Excessive Dowries

Question: Could you please offer some advice to guardians who demand exorbitant dowries, thereby creating difficulties on the road to marriage?

Answer: With regard to dowries, there is no doubt that they should be made easy and modest, because the objective of marriage is not the mahr (bridal gift) itself; rather, the aim is the many benefits of marriage and the good it brings to society and to the spouses. Demanding inflated dowries that obstruct or delay marriage is something a Muslim must not do.

What the Sacred Law requires is to facilitate marriage, lighten the dowry, and employ every possible means that encourages people to marry, given the advantages it entails. One should never take as role models those who are unfit for imitation—ignorant or greedy individuals who raise the amount of the mahr merely to satisfy their desires, to boast, or for other reprehensible motives.

Undoubtedly, inflating dowries and increasing their cost for prospective grooms hinders marriage and leads to corruption. Muslims must be alert to this and refuse to follow corrupt customs, ostentation, extravagance, and waste. Added to this are the other expenses that often accompany a wedding—lavish banquets, ostentatious displays, and the purchase of fabrics and large quantities of jewelry intended only for show, which serve merely to burden the groom. All of this constitutes excess and the shackles and chains that the devils among humankind and jinn cast across the path to marriage, thereby disrupting a means that brings great benefit to society.