Thanks to Muslim lawyer Abed Awad, New Jersey courts have begun taking a new approach to mahr cases. The ground-breaking case is Odatalla v. Odatalla, 355 N.J. Super. 305 (2002).
The key is to look at how the mahr is regarded in Islamic law, rather than trying to fit a Muslim marriage contract or mahr agreement into existing categories in American family law. A mahr agreement is not a prenuptial agreement. As the fiqh article I linked to in the first post of this series makes clear, a Muslim marriage contract is valid without specifying a mahr.
Instead, the mahr agreement is a separate arrangement between the married couple. As the Superior Court of New Jersey wrote in the Odatalla decision:
Clearly the Mahr Agreement in the case at bar is nothing more and nothing less than a simple contract between two consenting adults. It does not contravene any statute or interests of society. Rather, the Mahr Agreement continues a custom and tradition that is unique to a certain segment of our current society and is not at war with any public morals.
The rules governing simple contracts between two consenting adults are much more lenient than those governing prenuptial agreements. This makes it much more likely that the mahr agreement will be upheld. Awad has successfully used this approach in several other cases to have the courts uphold Muslim mahr agreements. See Groundbreaking Ruling Recognizes Islamic Marriage Agreement and Muslim Mahr.
Awad has also written a law journal article, Court Enforces Mahr Provision in Muslim Marriage Contract, for the New Jersey Law Journal. The article is published here at The Niqabi Paralegal by permission of the author.