Nikah

The nikah is the Islamic marriage, and the classical jurists treat it as a contract rather than a sacrament, an agreement, with an offer and acceptance, concluded before witnesses. Its essential elements are the consent of the two parties, the presence of witnesses, and the mahr, a gift or payment from the groom that becomes the bride's own property and financial security. In the practice of most schools the bride's guardian (wali) has a role in the contracting, though the schools differ over how far an adult woman may contract her own marriage.

Because it is a contract, its terms could be negotiated, and stipulations could be written into it. The ceremony itself may be brief and is often conducted by a scholar or official, though no priestly mediation is required; the feast that publicises the marriage, the walima, follows separately. Scholars such as Kecia Ali have examined how the early jurists conceived marriage in terms drawn partly from the law of sale and property.

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.