OTTOMAN AND EUROPEAN INFLUENCE IN THE NINTEENTH-CENTURY BRIDAL COLLECTION OF THE AZEM PALACE, DAMASCUS, SYRIA

Julianne Parker

In 1829, Ottoman Emperor Mahmud II issued a proclamation mandating that all men under his rule must replace their traditional clothing with the “modern” European-style jacket and trousers.1 The interest and appeal of Europe had never been so publicly sanctioned in Ottoman history. The western influence was perhaps most greatly felt in outlying provinces like Damascus, whose government had long been semi-autonomous under local governors, including the Azem family, residents of the Azem Palace. As European entrepreneurs, statesmen, and tourists continued to visit Damascus, local Damascenes inevitably began to imitate these exotic foreigners. Fashion was one of the easiest ways to mimic the west, especially in the wake of Mahmud’s declaration. Conflicts thus arose between local traditions and the new western customs. This study of the nineteenth and twentieth-century bridal collection in the Azem family’s Damascene Palace is helpful in showing the social and political tension between extant Syrian traditions and the ever-increasing European influence.

European Presence in the Ottoman Empire

It is estimated that in 1897, there were 127,000 foreigners living in Istanbul out of a population of 850,000. More than three-quarters of these foreigners had emigrated to the Ottoman Empire between 1840 and 1900.2 European interaction with the Ottoman Empire was obviously not a nineteenth-century phenomenon, but never in Ottoman history had there been such a profound cultural exchange. This huge boost in foreign affairs was mostly a factor both of eighteenth and nineteenth-century political policy and eventually the Crimean War. Sultan Selim III took one of the greatest steps towards garnering European interest and relations by setting up permanent European embassies, the first opening in London in 1793, followed by Paris, Berlin, and Vienna in 1796.3 Once reform-minded Mahmud II came to power in 1808, the Ottoman Empire began modeling its military and social services after European examples. Mahmud completely replaced the centuries-old Janissary force with the new “Trained Victorious Soldiers of Muhammed,” complete with a western-style cavalry division. Mahmud also set up an Ottoman postal service to better contact and administer the Empire’s often wayward provinces.4

Perhaps the greatest impetus for European interest in the Ottoman Empire, however, was the Crimean War itself. The war pitted England, France, and the Ottomans against Russia from 1853-56, securing afterwards a strong feeling of solidarity among the Ottomans towards the western-European states. It resulted in the creation of multiple foreign schools in Istanbul, the American Robert College perhaps the most renown. Aristocratic Turkish boys were also now encouraged to finish schooling at elite French military academies, furthering the proliferation of western languages among the Ottoman population. The returning students would be filled with tales of French customs and traditions, causing their imitation to become even more widespread throughout the Empire.5

The war’s promotion of trust between the Europeans and Ottomans made the industrial trade opportunities much more appealing for western investors. The first appearance of western commodities in Damascus dates back to the 1820s with the trade of English textiles. By the 1850s, the Damascene market was completely saturated with English products and its accompanying technology.6 The sudden shift in economics from local production to international trade caused many Damascenes to reach new heights of either dependant poverty or autonomous wealth. Women began to privately own craft-production shops called gediks.7 Here they could manage embroidery workshops appealing to foreign visitors, especially other women, looking for traditionally “eastern” goods. Embroidery workshops had existed in the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, but never before had there been both the international market and female job opportunity that the nineteenth-century economic shift produced. Women who were traditionally talented embroiderers in their domestic spheres were now publicly using their skills to attract the European tourist. By 1890, textile production employed 15,000 people in Damascus (one-tenth of the population), with 5,000 of those being women.8

The technological shift resulted in the “rapid destruction and disappearance of hand spinning of cotton yarn” in the Ottoman Empire.9 Because of Britain’s decades-long economic presence in Syria, Damascene domestic production of cotton had utterly ceased by the 1840s. The urban textile industry relied on the import of English cloth and technology to create ready-made, factory-produced clothing. Foreign technology was so pervasive that by 1910 there were over two thousand sewing machines in Damascus alone. The foreign economic presence in Damascus led many rural Syrians to populate the urban community, seeking employment and wealth. Women were especially inclined to use their traditional weaving, sewing, and embroidery talents to better their lifestyles, resulting in a decline in rural production of textiles. The shift to the urban production is probably the greatest practical explanation for the steadily increasing presence of European fashion. With the rural market collapsing, demand for the cosmopolitan, foreign fashions of the city would inevitably increase dramatically.10

