"There is the Islamic view of marriage. Apologists of Islam, ever so anxious to show how progressive and avant-garde and modern their religion has always been, never tire of saying: In Islam marriage is not a sacrament, it is just a contract. Woman, as we shall see when we turn to the Quran and the Hadis, is just an ‘affliction’ that man has to suffer; she is just a field that he may irrigate or not irrigate as it pleases him; at best she is one of the things that Allah has created for him to enjoy; when on top of all this marriage is but a contract specifying the terms on which he may enjoy the thing—the mehr, as Ram Swarup reminds us being literally the ‘wages’ or ‘hire’ for using the woman—the ulema naturally visit all the consequences on the woman. The husband has but to enjoy the woman, and when he tires of her can just cast her off paying her the nominal maintenance, and the mehr which had been agreed to in the contract. And Allah, in His mercy, has not put these latter at anyonerous level. The minimum mutah, the consolatory gift, we learn, is one pair of clothes and the maximum is one slave or slave girl. The maintenance is to be board and lodging for just three months. And while it is fashionable nowadays to fix the mehr at poetically grandiloquent levels, it is just as fixed a practice to have the wife agree to forego it on the nuptial night itself. [...] The Quran (2.241) explicitly says, ‘Those of you who die leaving surviving widows shall bequeath to their widows provisions for a year without (their) being turned out.’ In direct contravention to this the compendium of Islamic law, the Hidayah, states, ‘Maintenance is not due to a woman after her husband’s decease...’ The Imamia goes even further to say, ‘A widow has no right to maintenance even though she be pregnant.’"