30 Women in Prectlamic Arabia congratulate him, he used to say, “congratulation, may she be a source of wealth for you”. This was an allusion to the fact that father of the girl would marry her in future and would receive the dower.'* In predslamic days, fathers or in case they died, the brothers believed they had the right of guardianship and power over daughters, Inthe first place, they married their daughters according to their own choice and not according to the will of the and in the second place, they considered the dower of their daughters to belong to themselves and not to the daughters. They also used to exchange daughters. The custom was that one man ‘used to say to the other: “I will marry my daughter or sister to you in exchange for your daughter or sister becoming my wife.” The other man would agree to it. In this way, each one of the two girls became the dower for the other girl. Such a marriage was called a shighar marviage. ‘According to sociologists, in order to get the girl of his choice, a man used to bind himself to the services of the father of the girl, Moses and Shuayb, which is told in the Holy Quran, is evidence of the existence of such a custom. When Moses escaped {rom Egypt and reached the well of Madyan, the daughters of Shuayb were standing with their sheep and nobody was paying attention to them. Moses was moved with sympathetic attitude to them and drew water for their sheep. The daughters described the ‘occurrence of that day to their father, who sent one of them to invite Moses to his house. After getting to know one another, Shuayb one day told Moses that he wished to give one of those two ¢ to him provided he would work for him for cight years and, in case he himself wanted to work more, for another two years. Moses accepted this and he accordingly became Shuayb's son-in-law. That was the custom in those days. The the non-existence of wealth. The only helpful w could offer to his bride or to the bride’s work for them.'® father was probably : In the ‘time of ignorance’ there were also customs which practically used to deprive women of their dower. One of those ‘Women in Pre-tslamic Arabia 3 customs was inheriting the wife. In the case of the death of a man, his inheritors, like his sons or brothers, inherited his wives in exactly the same way as they inherited the property of the deceased assuming that the marriage right was still valid, and considered himself empowered to marry the wife to anybody he liked and take the dower for himself, or otherwise, to take her as his own wife without a new dower on the strength of the dower that the deceased had paid.” According to Tafiire-Abmedi, an authority cited by Abdur Rahim in his monumental work as referred to formed a part of marriage contract, and in Pre-Islamic times it was possible for a women to buy her freedom from her husband by resigning het dower to him. Unchastity on the part of the wife was also a reason for debarring her from the claim of dower. Divorce Prior of Islam, divorce was easy and of frequent occurrence and this tendency has persisted to some extent in Islamic law. The power of divorce possessed by the husband was unl unrestricted. His power in this connection wds absolute and he could divorce his wife for any cause which made her disagreeable to him. There were no checks to an arbitrary and capricious use of his power as he could do so without assigning any reason or observing any procedure."* The pre-tsla i required no formula to make imation from the husband to ld discard his ivorce, of course, was a matter of few the renowned commentary Tafiire: Abmadi that an Arab could pronounce talag ten times and contract fresh al his wife every time. He could revoke the divorce and resume conjugal relation at any time. In some exceptional cases, both among the Arabs and Jews, wives yefore marriage, reserve to themselves the power to divorce themselves from the husband and they exercised that power and pronounced separation by merely changing the position of their tent which conveyed a sufficient intimation of the fact to the repudiated husband”