Saudi tribes agree on dowry ceilings

Manama: Tribes in the Jizan Region in southwest Saudi Arabia have agreed to drastically reduce high dowries and ostentatious marriage practices and to adopt a new accord that applies to all wedding contracts.

The dowry, or mahar, is the gift of money or goods given by the groom to his future wife at the time of the wedding.

Under the accord reached by the tribes, the dowry to be handed to a bride who is getting married for the first time was fixed at SR50,000.

A divorcee or a widow receives SR30,000 from the groom, the tribes said under the accord to facilitate marriages and re-marriages. Grooms may offer an extra SR5,000 for outfits and up to 12 bangles.

The amount includes all the financial requirements for the wedding, Saudi news site Sabq reported on Wednesday.

The marriage ceremonies will be reduced to only two, one for the engagement and one for the wedding.

Tribes have been celebrating marriages over several evenings in lavish ceremonies under various names that invariably made heavy financial demands on the groom and the bride and their families.

“We highly welcome this initiative that will have positive effects on people planning to get married and their families,” Majed Bin Khatla, the governor of Damad in Jizan Region, said. “We have noticed the high dowries imposed on grooms and the high number of ceremonies held to celebrate the wedding. It was way too much for families and for grooms and brides, and we talked with tribe leaders and explained the situation, they agreed to sit together and reach an accord that is beneficial to all,” he said.

Following the agreement, the new clauses will be included in the marriage contract to ensure there will be no abuses.

According to Sabq, young people in several other governorates have called for the emulation of the Jizan accord and impose ceilings for dowries and limit the wedding-related ceremonies.

Islam requires the payment of a small dowry as a token of care and compassion between the bride and groom and their families.

However, and although in Islamic marriages, the dowry is purely symbolic, just like white dresses in Western weddings, many status-conscious families in the Gulf regard it as a source of prestige or as an insurance policy payable to the wife in case of divorce.

Traditionally, the dowry of a Gulf woman comprised of silver jewellery, but brides today prefer gold and cash sums, often inflated by demanding families.

Extravagant dowries and hyper-inflated bills from lavish wedding celebrations, ornate garments, lavish receptions and dinner banquets have often led young Gulf men reluctant to fall into debt to turn to other countries to find brides, mainly in Egypt, Syria and Jordan among Arabs, India, Pakistan, Thailand and The Philippines.

However, Gulf women have regularly complained that by taking foreign wives, the men effectively contributed to the increase in the number of spinsters in their countries.

Seeking to curb the phenomenon of men taking wives from abroad, authorities have imposed conditions to restrict international marriages. They also sought, alongside religious societies and community centres, to organize mass weddings to help couples alleviate the burden of wedding costs.

"We need to ease marriages and facilitate their norms, particularly by lowering dowries and doing away with traditions that pile up financial pressure on young people and steer them away from marriage," Bahrain's Prime Minister Prince Khalifa Bin Salman Al Khalifa said in 2007. "We need to promote the culture of mass weddings and look at them from the social point of view because they bolster cohesion and solidarity and help deepen the sense of togetherness. There is also the economic aspect that helps cut down the costs of celebrations.”