In nineteenth-century Damascus, the steady increase of fashionable European women as tourists and residents created many easy targets of imitation for this growing textile industry. The appeal of western fashion to Ottoman women was inexorably sealed, however, by the famed arrival in Istanbul of the beautiful and fashionable French Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, in 1866. As Turkish resident Zeyneb Hanim states:

Imagine actually seeing in the flesh, the heroine of your grandmother’s stories, the Empress whose beauty fascinated the East, the Empress whose clothes the women copied, whose language they learnt, the woman who had, though perhaps she may not know it, the greatest influence on the lives of Turkish women.11

The proliferation of French customs and culture was suddenly felt throughout the entire Ottoman Empire. Due to Mahmud II’s reforms, nineteenth-century aristocratic Ottoman women had a rare opportunity to be publicly educated in new all-female private and public schools.12 Here, just like their French-educated brothers, they were often taught western language and literature, allowing their fascination with western customs to be applied directly into the way they lived their own lives.

The appeal of European visitors in Damascus was not only evidenced by a change in fashion, but also by a complete re-evaluation of home décor. The traditional wooden ceilings and walls of Damascene homes were canvassed over with images of European-style landscapes and cities. Residents began adding dining rooms to their homes and even modified the home’s typically plain exterior with elaborate windows and wooden cornices. In the latter half of the 19th century, a Yearbook of the Ottoman Province of Damascus states that between four and five hundred houses were being renovated each year.13

The reactions by Europeans to the Syrian mimicry were often negative, as the western imitation was often over-emphasized by Damascenes anxious to distance themselves from their Ottoman rulers. Watzinger, a German resident of Damascus, commented that “in a few cases the decorations become overpowering and perverse because of too much white marble. . .too large mirrors or too many landscape and figurative views which are inappropriate for local talents.” This décor’s attempt at European alignment and Ottoman distance was perhaps best achieved by the non-Muslim residents of Damascus, for as Watzinger concludes, “examples of this kind we mainly find in the Jewish and Armenian quarters.”14 Armenian, Jewish, and Greek residents in the Ottoman Empire were the first to adopt western lifestyle and fashion trends in a drastic attempt to link themselves with their European and Christian counterparts. This being said, they were still known to continuously mix the two influences in their wedding costume—they would wear a white European-style bridal gown with a traditional veil of long gold threads covering the bride’s face.15

typically plain exterior with elaborate windows and wooden cornices. In the latter half of the 19th century, a Yearbook of the Ottoman Province of Damascus states that between four and five hundred houses were being renovated each year.13

This tendency to blindly imitate certain European styles while adhering to Ottoman traditions was often a point of ridicule among the western visitors. English visitor Julia Pardoe expounded upon this interesting and slow-moving western influx in 1837 while observing a parade of Greek women at a dance: Ottoman Damascus was in the decoration of the bridal chamber. This is one of the most pronounced instances where there is a direct European influence mixed with a traditional Ottoman marriage custom. In the Azem Palace, the room designated as “The Bride’s Room” is furnished with European-style high couches covered with traditional Ottoman-style embroidered velvet covers (Fig. 4). The importance of the bridal chamber, or hacle, as a place of consummation and hopeful fertility did not diminish with western presence in Damascus. This room was the final location of the marriage ceremonies, where the groom could finally see the face of his bride. During the weeklong wedding celebration, the majority of the festivities were segregated by gender, with the bride heavily veiled. Yet in this private hacle, the bride was entirely revealed to a man for the first time. The elaborate embroidery within a courtly hacle in Istanbul was described by English visitor Fanny Blunt: “This promiscuous exhibition of silk gauze and various stuffs, intermingled with embroidery in variegated silks, gold and silver, is most striking in effect.”17

With this hacle decoration, it becomes evident that the prevalence of western fashions in nineteenth-century Damascus had a surprisingly small effect on the actual celebratory traditions of the marriage itself. When examining the nineteenth-century collection at the Azem Palace, it is obvious that the production of traditional objects for the wedding ceremonies was continued, however modified to fit European fashions. As previously mentioned, wedding celebrations would continue for an entire week and were enacted separately by men and women. The most important female ritual was the bride’s obligatory visit to the bath, or hamam. Because of the wealth and political importance of the Azem family, their palace in Damascus was equipped with its own hamam complex, which can still be seen today. Whether the hamam was privately located in the home or more customarily situated in a public building, its importance in the daily experience of Ottoman women cannot be understated—it was the center of the female social realm. It was their ultimate site of freedom, for “the worst tyrant among husbands had no right to forbid his wife seeking solace in the hamam.”18 Many European visitors to the Ottoman Empire were fascinated by this private dominion, fantasizing this hidden femininity. The segregation of Ottoman women in hamams even led to western stereotypes of the Empire’s heightened sexuality. But for these secluded Ottoman women, the hamam was not an atmosphere of homosexuality, but was instead a social institution which helped form political intrigue and personal relationships.

