High Mahr Culture and Their Effect on Marriage

The mahr should be decided by the woman herself — not her parents. And if she is just a little girl, she should not be getting married. Women get married and women decide their marriage gifts. Those gifts are decided by and given to them, not decided by their fathers or mothers or extended families on their behalf.

What we have are cultural layers on top of this that have complicated things — and people justify those cultural impositions and say it is the 'urf of society. I am talking about the text of the Quran.

If two adults are willing to get married, it is halal for them. If parents are getting in the way of two slaves of Allah trying to do the right thing, I would argue the parents are committing a bigger wrong than anyone else. I cannot think of any justifiable reason for making impermissible what Allah has made permissible. Even the Prophet ﷺ was warned not to make haram what Allah made halal — how can parents in our cultures think they have more authority on this than that?

The psychosis we have created in our communities — where elders can block what Allah made permissible but do not have to answer to anyone, including Allah — needs to be called out. Everybody has to listen to someone higher, but some have created a world where they alone have no one above them. That is not Islam.