The Historical Trajectory of Mehir in Turkey

In Islamic jurisprudential traditions, mehir is a sum paid by the groom to the bride, who is supposed to have full control over how it is spent. It can be paid in the form of gold, money, possessions or any other benefits stipulated in the marriage contract³ (Moors 1995). During the Ottoman period, mehir was a legal requirement and central to the institution of marriage. However, despite the legal recognition of mehir, the direction of and control over marriage payments and gifts did not necessarily follow Islamic jurisprudence; rather, it could be shaped by the patriarchal kinship structure. For instance, Ortaylı (2018) states that mehir was not practised by all classes of society in the same way. According to him, it was common in rural Anatolia in particular for bridewealth (başlık parası in Turkish) to be paid by the groom's family to the bride's father,⁴ even though this was not in accordance with Islamic law (ibid.: 99). Duben and Behar (1991: 115) emphasise that unlike in the less urbanised areas of Ottoman Anatolia, in Istanbul mehir should be understood as ‘marriage settlement between spouses and not as bridewealth’.

After the adoption of the Swiss Civil Code in 1926, mehir lost its legally binding quality. Neither the 1926 Civil Code nor the 2002 Civil Code defined mehir within the framework of women's economic legal rights. But in 1959, the Court of Cassation General Assembly on the Unification of Judgements accepted the validity of mehir agreements on the grounds that they were not banned by civil law. During religious marriage ceremonies, couples record the agreed amount of mehir and sign the paper. According to the General Assembly's 1959 decision, this document is legally known as the ‘mehir bill’ (mehir senedi), and mehir is legally defined as ‘a promise to make a gift’ and an ‘agreement on secondary consequences of divorce’ (in Turkish, boşanmanın fer'i sonuçlarından tazminat üzerine anlaşma) (Kılınç and Kılınç 2019: 103). Mehir is not a subject discussed and determined in divorce cases, unlike alimony and compensation, and a divorcing woman has to file a separate suit to pursue her mehir. However, it should be emphasised that many people, including those who are religiously committed, are generally uninformed about mehir's adoption into secular law and they do not know that they can claim their mehir within the legal system.

In order to explore the operation of mehir in Turkey, it is also necessary to underline the role of the social and political dynamics that shape people's commitments and imaginaries. The process of building the nation state ideology following the establishment of the Turkish Republic promoted new ideals regarding marriage and the family, which became the locus of conjugal love, patriotism and self-sacrifice (Sirman 2007). Women in Istanbul tended to embrace the narratives of modernity, including ideas of equality and progress (Sehlikoğlu 2021), which may have undercut the significance of mehir. After the rise of the Islamic movement in Turkey during the 1980s, however, many Muslims became more committed to Islam's normative and scriptural dimensions, and the rights granted to women by Islam were a major topic of discussion within the movement. During this period, mehir as an Islamic legal practice was reinterpreted as a hak (right) for women that was to provide them with economic security. This view was particularly prevalent among women adherents of the Islamic movement, and it was taken into greater consideration at Islamic marriage ceremonies.

Over the last two decades, Turkey has witnessed a significant proliferation of media technologies, social services established by the Directorate of Religious Affairs, Imam Hatip high schools (schools with an Islamic syllabus), and Theology Faculties. These have brought together the reconfiguration and transformation of ‘Islamism’ into a particular understanding of Islam that highlights Islamic jurisprudence and prioritises Islamic tenets over the principles propagated by the secular republican state. This understanding of Islam has been accepted by a large section of the population, and the desire to live in an ‘Islamic’ way has gained in popularity. Within this context, more people have acknowledged the role of mehir as an obligation in Islamic marriage, which is usually performed in addition to civil marriage.