Thus despite the feminine absence from public life, Ottoman women were not completely inactive and subservient. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, a great nineteenth-century observer and author of Ottoman customs, stated that Turkish women “are perhaps freer than any ladies in the universe, and are the only women in the world that lead a life of uninterrupted pleasure exempt from cares; their whole time being spent in visiting, bathing, or the agreeable amusement of spending money, and inventing new fashions.”19 Though highly generalized, Lady Montague’s description aids in understanding that the realm of Ottoman women was complex and did exert its own freedoms—especially once within the private realms of the home and hamam. The importance of this social custom in promoting such female empowerment can be seen as the reason for its perseverance in the Damascene wedding rituals under the influence of Europe. In the weeklong wedding ritual, the bride would attend the hamam on Tuesday to be personally washed by the head woman, or usta. The bride would wear a special baidalli jacket and dress of embroidered velvet and silk. The embroidery was mainly done in gold and silver thread, just as all other embroidered wedding items.20 She would also wear specially-designed tall wooden hamam shoes, or nalin, heavily decorated with inlaid pearl.

The Azem Palace houses an enormous collection of these pearl-inlaid nalin (Figs. 5-7). The taller and more elaborate shoes, exuding wealth and prestige, would therefore have been worn by a bride on her important and highly public hamam visit. The pair on the far left of Fig. 7 are surprisingly western in design- with a high platform and heel. Again, it was at the hamam that women came to see and be seen, so it seems natural that the highly popular western fashions present in Damascus would begin to appear in a woman’s hamam costume. This imitation of a European woman’s stiletto shoes is also highly instructional, however, in showing that although European fashion styles were quite ubiquitous in Damascus, women worked the fashions into highly traditional rituals of their Ottoman past.

Once at the hamam, the bride’s body hair would be completely removed in the warm rooms, referencing the Turkish Hanafi law which outlined the ideals of female decency in relation to her clean, hairless purity.21 She was then taken to the soğukluk, or cold room, to have her hair braided and decorated with pearls. Finally she was escorted back into the dressing room where gypsies would play music to celebrate her return to her guests, or hanims. She would kiss each of their hands as they wished her congratulations and was afterward dressed in borrowed wedding underclothes which she would wear until Thursday morning, the day of the official ceremony when the bride would put on the entire outer bridal costume.22

One of the main embroidered hamam textiles was the bohça. The bohça was a common
textile in Ottoman life, used to wrap up courtly textile gifts, turbans, linens, and even Korans. The hamam bohça held all of the woman’s towels and change of clothes, and thus became the most obvious public display of a woman’s wealth and if domestically produced, her embroidery skills. Bohças usually had their own special embroidery technique, atma, which involved laying an initial layer of threads first over the fabric and then placing another thread layer on top at regular intervals. The thread was then couched down with smaller stitches to form an intricate pattern. However, if the bohça was made out of linen, the embroidery was darned, with the pattern painted on before the thread was applied, giving a satin-like appearance.23 These embroidery techniques help to identify the area or means of production, with the darning method the most labor intensive and slow, meaning it was highly possible that the individual women would prefer this method in domestic production to fill their long hours at home. However, the atma embroidery’s quick stitch was probably more often produced in professional workshops, especially after the English technological influx of the 1820s. This type of embroidery was only economically viable for the extremely wealthy hamam patrons. For as Frenchman Antoine Melling described, at the hamam, it was easy to distinguish “by the cut and quality of their clothing, women of various ranks.”24 The embroidery on all the hamam textiles was thus the ultimate statement of a woman’s social standing and private habits. In the wedding visit to the hamam, the bride’s bohça and towel would not only serve practical purposes, but also publicly showed her character and social standing.

