Reassessing Deferred Dower in Muslim Marriages: A Legal and Economic Analysis of Women’s Property Rights in the Age of Inflation

Deferred dower (mahr muʾakhkhar) gives rise to a proprietary claim, but delayed payment of a fixed cash amount can erode its purchasing power. This article examines the legal scope for preserving that value in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India through a qualitative doctrinal comparison and a hypothetical CPI illustration. The doctrinal comparison uses 50 identifiable authorities, classified as direct, analogous, or contextual, without converting them into frequency estimates. Mahr is distinguished from maintenance, fair provision, and khulʿ consideration. Classical currency debates and contemporary collective fiqh resolutions expose a substantive objection to indexing an already fixed monetary debt; economic equivalence alone does not resolve the ribā question. Iran’s statutory cash-mahr mechanism provides a comparator of limited transferability. The article prioritizes precise asset denomination and informed registration, and presents CPI adjustment as a contested legislative option requiring express legal authority. Transitional rules, deflation, data limitations, payment hardship, and procedural fairness constrain the proposal. The article’s contribution is a distinction between entitlement, valuation, and execution rather than an empirical estimate of judicial practice.