Visits at religious celebrations (≠ayàd) and life
cycle events (munàsabàt) play an important role in
reaffirming ties with a larger group of useful con-
nections who can provide information and practi-
cal help: obtaining jobs, circumventing government
red tape, or locating services such as mechanical
repair. Arab tradition requires that friends and rel-
atives visit a woman on the seventh day after the
birth of a child. Following a death, a formal visit to
bereaved family members is also expected during
a seven- to ten-day mourning period. And, de-
pending on the region and local cultural traditions,
weddings, engagements, and circumcisions are cel-
ebrated over a one- to seven-day period, during
which network members visit and attend parties,
bearing gifts of food, money, or household items.
Muslim religious holidays also require the
exchange of visits and food to maintain network
ties. Although there are numerous small religious
holidays and special regional saints’ days that vary
throughout the area, the four primary holidays
observed are: Mawlid (the birth of the Prophet
Mu™ammad), Ramadan (the month of fasting), ≠îd
Íaghìr (a two-day holiday following Ramadan),
and ≠îd Kabìr (commemorating the prophet Abra-
ham’s sacrifice of Isaac). During each of these holi-
days, women prepare special dishes and cakes, each
region proud of its own unique foods. In most
Arab communities in North Africa these dishes
and cakes are served during formal holiday visits
to as many as several hundred network members.
Barring extreme illness or age, failure to visit dur-
ing these life cycle events and holidays can be suffi-
cient justification for terminating a relationship.
Visiting, exchanging gifts, and maintaining net-
work ties form a central part of Muslim North
African women’s daily lives and experience. Given
the social, practical, and economic importance of
women’s networks, a woman’s daily world of inter-
acting with and visiting female kin, friends, and
neighbors, not only provides companionship and
joy, but solace and support throughout her life.
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the ottoman empire 529women and the informal economy, Gainesville, Fla.
1998, 262–86.Paula Holmes-EberThe Ottoman EmpireOttoman women’s networks were webs of loose
and easily maintained ties that structured the cul-
ture of women’s worlds, could be mobilized to pro-
vide support for families and households, and also
functioned to provide access and information
between parts of a society. Since the Ottoman Em-
pire spanned seven centuries and included societies
from Eastern Europe to Mesopotamia, and since
only infrequent glimpses of women’s culture are
preserved in the historical record, it is impossible to
survey the full range of types of women’s networks
historically or geographically. This entry focuses on
women’s networks of the Arab Ottoman provinces
and practices which, even as they declined through
much of the post-imperial era, were remembered by
female informants as the way things were done in
generations past, but also persisted into the twenti-
eth century because their of their fundamental util-
ity in organizing societies. The ties of female kin,
the informal gatherings of neighbors, the formal
visits of social self-presentation and marriage
scouting, the circulation of midwives and female
entertainers through all strata of society, and later
the emergence of literary and cultural salons and
charitable committees run and frequented by
Young Ottoman women provided critical arenas
for cultural development, for emotional and mate-
rial support, and for information about the market
and politics.Kinship
The most basic and important form of women’s
network in Ottoman society was the web of kin
relations preserved by religious and legal under-
standings of the mutual obligations of spouses,
parents and children, and siblings and extended
families, and reinforced through the devolution
of wealth through gift giving, care provision, and
inheritance and marriage payments. Maternal and
affective webs of kinship were brought to life by
the principal of ßilàt al-ra™im(literally, the bonds of
the womb). Understood through the secondary
meaning of ra™ma(tenderness), this Arabic term
emphasizes the maternal and distant relatives
whose ties are not those of juridical obligation but
ones of love. The ties of ßilàt al-ra™imwere culti-
vated through festive gatherings of female relatives
(mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and cousins) as