A couple of days ago, I stumbled on a paper by an Iranian anthropologist called Ziba Mir Hosseini.
She defines herself as Muslim but in the straight line of Muslim feminists who want to reinterpret the texts away from the dominant patriarchal perspective.
it's really well worth reading this relatively short paper as it absolutely confirms what you've been saying above about marriage contracts. Just as a starter to give you a glimpse, she quotes the following learned jurists - it really shocked me. And I didn't know the meaning of nikah before reading this...
Under the chapter heading - Marriage: Union or Dominion?, she comments "The marriage contract is called ?aqd al-nikah (literally ?contract of coitus?). (...)
Al-Ghazali, the great twelfth-century Muslim philosopher, in his monumental work Revival of Religious Sciences, devoted a book to marriage, where he echoed the prevalent view of his time:
"It is enough to say that marriage is a kind of slavery, for a wife is a slave to her husband. She owes her husband absolute obedience in whatever he may demand of her, where she herself is concerned, as long as no sin is involved."
Likewise, Muhaqqiq al-Hilli, the renowned thirteenth-century Shi?a jurist, wrote:
"Marriage etymologically is uniting one thing with another thing; it is also said to mean coitus and to mean sexual intercourse ? it has been said that it is a contract whose object is that of dominion over the vagina, without the right of its possession. It has also been said that it is a verbal contract that first establishes the right to sexual intercourse, that is to say: it is not like buying a female slave when the man acquires the right of intercourse as a consequence of the possession of the slave."
Sidi Khalil, the prominent fourteenth-century Maliki jurist, was equally explicit when it came to dower and its function in marriage:
"When a woman marries, she sells a part of her person. In the market one buys merchandise, in marriage the husband buys the genital arvum mulieris. As in any other bargain and sale, only useful and ritually clean objects may be given in dower."
(etc.)
If you want to read more it's a doc. format file you can download - so no web site direst but below is a copy of the Google entry where I found it
The Changeable & Unchangeable in
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Format de fichier: Microsoft Word - Version HTML
Islam and Gender Justice. Ziba Mir-Hosseini. For a century or more, one of the 'hottest' areas of debate among the Muslims has been the 'status of women in ...
www.smi.uib.no/seminars/Mir-Hosseini/ZMH%20final%20Gender%20Justice.doc -
Topic: People are fucking assholes!