This article considers the legal institution of mahr in Islamic family law from three research perspectives in order to provide insights into the phenomenon's complexity, particularly with regard to current legal practices. In particular, emphasis is placed both on countries where family law is shaped by Islamic traditions (e.g., Morocco) and on countries whose legal traditions do not have a mahr counterpart (e.g., Germany). First, the social and economic function of dower will be described. As a special form of property transfer, mahr will be analyzed in its historical and present shape in theory and practice. Second, the legal conceptualization of mahr in the German legal context will be discussed. The example of Morocco serves to illustrate the changes with regard to mahr because of the process of incorporation of Islamic legal concepts into a national statutory law system. Given the Muslim diaspora, these insights are important contributions to the legal intepretation of mahr in a transnational context.

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The aim of this work is to answer the question:“What role do Islamic norms play in property-related attitudes and behaviour of Muslims living in Western European societies?”To this end, a systematic review of electronic journal databases was undertaken to identify academic works published on the matter up to August 2013. Twenty relevant papers were identified, all of which contained original data. The empirical results of the studies show that Muslims in Western Europe incorporate Islamic norms in their decisions in everyday situations and secular life.

Starting from the thesis that European mosque archives offer important sources for the history of Muslims and Islam in Europe, this contribution presents results of a pilot survey into the whereabouts of mosque archives in Germany. Focusing on five small towns in industrial zones where predominantly Turkish contract workers have settled, we asked Turkish mosque administrators, chairmen and imams how they had handled papers in the past, whether and where they had stored folders that were not in use anymore, and what kind of documents their collections contained. What we found were various archival records in a wide and unexpected range of places. We also learned that our questions prompted very different reactions. Umbrella organisations understood their archives as tools for preserving the written sources documenting their origins, whereas local administrators tended to see them as records of their personal memories. Our conclusion is that the time is ripe for the development of knowledge about mosque archives in Germany and, with regard to the founding generation, this is of crucial importance.

In most mosque archives, the subject range seems to be limited to bureaucratic matters. In this article I discuss the factors that are responsible for this constraint. Using academic literature on (Christian) religious and (ethnic) community archives, as well as relying on the research presented in this special issue, I develop a hierarchical (or multi-level) model of subject ranges in mosque archives by considering factors at the individual, intermediate, and system level. I argue that the individual dispositions of mosque leaders regarding resources and attitudes, as well as funds at the intermediate level, are key to the maturing of the archiving culture in mosques.