In their chapters on Islamic marriage (nikah), early Muslim legal treatises such as Sahnun b. Sa'id al-Tanukhi's al-Mudawwana al-Kubra emphasize the significance of bridal dowers (mahr/sadaq) in marital arrangements. Although the dower, where stipulated, is usually given by the husband to the wife, its form can vary significantly. According to Sahnun, a dower may be paid immediately (naqdan) or in installments, one of them due before the parties consummate their marriage, the other at an agreed-upon time (ila ajal) or in case of husband-initiated divorce (talaq). In this paper, I examine Islamic marriage as a site of exchange by exploring and discussing the legal positions presented in fiqh-manuals from the formative period. The paper takes issue with the observation that Islamic law configures women singularly as naturally deficient and explores Islamic marriage as a transformative site that leads to the creation of value. This value, I argue, manifests not merely in the financial security and leverage acquired by women by stipulating bridal dowers (mahr) but beyond that, subsists in enhanced opportunities for them to advance claims within marriage and negotiate forms of sociality, including but not limited to their positionality in marriage, sexual pleasure, and divorce. Therefore, the value of the bridal dower lies not so much in its face value but, instead, in the inherent quality that it can be exchanged further in return for enhanced rights and conditions. This paper thus invites us to imagine Islamic marriage as a site of gift exchange while complicating the discussion of gender configurations in Islamic law as essential attributes, showing that the marital practices prescribed by Muslim jurists from the formative period subscribe to a relational concept of gender in which the spouses' rights and obligations are defined in relative terms and mutually opposed to each other. The argument of this paper is fleshed out by drawing on the analytical concepts of gift exchange, value creation, gender, sociality, and hierarchy as used in the works of Marcel Mauss, Marilyn Strathern, and Lucinda Ramberg.