Nevertheless, while women with varying levels of commitment to a pious lifestyle in Istanbul today generally register a substantial amount of mehir in their Islamic marriage contracts, they rarely claim it during their married lives or in cases of divorce. The middle-aged women I talked to sometimes did not even remember their mehir. Many of my young interlocutors eagerly adopt the assumption of gender equality, both within marriage and in society at large, and do not feel the need to use mehir as a form of security. Many of those who attributed religious meanings to mehir also referred to its incompatibility with their understanding of love and lifelong marriage. The exceptions were a few divorcees who had claimed their mehir during their divorce processes, and a few married women who had received (or were determined to receive) it during their married lives or in the case of divorce.

Some of my interlocutors withdrew their right to mehir and bestowed it on their husbands, making it halal (permissible) to them. One might regard this as a gift or a sacrifice on their part, but most of these women did not emphasise that in their narratives. Of the women who had tried to claim their mehir, very few had been able to access it. Husbands often do not feel obliged to give their wives mehir either within the marriage or during divorce, and there is no powerful social imperative that holds men responsible for giving their (ex-)wives their mehir. This also applied to the religiously committed husbands I encountered during my research. Some of the women who had tried and failed to receive their mehir pointed out that their husbands had a debt to them for which they would have to account in the hereafter.

Women's different stories and lines of argumentation vividly reveal the convoluted trajectories and multiple meanings of mehir in Turkey. Especially among people with strong ‘secular’ commitments, unlike gift-giving, mehir can be seen as a transaction undermining women's equal position in marriage today. The argument that a man should ‘pay’ a certain sum before marriage is frowned upon, the thinking being that it degrades women and reduces them to a form of commodity. However, none of my religious interlocutors simply embrace the well-known argument that considers mehir to be the ‘sale’ of women. They usually see it as their hak given by God, but at the same time find it irrelevant to their social context. Therefore, a nuanced analysis of women's understandings of mehir shows that more complex dynamics are in play. Women's practices and interpretations of mehir change in relation to their multiple ways of engaging with Islam, their definitions of marriage and love at different periods in their lives and their interpretations of gender equality and difference. Besides, even if women do not receive their mehir, as explained below, they usually get gold as a wedding gift. Therefore, practices of mehir are also shaped by the presence of other forms of marriage exchange.

Beyond the Law

Based on long-term fieldwork in low-income neighbourhoods in Egypt, Homa Hoodfar (1998) draws attention to the ways in which women use mehir and marriage negotiations to circumvent the limitations of Islamic family law and to establish their own economic security. She argues that less privileged women employ less formal everyday negotiation strategies to protect their own interests where the law dictates a gendered hierarchy. Women use mehir as a bargaining tool to gain access to divorce and custody as well as to prevent polygamous marriage (see also Mir-Hosseini 1993). As a strategy of security for women, mehir has a strong meaning in the context of a set of family laws based on gender inequality where men are the heads of the household, women have limited access to divorce, inheritance shares are gendered and there is no shared property regime.

It may appear self-evident that my interlocutors’ devaluation of mehir was related to an assumption that women's economic rights are already secured by more equal legal rights to divorce, alimony, compensation for losses and the division of property in Turkey. However, when I asked my interlocutors why they had not claimed their mehir, only a few women addressed the presence of the Civil Code. For example, Serap was a lower-middle-class married woman in her mid-thirties who was working as a sewing teacher on a vocational course. She told me that she would not claim her mehir, and indeed she found the practice awkward. She claimed that everything a husband owned already belonged to his wife. When I asked her if she was referring to the shared property regime under the Turkish Civil Code, she said no. Instead, she said she was confident that her husband would give her everything he had, in any situation. However, although she found the practice strange and chose not to exercise her right to mehir, she emphasised its significance within the context of religion. She stated that although a man might not pay his wife alimony, mehir – unlike alimony – was a religious obligation that extended into the afterlife.

Another woman, Hilal, a 35-year-old recent divorcee, clearly stated that her approach to mehir was not shaped by the presence of the Civil Code. She asserted that if a man did not fear God, he would not pay his wife alimony either. This was a reference to a very common practice in Turkey whereby men deed their properties over to someone else and present themselves as destitute in court in order not to pay alimony or child maintenance. She underlined that legal rights did not necessarily materialise in women's lived experience either, and therefore neither religious law nor the Civil Code guaranteed women's rights.

