardian for the bride) for his approval of the marriage (bait wali) (Muslim & Taisir, 2009). The third principle is that mahr is linked to the act of consummation. All four of the Sunni schools of law emphasize that a wife has the right to demand immediate payment of mahr after the marriage has been consum- mated and, if the husband wants to defer payment, she has the right to allow such deferral while remaining the sole recipient (Takim, 2012;Welchman, 2000; Monsoor, 2008). Practically, mahr is not only linked to marriage consummation and the unilateral right of men to divorce, but is also used by women as the main bargaining strategy for demanding or avoiding divorce, according to Mir-Hosseini (1993) based on her observations of proceedings in an Iranian court. Furthermore, mahr is also linked to the social background and status of brides and grooms. Moors (1994) for example, discusses how the deferral of mahr means different things for urban educated women and rural poor women. While urban women find deferred payment of mahr a problem, and even regard it as signalling women’s dependence, poor rural women use such deferrals to strengthen their bargaining power with their family of birth should they divorce and need to move back to their parents’ house. Likewise, in Makas- sar and Aceh in Indonesia, the primary function of mahr is to indicate social status and maintain family privilege (Salim & Bowen, 2013; Tami, 2013; see also Chapter 2 this volume). It is important to note that with regard to the practice of mahr among the Bimanese, the aforementioned gaps between the principles and practices of mahr are not mutually exclusive. Thus the practice of ampa co’i ndai may occur with other marriage payments; such payments can become a status marker and be used by women to acquire power while maintaining gender roles. By focus- ing on the Bimanese local tradition of ampa co’i ndai I argue that the Islamic rules of mahr are, in practice, determined by various factors, including local tradition, family, and individual circumstances. Economic and social consid-