What Islam Kept from Older Arabian Custom, and What It Rejected

Marriage contracts of a broadly similar shape, offer, acceptance, witnesses, and a payment from groom to bride, already existed in pre-Islamic Arabian custom, and Islamic law is generally understood to have retained that basic contractual structure while reforming specific elements of it, most significantly by making the mahr, the dower, a payment owed to the bride herself rather than to her father or guardian, reversing an arrangement common before Islam in which such payments functioned more like a transaction between the two families than a right belonging to the woman. How much mahr is owed, and whether it must be paid immediately or may be deferred in whole or part until a later point such as divorce, are questions the classical schools answer differently rather than uniformly, so the practical content of a nikah contract varies by school and by region even though its basic form does not.

A more significant and still unresolved rejection concerns mut'ah, a fixed term temporary marriage contract that some historical accounts describe as practiced in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic period; mainstream Sunni legal tradition holds that Muhammad later prohibited this form outright, while Twelver Shia jurisprudence continues to recognize it as valid under specific conditions, a genuine and long standing point of disagreement between the two branches of Islamic law rather than a settled question, and one on which each side considers its own historical account of what was permitted and later withdrawn to be correct.