Instead, many of my educated and working interlocutors stressed the ‘equality’ promised to them by modernity and the ideal of intimacy when explaining their reasons. For example, Eda, a 29-year-old recent divorcee who had been working at a university when she got married, drew attention to her equal position with her ex-husband, them both being university graduates. She also emphasised that her family was even wealthier than her ex-husband's family. Although she registered a certain amount of money as her mehir since she thought it was a religious obligation, she did not plan to claim it at the time of her marriage: ‘My ex-husband had never been a source of money for me. I didn't like that kind of hierarchy. Why was I taking that mehir? I thought, why should he have to take financial responsibility just because he's a man?’ Eda thought that mehir was a gendered practice reproducing the idea of gender inequality, and asking for money would have undermined her sense of equality and freedom. However, during our second interview, conducted one year after the initial one, she added different layers to her views. She pointed out that she had realised by experience that women could not find jobs as easily as men could, and families did not economically support their daughters as they supported their sons. I saw that her ideas on mehir had slightly changed, shaped by her everyday experiences of existing gender inequality in society.

When giving the reasons for their disregard of mehir, rather than pointing to their rights under the Civil Code, many women also said they had not contemplated the possibility of divorce when they got married. Whereas the discourse on ‘equality’ was articulated only by young educated women, according to many women from a wide array of backgrounds, including the young educated women, valuing the mehir meant making a rational calculation considering the possibility of divorce at the time of getting married. One of these interlocutors was Filiz, a 31-year-old lower-middle-class woman with no paid job and two small children, who had been an active member of the women's branch of a well-known Islamist party that had been very powerful in the 1990s. She wore a çarşaf (a black cloth that covered her body) and veiled her face, and she had been unable to receive a university education due to the headscarf ban that had prevailed in Turkey for almost two decades. She told me she wanted to live a life based on Islamic precepts, and this had extended to her preferences and criteria regarding marriage: she had decided that the man she would marry would have to be involved in the Islamist party, be consistent in his attachment to Islam in various areas of his life and make ‘no compromises’. She also told me several times how emotionally attached she was to her husband. After telling me that she had registered 85 grams of coins as her mehir – an average amount in her social milieu – Filiz added that she had not claimed her mehir and did not plan to receive it:

We didn't negotiate about mehir. Mehir is not important in Turkish society. I sometimes tell him [her husband] that this is his debt to me, but he is not looking for an opportunity to pay his debt to me. However, I also think that it will be okay if I don't have any mehir. I cannot think of mehir as insurance that will help me in the case of divorce, because I don't want to think about divorce.

Filiz's narrative is a strong example of how the demands of religious commitments and of everyday lived realities are in tension. Whereas Filiz is devoted to the normative registers of Islam, and thus recognises her mehir as her husband's debt to her, she is also motivated by her aspiration to a lifelong marriage and her adherence to familial norms. On the one hand, she sees mehir as her religious entitlement and includes a substantial amount in her agreement. On the other hand, she does not actively pursue this entitlement, envisioning her marital relationship lasting until her dying day, such thinking being common in Turkey. Moreover, she grounds this relationship in marital trust, intimacy and sharing.

Like Filiz, most of my interlocutors are ambivalent about mehir, and these ambivalences broadly arise from women's commitment to Islam and the normativities of the institution of marriage, which can overlap or contradict depending on different contexts in Turkey. Since mehir's legal force is often unrealised or ignored, it is generally seen as a religious practice, and therefore, it draws its authority from Islamic interpretations. Relying on an Islamic legal understanding of marriage built on duties and rights, many women I talked to– especially educated and religiously committed women who had gained Islamic knowledge during their formal education or in other circles – saw mehir first and foremost as a hak (right) of women given by God as well as a condition of religious marriage.

