dowry or requiring the husband to house her in a specific locality on the wife’s side, or—on the husband’s side—stipulating that she be a virgin or of a certain lineage.
2- The obligation to honour conditions covers both those that are intrinsic to the contract itself and those laid down for the benefit of either spouse.
3- The general rule stated in this hadith, that conditions must be fulfilled, is limited by other reports—such as the hadith, “It is not lawful for a woman to ask for her sister’s divorce”—showing that a condition leading to harm or injustice is invalid.
4- Fulfilling the conditions attached to a marriage contract is more emphatically required than fulfilling other conditions, for what is given in exchange is the lawful enjoyment of intimate relations.
5- Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah said: “The sound position—adopted in most of Aḥmad’s explicit texts and held by the majority of the early scholars—is that the reciprocal rights the contract establishes for each spouse over the other, such as maintenance, sexual access, and the husband’s spending the night with his wife, are not fixed by a specific quota; rather, the standard is local custom. This is indicated by the verse, ‘And women have rights similar to those (of men) over them, according to what is reasonable’ (Q 2:228), and by the Prophet’s ﷺ statement to Hind: ‘Take from his wealth what suffices you and your child, in a manner that is appropriate.’ If the spouses dispute over these matters, the judge determines what is due according to his own ijtihād.”
Hadith Two
ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar (may Allah be pleased with them both) reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ forbade shighār marriage.
Shighār is when a man marries off his daughter to another man on the condition that the latter marry him his daughter, with no dowry stipulated between them.
Unfamiliar terms
shighār (with a kasrah on the shīn and the ghayn): linguistically derived from the sense of “raising”; it was applied to this form of marriage because each guardian “raises”—that is, passes over—his ward to the other without any dowry or benefit accruing to her.
Overall meaning
The basic rule for the marriage contract is that it is not concluded except with a dowry for the woman, compensating her for granting access to her private parts. For that reason, the Prophet ﷺ prohibited this pre-Islamic form of marriage by which guardians wrong their female wards, for