Indian Muslims are hiding their dowry practice in a Sharia loophole

Inheritance is often handed over at the time of marriage in the name of dowry. And once it enters the husband’s household, it no longer remains hers.

Representational image | Photo: Debarshi Ray | Flickr

A video where a woman is seen falling off the roof of a building is making the rounds on social media. The young woman, Aamina, from Jalaun, Uttar Pradesh, was reportedly thrown off a rooftop by her husband, Arif, and his family after being beaten like an animal. Her “crime”? Her family couldn’t meet the dowry demand of Rs 10 lakh. The news has been covered by local newspapers as well.

Policymakers have tried to curb dowry through legislation, but most of those attempts have failed to bring real change. For example, researchers studied 40,000 marriages in rural India between 1960 and 2008, and found that dowry was paid in 95 per cent of them despite it being illegal since 1961. That’s not a loophole, that’s a system.

And it doesn’t stop at money changing hands. In 2022 alone, over 6,000 dowry-related deaths were officially registered, according to NCRB data. These aren’t just statistics—they’re women who have been burned, beaten, and silenced.

But while we often talk about dowry in India and acknowledge that it cuts across all religious communities, the conversation rarely stops to look at Indian Muslims. As a Pasmanda Muslim, I’ve noticed this gap again and again—hardly any data, barely a whisper of discussion, and certainly no honest reckoning with how deeply dowry continues to harm women within our own community.

Just like this case of Aamina—beaten, locked up, and allegedly thrown off a roof by her in-laws—there are countless others. We just don’t want to talk about them. Remember Ayesha Banu? A 23-year-old woman from Ahmedabad, who took her own life four years ago, left behind a video that pointed to the dowry harassment she faced. Her face haunted many of us, but still, no serious change followed.

Practice vs theory

Whenever someone tries to talk about these issues within the community, the reaction is predictable. People get defensive and say, “But dowry is a sin in Islam”, “It’s impermissible, we don’t support it.” As if just saying that somehow erases the reality of what’s happening around us. It doesn’t. Quoting scripture is not a solution when women are still being tortured, driven to suicide, or killed for dowry in our own homes. If anything, this response just helps build a culture of collective silence and negligence, where no one feels responsible.

It’s also important to understand where the practice of dowry among Indian Muslims really comes from. Islam talks about meher (dower), which is a mandatory, promised gift or money given by the groom to the bride. This is her right and not to be confused with dowry. But there is no such mandatory dowry concept mentioned.

Islam gives women the right to inherit property. But in practice, that inheritance is often handed over at the time of marriage in the name of jahez or dowry. And once it enters the husband’s household, it no longer remains hers. It becomes something everyone feels entitled to—in-laws, siblings, even distant relatives.

Many try to justify it using the term jahez-e-Fatimi, referring to the modest items the Prophet is believed to have given his daughter Fatima. But let’s be honest, what we see today is far from that. Lavish goods, expensive clothes, cash negotiated between families, and grand hospitality for the baraat—none of this is religious. It’s social pressure, dressed in misplaced religious justification.

The standard practice among Indian Muslims is to give daughters dowry in lieu of inheritance, and then expect them to never ask for anything else. I’ve seen cases where if a Muslim woman dares to ask for her rightful share in inheritance, she’s immediately reminded of how much the family “spent” on her marriage and how they gave her dowry, as if that cancels out her actual rights. She’s warned, sometimes subtly, sometimes directly, that claiming what’s hers means she’ll lose all her relationships.

It’s one of the saddest things to witness. The same community, which cries hoarse about following Sharia law whenever there’s any talk of reform for women’s rights, won’t blink twice when it comes to snatching away rights already given to women under Sharia.

That’s why I argue that the laws for Indian Muslim women should be based on social realities, not just an idealised version of Sharia. Because the lived experience is far removed from the textbook version. You can’t build justice on theory when practice is so deeply broken. Enforcement is one challenge, but even getting to a point where society accepts the need for reform is a battle in itself.

Amana Begam Ansari is a columnist, writer, and TV news panellist. She runs a weekly YouTube show called ‘India This Week by Amana and Khalid’. She tweets @Amana_Ansari. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)