Women's religious approach towards mehir was also not limited to jurisprudential dimensions of Islam, which in turn makes this ambivalence more powerful. According to them, mehir was both a prescription and an act of worship, and the two aspects were mutually entangled. The women I talked to also highlighted mehir's affective power, which was intertwined with its power arising from their strong commitment to Islamic jurisprudence. This affective power arose from Muslims’ personal relationship with God, which was both intimate and power-laden (Schielke 2019). Mehir is a responsibility accepted in the presence of God, and it entailed accountability in both this world and the next – as Filiz claimed with regard to mehir as her husband's debt to her. Religiously committed couples in Turkey generally treat religious weddings as ceremonies performed in the presence of God as the sole authority, through which they receive God's permission to marry and promise to obey God's rules within marriage. Since mehir is seen as an indivisible part of religious marriage ceremonies, it also operates as a form of worship.

Aspirations to Lifelong Marriage and Conjugal Trust

Selma, a 26-year-old lower-class woman who had married a man with whom she fell in love at the age of 19, was in the middle of a divorce when I talked to her. During our interview, she narrated how her husband subjected her to psychological and economic ‘pressure’ throughout their marital life. While he did not allow Selma to work, he himself did not take the responsibility of sustaining their household. When I asked about mehir, she said:

I didn't know much about mehir at that time. I knew simply that it was the rule of God. I felt that without a religious marriage with a mehir, my marriage would not be considered valid. I suppose that my mehir was 150 grams of gold and Umrah or Hajj.⁵ My mum insisted that I had to demand something as a mehir. But it is ayıp [improper, shameful], how can one ask for something? It is like you are getting married in order to get divorced. I remember that I was so ashamed. I felt görgüsüz [vulgar, mannerless]. It seemed like you were safeguarding yourself, contemplating the possibility of it all coming to an end one day. Now I understand that mehir may be needed. He [her husband] had also said, ‘what is the need for such things? These are silly things. You won't ask anything of me, will you?’ I had great difficulties getting the words out of my mouth during the religious marriage ceremony.

Selma is one among many of my interlocutors who consider demanding mehir to be ayıp and awkward as it implies contemplating divorce at the onset of marriage. Like Filiz, Selma is also ambivalent due to the conflicting necessities of her religious and marital commitment, while at the same time being pulled by her mother and her husband in different directions. While Selma's narrative shares similarities to Filiz's, her usage of ayıp, a moral term commonly employed in everyday life to imply a violation of moral boundaries, provides us with a deeper understanding of how the act of getting married and staying in that union are constituent moral norms that demarcate women's boundaries.

In Turkey, marriage plays an essential role in shaping gender and familial identities, and as Belgin Tekçe (2019: 3) describes, it appears ‘at the centre of a nexus of attachments, entitlements, duties, and affectivity, which bind people to each other, vital to the reproduction of the individual as a responsible, moral, social being, and of the communal worlds of belonging’. It is considered to confer maturity on individuals, particularly women, and constitutes recognition by society and the state. For a substantial number of people, marriage is also the only legitimate way to experience sexual intimacy and have children. In addition, according to my young interlocutors, before they were married, marriage for them represented a space of freedom and operated as a means for establishing their own order. Marriage is an essential norm in society desired by most women, and women aspire to live a married life in order to be happy, complete, mature and ‘normal’.

Anthropologists have argued that marriage is a widely shared fantasy promoted through different narratives in Turkey (Akınerdem 2019; Sirman 2019; Tekçe 2019). Using the word ‘fantasy’ – which entails both ‘duty and desire’ and ‘propriety and pleasure’ (Tekçe 2019: 1) – they have drawn attention to women's search for the normativity of married life in Turkey. A well-known saying in Turkey attests to people's understanding of lifelong marriage, as well as their attitude towards divorce: ‘One enters the house in a wedding dress and leaves in a shroud’ (gelinlikle girilen evden kefenle çıkılır). Although people's understanding and experience of divorce have been changing recently, divorce is still substantially regarded as a moral deviation from the socially accepted institution of marriage. The word ayıp refers to a circumstance in which a particular moral boundary has been transgressed, and it both marks and maintains the moral boundaries of propriety. To think about the possibility of divorce then would imply a step towards what is socially frowned upon for a woman. By not claiming their right to mehir, and by not thinking about the possibility of divorce, women may be seen as investing in lifelong marriage rather than in material security. In other words, a lifelong marriage commitment is thought to compensate for women's right to mehir.