Further exemplifying the mix of Ottoman and European ideologies, the Azem Palace’s collection houses two examples of upper-class, urban entaris, or gowns, which although show western influence, remain much more aligned with a traditional, Ottoman design (Figs. 8-9). The first is from Aleppo, and though its outward appearance seems completely traditional, it was created well into the twentieth century with the western innovations of fitting directly over the wearer’s head (rather than hanging in multiple layers held together with ties), and utilizing the English innovation of machine embroidery (Fig. 8). These practical western influences do not entirely overshadow the traditional nature of this dress, however. It is still designed to hang baggy and a-line starting at the shoulders, rather than pinched in at the waist in the typical western tradition of Figures 1-3. It becomes obvious then that although textile production would never be the same after the English presence in Damascus, not all Syrian women were entirely open to full adoption of the western fashions suddenly available after the nineteenth-century. As already mentioned, in adopting European-style dress, the bride and her family were often symbolically distancing themselves from their Ottoman rulers. The adherence to Ottoman, Syrian, and Islamic traditions varied among families, as Demetra Brown, a western visitor to Istanbul in 1909 states:

As I said before, this household was a strict one, and the women of the household obeyed all the laws of their creed, and followed the prescribed customs rigorously. Their nails were profusely dyed, and their indoor robes were one-piece garments of very costly materials. Their hair was done up in braids, while gauzy pieces of silk, cut bias, were arranged around their heads.25

This Aleppan entari from the Azem’s collection would have therefore aligned its wearer more directly with the feminine ideals traditionally publicized by the bridal garment. A standard bride in Ottoman Syria was meant to exemplify her purity, fecundity, and marriageability directly in her wedding costume. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century urban upper class wedding ritual, the dressing of the bride would occur on Thursday morning of the wedding week,

beginning with the yüz yazisi, or makeup decoration of the bride’s face. It was thus obligatory that every surface of her body was ornamented, an expense that made many families borrow the wedding garments rather than pay for their elaborate embroidery materials. After the yüz yazisi, the bride would put on a thin white tulle underdress with tiny pearls and gold hoops—the pearls a symbol of her purity. The actual dress, or entari, was red in the Turcoman tradition, but began to be modified in the eighteenth century to include a shade of deep purple. In Syria, tribal custom favored red for its magical power to dispel evil. The entari was usually made of heavy velvet embroidered in gold and silver, and sometimes with pearls depending on the family’s wealth.26 The bride wore a single-strand necklace that would ideally reach the ground. It was made of precious stones and called akarsu, or “flowing water,” a symbol of women’s powers of fertility that goes back all the way to Turcoman traditions.27

The bride’s head was then covered with a baslik, or bridal crown, of crimson tulle decorated with gold and silver thread. At the temples of the woman’s face long strands of gold and silver tinsel, or tel, hung down. On top of the baslik was placed the family’s aigrette, a common Ottoman head emblem of finely cut glass, in a setting called divanhane çivisi. The woman also wore bracelets, rings, and elaborate tel plaiting her hair.28 Finally on top of all this regalia would be placed the most essential and sacred bridal garment—the obligatory red veil. The veil hid the woman from the public eye; only to be lifted after the marriage was performed and she was alone with her new husband. All of this jewelry mixed with the embroidered entari and veil would make the bride completely radiant and sparkling.

The ideology behind the bride was derived not only from pre-Ottoman tribal traditions, but also from Islam itself. The courts in Ottoman Syria were run by Islamic muftis, who would occasionally be consulted on matters of marriage. Their rulings were derived directly from the tenets of Islam, and covered all aspects of the marriage contract. One of their main responsibilities was in determining the appropriate maturity of the woman chosen by the groom. Her maturity level and marriageability was not determined by her age, or even puberty, but instead by her physical appearance as “fleshy” (samina), “buxom” (dakhma), or an “object of desire.” For “marriage was a sexual relationship, and the consummation of the marriage was essential to establishing the groom’s responsibilities.”29 If the woman’s physical appearance could not feasibly sustain intercourse, she was deemed unsuitable for marriage, and the suitor must wait to enact the ceremony. The traditional Ottoman bridal costume would emphasize this marriageability directly—especially when coupling the entari with şalvar, or long, baggy trousers. The second entari from the Azem’s collection perfectly exemplifies this idea—its rich red velvet is voluminous enough to show off the bride’s “buxom” figure (Fig. 9).

