If women often refrain from claiming their share in the estate, this does not imply that they have no direct access to property at all. For many women, marriage presentations, the mahr or dower, were and are the most important means by which to acquire property. In part II, I will discuss the historical shifts which have taken place in women's access to such ‘dower property’. Changes in the value and the nature of the property involved will be addressed and related to the variations in the meaning of the dower to different categories of women.

In chapter 4 I summarily discuss the dower as part of the process of arranging marriages in three discursive fields: anthropological theory, Islamic law, and locally held conceptions. After these introductory notes, chapter 5 concentrates on the prompt dower, the gifts the bride receives when she marries, while the deferred dower, that part of the dower women obtain when they are repudiated or widowed, is the central topic of chapter 6. Both chapters set out with a description of historical changes in the dower as registered in the marriage contracts. To discuss possible incongruencies between the written texts and payment practices, this is followed by the words of the women themselves as they speak through court cases and, in particular, through marriage and divorce stories.