As Annelies Moors (1995) has shown in her study of dower practices in Palestine, trust is another key concept that introduces an additional layer to the discussion of mehir, especially in the context of companionate marriages. When narrating their marriage stories, many of my interlocutors told me how and why they trusted their husbands. While trust can be based on similarity, such as a shared familial or religious background, some educated and young women told me they had come to trust their husbands after establishing intimate relationships in which they talked about their deepest emotions. For some, trust had come after they saw their partner's capacity for care and self-sacrifice. While women may trust their prospective husbands in multiple ways, imagining and projecting a future with their husbands in turn also strengthens that sense of trust. In other words, ‘expectations about the future increase the tendency to cooperate and trust’ (Illouz 2019: 177), and thus women's aspirations to lifelong marriage produce trust too.

The trust at stake in relationships also configures women's sense-making with regard to economic marriage transactions and their property rights during their married lives. Eva Illouz (2019: 175) has indicated that in contrast to economic realms, where a contract creates trust, in the realm of intimate relationships, a contract undermines trust. This is highly relevant to the character of mehir as a contract: when they explained why they did not value or claim their mehir, many of my interlocutors, such as Serap, stressed their trust in their husbands. Not claiming their mehir could be seen as an indication that one trusted one's husband to fulfil his duties, as well as itself helping to produce trust.

Gifts of Gold: An Economic Resource and a Performance of Honour

Mehir is not the only material transaction that takes place when entering into marriage. In effect, economic exchange continues to be an integral part of the marriage process in Istanbul. Therefore, I also asked my interlocutors what they had received when they entered into marriage. Although they usually did not receive their mehir, all of them were given wedding gifts that had monetary value, mostly gold jewellery. For example, whereas Filiz said that it would be okay to not receive any mehir, her husband's family had given her five pieces of gold and five bracelets, equal in total to 100 grams of gold, as a wedding gift. She said that although she had control over the bracelets, the couple had spent them jointly. Given the prevalence of gift-giving practices at the point of entry into marriage in Turkey, the question of economic marriage transactions requires a discussion on wedding gifts.

At engagements and weddings, women are given gifts of gold or other valuable items by the groom's family, depending on local customs and the economic conditions of both parties.⁶ Gold is a valued adornment through which women ‘produce and express their various identities’ (Moors 2003: 103), and it is also an important economic resource for women. Indeed, it is an unwritten rule of the marriage process that the groom gives gold, and if a groom cannot meet the expectations of the bride's family in this regard, conflict can arise between the families during the engagement period.

Gold given as gifts to the couple legally belong to the bride.⁷ At religious marriages they are also sometimes registered as the bride's mehir, over which women have full control under Islamic law. However, in practice in Turkey, they are usually not exclusively used to the bride's benefit. As Nükhet Sirman (2015) has indicated, as such gifts are an economic resource transmitted from the groom's family to the couple, the bride, the groom and the groom's family can each stake a claim to them, and this becomes a matter of negotiation during the couple's married life. According to my interlocutors’ narratives, with the exception of very personal jewellery, their wedding gifts (including gold bracelets) were often used either to fund the joint needs of the couple or exclusively to fund the needs of the groom and his family. It emerged from the narratives that this issue of spending gifts was a topic of marital debate, particularly for divorced women I talked to. When the gifts of gold were used to fund the needs of their husband or his family, women usually considered this to be an injustice to themselves; but this was not the case if they were used to fund the purchase of items such as a house or car for the couple.

