The Bride Price: The Afghan tradition of paying for wives Author : Fazal Muzhary Published: 25 October 2016 Downloaded: 4 September 2018 Download URL: https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/the-bride-price-the-afghan-tradition-of-paying-for-wives/?format=pdf Weddings are hugely expensive affairs in Afghanistan, with excessive costs for wedding halls, lavish meals and usually a bride price. The bride price is the money paid by the groom’s family for the bride to her family. It is a contested tradition that is viewed as having no foundation in Islamic law and does not appear in the new draft marriage law. It is also not to be confused with the dowry (mahr) which should be given to the bride in case her husband dies or divorces her. High bride prices can lead to debt for grooms and their families and early marriage to unsuitable men for the daughters of poor men; fathers of many daughters, however, may benefit from the practice. AAN’s Fazal Muzhary investigates the tradition and finds that current, local attempts to curb high bride prices are proving more successful than previous attempts by the state. Wedding Negotiations and Bride Price Almost all weddings in Afghanistan start with matchmaking. The groom’s family initiates a marriage proposal and it is up to the bride’s family to agree or not. When the families have agreed to the marriage the real negotiations around the wedding and the bride price start and usually take place at the house of the bride-to-be. The negotiations about the actual wedding and its costs, including food and catering, clothes for the bride’s relatives and payment for the imam, who drafts the marriage contract and performs the ceremony, can be quite quick. However, the negotiations about the bride price can be lengthy. The couple are nowadays often consulted about the marriage proposal, but they have a very limited role in the wedding and 1 / 9 bride price negotiations and have to accept what their families decide (for detailed information on marriage practices in Afghanistan see: here). The father of the bride, or in his absence her oldest brother, specifies how much he would like to receive from the groom’s family for his daughter. The amount is often based on family credentials, education, skills, age, beauty and the reputation of the girl, as well as recent bride prices within the community. It is the groom who is expected to raise the money for the wedding and the bride price, but the groom’s family usually pitches in. As a consequence, the decision to accept or reject the wedding costs and the bride price becomes a family affair. The price tag for the wedding, especially in Kabul, can easily top 10,000 USD; a small fortune in a country where the gross domestic product per capita in 2015 was 623.90 US dollars (see: here). Even if the actual wedding costs are less in rural areas, the overall costs are pushed up by the bride price. Social media provides some examples of current bride prices in different provinces (see: here): Maidan Wardak: 400,000 to 800,000 afghanis (5,900 to 11,800 US dollars); Nangarhar: 100,000 to 500,000 afghanis (1450 to 7,245 US dollars). Not all communities in Nangarhar have a tradition of asking for a bride price. Loya Paktia (Khost, Paktia and Paktika): 1,000,000 to 1,200,000 afghanis (14,500 to 17,390 US dollars) Farah: 800,000 to 1,500,000 afghanis (11,800 US dollars to 21,733 US dollars); Faryab: 66,000-135,000 afghanis (10,000 to 20,000 US dollars (see: here) Kandahar and Helmand: 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 afghanis (14,590 to 43,468 US dollars) (see: here). Bride Price versus Dowry Bride price is known as walwar in Pashto-speaking areas and toyana and sherbaha in Dari- speaking areas. It is an Afghan tradition with no foundation in Islamic law (see: here) and does not feature in the draft marriage law. According to the draft marriage law and the civil law (1), the only payment that can be requested by the bride’s family is the Islamic dowry (mahr), which should remain the property of the bride for the duration of her marriage (2). Bride price and mahr are not the same: the bride price is a payment that the father of the bride receives, while mahr is the groom’s financial pledge to his wife. According to Islamic (sharia) law, women who enter into a marriage contract are entitled to receive mahr and it is intended to provide security for her and her children in case the husband dies or requests a divorce. According to Hanafi jurisprudence fiqh), a wife is allowed to use the mahr in any way she sees fit as it is her property – this means that she can also return it or share it with her husband or their extended family. Mawlwi Abdullah Haqyar, head of the Islamic and Culture Department of the Sharia Faculty at 2 / 9 Kabul University, noted that “mahr is an Islamic matter and a gift from the groom to the bride, it remains the property of the bride. This is the financial obligation that a husband has to his bride.” The draft marriage law and Islamic law provide limited instructions regarding the size of the mahr or the timing of the payment; this is left to families to decide (3). Community members interviewed by AAN said that mahr was almost never implemented as Islamic law prescribes, even if people are aware of the law. In fact, when parents of a bride and groom negotiate wedding arrangements, they often use the word mahr when they are actually talking about the wedding price. Sayed Wali (name changed at the request of the interviewee) from Ghazni said, “On the day of my engagement in 2011, my father and brothers decided on a sum of 800,000 Pakistani rupees [about 9,230 US dollars[ to be given as mahr to my future wife. The money was paid directly to her brother and after the wedding, when I asked my wife about the mahr, she told me that she did not receive a penny of the 800,000 [Pakistani] rupees. Instead, she told me that her brother had used the money to arrange the marriage of his son.” This practice was also confirmed by interviews with two mullahs from Ghazni province who explained that it is a widely accepted fact that the father of the bride takes the bride price money but calls it mahr. The Complex Social and Financial Effects of the Bride Price The bride price is a huge burden on grooms and their families, but is also a vital source of income for the families of brides, in particular poorer ones. If a father only has daughters and no sons, he will often rely on the bride price as a source of income, as he cannot rely on the income a son would bring. When a daughter is married, she moves into her husband’s household and has less contact with her parents and little opportunity to support them. The bride price is considered to be the daughter’s contribution to the economy and wealth of her parents’ household. Its importance is exemplified in one of AAN’s interviews by a story of a poor man in Ghazni who demanded 10,000 US dollars for his daughter, which helped him to feed his entire family for almost four years. Bride price also drives child marriage in Afghanistan, as research in 2013 by the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation showed. Getting a high bride price was a major reason given by parents for marrying their girls off young. Other economic factors also counted, including giving girls in lieu of debts and exchanging girls, so that neither family had to pay the bride price. Although article 70 of the civil law specifies the minimum age for marriage is 18 years of age for men and 16 for women, girls under the age of 15 make up three per cent of all married women according to Afghanistan’s periodic report under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Article 28 of the law on the Elimination of Violence against Women states that those who force girls to marry under the age of 15 should be imprisoned for at least two years and the same article states that the marriage of an underage girl can be cancelled at the request of the girl. However, the implementation of these laws is difficult given Afghanistan’s traditional society. This is particularly true when the economies of entire families depend on underage marriages. 3 / 9 Parents who chose to or are forced to marry off their underage daughters often ignore factors such as the age or any disabilities of the future son-in-law. Daughters might even get married off to men whom their families have never seen before. An AREU study on marriage practice in Afghanistan from 2007 cited the example of Aziza, a girl in her mid-teens who was married to a 60 years old man. Aziza explained, “my father was sick and my family could not afford to pay for his treatment. Therefore I saw no other way out than to marry the old man who was willing to pay the bride price demanded by my family.” As a result of the high prices for weddings, hundreds of young men have been forced to go to Iran, Pakistan, or the Gulf countries to find work, often under precarious conditions, to try to earn enough money to pay for their wedding and the bride price (4).