Dower Registrations and Dower Practices in Jabal Nablus 1920s-1980s

I would like to start with thanking the organizers of this conference for inviting me. I am truly very pleased to return to Palestine, and especially to Nablus, where I did my first fieldwork in the 1980s and early 1990s that was to be the empirical basis for my PhD dissertation. I intend to focus today on what may seem a highly specialized topic, that is the dower (mahr) and its meanings for women. Moreover, I will also focus on one specific area, that is the Nablus region, and a particular time period, from the 1920s to the 1980s. Still, by doing so, I will simultaneously address more general issues, in particular the use of sources and methods. I hope to show the particular kinds of understanding we may gain from archival research (focusing on written documents, such as marriage contracts and court cases), on the one hand, and oral history interviews (conversations with women about the dower), on the other. According to Hanafi fiqh, the dower (mahr) is an effect of marriage. In the marriage contract a dower needs to be registered, that is an amount of money the husband is to pay to the wife. In case no dower has been registered, the wife is entitled to the dower suitable for someone of her stature (mahr al-mithl) (JLPS art. 44; 54). The dower is intended for the wife herself; neither husbands nor fathers can claim it, and women can use it as they see fit (JLPS art. 61-62). In the course of the twentieth century, there have been reforms of personal status law, but no major changes have taken place with respect to the dower. At the same time, however, major changes have occurred in how the dower is registered in the contracts and in how people deal with the dower in practice. The dower generally consists of the prompt dower (muqaddam), the part that can be claimed at the time of marriage, and the deferred dower (mu´akhkhar), the part that can be claimed in the case of divorce or when the husband has died). Next to this, there is a separate entry in the marriage contracts to register tawabi’ (household goods).