While most of my interlocutors had received jewellery on their entry into marriage, many of them – educated or otherwise – not only told me they would renounce their mehir in the case of divorce but also proudly stated that they had not made wedding gifts into an issue. According to many women I talked to, similarly to their narratives on mehir, talking and negotiating about money or gifts was also ayıp. However, since the social practice of wedding gifts has a different configuration than mehir, the implications involved in ayıp are slightly different here. For example, Ayşe, a 40-year-old married woman with no paid job, had requested a sum of money that would enable her to go on Hajj, but at the time of our interview, she still had not received it. When I asked her about what she received as wedding gifts she explained the following:

They gave me jewellery as a gift according to their own budget. But in our family, a gift of gold or jewellery is certainly not talked about, talking about them is very ayıp. My father believes the following: the groom should give according to his budget; it may even only be a quarter-gold.⁸ He strongly warned me not to open my mouth about jewellery. We went to buy a ring; before we went, he told me not to ask for anything.

Following this, she implied that she aligned with her father's ideas, stating that he was always right in his decisions. As Viviana Zelizer (2005) points out, economic activities can be thought to degrade intimate relations. Ayşe and her father's ideas framed by the word ayıp here imply a transgression of moral boundaries drawn between the intimate sphere and monetary issues in people's everyday interactions. This tension between economic transactions and intimate relationships is also seen in narratives that link mehir to women's possibility of divorce and their aspirations to marital relationships based on intimacy and trust. Yet, unlike mehir, which is a payment recorded and signed, and considered the bride's entitlement by God, gift exchange has a relatively arbitrary and ambiguous character. The moral question about talking about money therefore takes on different dimensions in narratives about wedding gifts.

As Jenny White points out, talking about money implies closure in relationships in Turkey. Economic and social relations and transactions are based on reciprocity and indebtedness, which depend on open-endedness and a lack of closure; therefore, ‘the emergence of money and profit too close to the surface of the transactions/relation causes anxiety’ (White 1994: 91). In this context, the effort of navigating the ambiguity of the intimate sphere, its lack of closure and the overlapping of these two supposedly different realms – the intimate and the economic – create moral anxieties for women making decisions about wedding gifts.

Yet this does not mean that economy and intimacy are entirely viewed as contradictory in this context; instead, their dynamic interplay is shaped by tacit rules and negotiations. Some middle-aged interlocutors repeated a well-known formula often spoken by the bride's family to the groom's family during wedding gift negotiations: ‘We don't demand anything; if you give something, it is from your şeref’ or ‘from your şan’. Şeref is a gendered term that denotes honour possessed by men and is derived from an achieved status in Turkey (Sev'er and Yurdakul 2001); şan is also an honour-related term, denoting reputation. Rather than fixing honour to a single content, Sirman (2014: 5) underlines its relational capacity and multiple meanings, and suggests that honour is ‘a performative act [that] can be and is used to change and/or give a particular direction to existing social relations’. Thus, there is arguably an ambiguous space of negotiation between intimate parties concerning gift-giving practices, which are carried out not according to civil law or religion, but according to honour and respectability performed within a complex web of social relations. In this space, the groom and his family are expected to perform honour by being generous and protective. Gifting gold jewellery, providing a wedding ceremony where a meal is offered or meeting other expenses expresses and regenerates the groom's reputation and status within his social environment. Women, on the other hand, are expected to perform honour by being proper and modest (Abu-Lughod 1986) and kanaatkar (abstinent) and satisfied, while at the same time usually recognising that owning gold can serve as economic security for themselves or their marital union in the future.

Like mehir, wedding gifts are also considered to be a means of both revealing and reconstructing the bride's value. Therefore, although my interlocutors largely described being ‘demanding’ as a moral boundary of propriety, a bride and her family would expect the groom and his family to provide monetary payments, gifts of gold, or furniture. Whether the parties come into conflict or not, these are often issues in the marriage process. Expecting without exactly demanding, the bride and her family will seek to strike a delicate balance between being valuable and being modest (indeed, modesty also reveals the bride's value), between economic security and austerity and between economic security and intimacy. The groom's value is also unfolded by ‘giving’, carried out through the operation of honour and reputation (Peirce 2014).

Concluding Remarks

Zelizer (2005) notes that people routinely differentiate social relations, negotiate their meanings and mark their boundaries. As part of this ‘relational work’, she argues, they negotiate the intersection of economic activity with social relations, and they invest great effort and constant worry in seeking to match the appropriate type of monetary payment to each relationship. According to Zelizer, to label a form of payment is also ‘to make claims about the relationship between payer and payee’ (Zelizer 2000: 826). How people experience and talk about a particular economic activity thus reveals a great deal about the relationship between the parties. On this basis, my interlocutors’ narratives about financial arrangements on their entry into marriage provide us with insights into their definition of marital relationships and the relative positions of the two families involved in each case. A careful analysis of the moral economies of marriage reveals women's shifting positions amid various demands and promises posed by family and kinship norms, as well as their commitments to Islam and ideals of marital intimacy and love. My interlocutors therefore try to find ‘proper’ ways of practising mehir and wedding gifts, with senses of shame, ambivalence and unease as they seek to adhere to multiple normativities.

Religiously committed women mainly consider mehir an obligatory requirement of religious marriage and their right given by God. In the context of the widespread proliferation of scriptural interpretations and Islamic institutions over the years, and many Muslims’ increasing commitment to the jurisprudential dimensions of Islam, registering a mehir does symbolic work through which people mark their religious commitment in religious marriages. Yet although mehir operates as a constitutive part of religious marriage, it is a demand that mostly remains unclaimed or unfulfilled, because certain normative dimensions beyond Islamic jurisprudence and civil law are significantly central to the decision-making processes of women. Particularly, since mehir is usually viewed as an amount to be given in the case of divorce to economically secure women, it exists in a tense relationship with the normativity of lifelong marriage. It is further seen as conflicting with marital intimacy and trust, which constitute essential elements of the ideal of companionate marriage. Additionally, some of my young interlocutors have articulated its gendered dimension, emphasising their equal position with their husbands. However, my interlocutors’ aspirations to lifelong marriage, equality and marital trust usually change after they face economic violence during their marital lives and divorce processes. Thus, I have listened to many narratives in which divorced women told of how they came to place more emphasis on economic security and their right to receive mehir.

While most of my interlocutors did not receive their mehir or did not plan to claim it, they generally received gifts of gold. Unlike mehir, which is seen as the bride's entitlement and registered in contact, the somewhat arbitrary realm of gift-giving and the common practice of spending gold for the needs of the marital union are more embraced by my interlocutors who define their marital relationships with intimacy, trust and a strong sense of familial belonging. Yet the tension between intimate relationships and economic transactions also creates ambivalence in the area of wedding gifts. In this space, women generally expect to be given gifts of gold without demanding them, as a result of their concerns about economic security, honour and modesty.

Lastly, as a woman who has lived in Istanbul since birth, I have also heard many stories about conflict between families stemming from disagreements about marriage and engagement gifts, wedding venues and expenses, and so on. It is self-evident that my interlocutors, which included religiously committed women from mostly lower-middle-class backgrounds, is not representative. One might easily encounter stories of brides who have no hesitation in making huge demands in Istanbul. Furthermore, my interlocutors’ narratives as constructions of their life stories do not reveal the ‘truth’ about them. In particular, regarding financial issues, women's narratives and actions, the texts and the facts, may not be consistent, and women's narratives may well reflect their desire for social approval. Nonetheless, that desire itself still offers a clue about women's quest for normativity and propriety concerning monetary issues in Turkey. What interests me is not consistency, but how a particular pattern narrated by my interlocutors reveals understandings of marriage, gender and religion in Istanbul.