Another important purpose of this Damascene entari was also to service the Muslim woman’s obligatory privacy. Both the Islamic hadeeth and Qur’an have admonitions for men and women to guard their eyes from any direct viewing of the other gender outside the bounds of marriage or family. In Surah 24 of the Qur’an, believing men are instructed to “lower their gaze (from looking at forbidden things) and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them: Allah is well acquainted with all that they do.”30 In Turcoman tribal weddings throughout Anatolia, the necessity of covering the bride was the first priority in her costuming. Women’s modesty was essential in all aspects of her life—even when a woman was executed by a man, her body was placed in a sack for protection of her modesty. An Anatolian woman’s wedding clothing especially helped to preserve her modesty, for before the wedding “her virginity mattered more than she did.”31

When taken in the context of these Muslim bridal ideals, the revolutionary nature of the three previously-mentioned European-style gowns in the Azem’s collection is quite astounding. Although Figures 1 and 2 have fuller skirts in alignment with the bride’s modesty and fertility, the straight, silk skirt of Figure 3 is in almost direct contrast to these Muslim concepts. All three gowns are also designed to show off a small, cinched waist in traditional European fashion. To wear such a form-fitting gown at a public wedding ceremony would have been unthinkable in Ottoman tradition and speaks to the astounding power of European ideas and fashion in nineteenth-century Damascus.

It also makes the existence of the Azem Palace’s Aleppan entari more understandable, despite its twentieth-century construction. The boldness of wearing an individually-tailored western-style gown would obviously not be palatable to all Muslim women in Syria. Not only would this entari’s shape have emphasized Islamic bridal ideals, but more important and noticeable is the embroidery covering the entire gown. The flower motifs follow a long tradition of symbolically displaying a bride’s power to give life. The fecundity of the bride was represented by symbolic flowering plants in every tribal and urban community within the Ottoman Empire. In the farming villages of what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, suzanis, or embroidered wedding coverlets, directly served both purposes of not only preserving the bride’s privacy but also promoting her fecundity. The very word suzani is Tajik for “embroidery,” but they were also directly referred to as gulkurpa, or a “flowering blanket.”32 These “flowering blankets” were therefore seen as apotropaic covers of the bridal virtue and her powers of fertility. For not only were they used to cover the consummation bed, but would also physically screen the bride from the groom throughout the ceremony. The belief in the veil was obviously not simply associated with weddings, and as an eighteenth-century Albanian convent pamphlet declared, “there is no veil save the veil of modesty.”33 However, the preservation of the bride’s virtue before the marriage was severely regarded and undertaken by the entire community. The embroidered symbols can thus be seen to aid in this preservation and in turn reinforce her inherent female privacy.

The importance of the fertility symbols found on Figure 8, the suzanis, and indeed every bridal garment found within the Azem Palace collection, is further emphasized by the fact that these images are embroidered directly onto the bridal garment. The importance of embroidery in the varying communities throughout the rural and urban Ottoman Empire cannot be understated. It is embroidery which probably best exemplified the woman’s private sphere, for as the Frenchman Pierre Belon remarked after a visit to Istanbul in 1588:

We find it hard to believe in our country that work on white cloth is held of such estime and value in Turkey, and that they make such a lot of it. The reason is that the women are normally kept shut indoors and that they have no housework to do, unless they are employed to do something. They do not have the habit of making lace, so they pass their time at embroidering white cloth.34

Belon’s comment cynically addresses an important feature of the prominence of embroidery within the bridal customs. Islam reinforced a woman’s privacy with the veil, which thus acted as a portable and public separation of the woman back into her private sphere. Thus under the veil she was allowed to maintain her separated comfort. At an Ottoman woman’s wedding, however, she was fully publicized, and thus was obligated to create a new elaborate veiling system, both literally and symbolically through her embroidered costume. Throughout the wedding ritual, a bride’s personal embroidery was continuously displayed, and thus became a public manifestation of the highly segregated domestic life she had hitherto been living. It became a mark of her character and a symbol of both her private virtue and the obligatory step towards the public world through marriage. Embroidery’s importance was so great, that even under the European fashion craze of the nineteenth-century, gowns continued to be embroidered in traditional designs. No matter the level of European influence on the wedding gown, embroidery was present, as seen in the Azem Palace collection.

Because the wedding ceremony was literally the most important day in a woman’s wife throughout the entire Ottoman Empire, the embroidery was not everyday construction, but almost always completed in gold and silver thread. This metallic threadwork is seen on the neckline embroidery of Figure 9, but is also present on all of the previously-mentioned European-style gowns in the Azem’s collection. In these three gowns, the embroidered gold is too elaborate for domestic production, and would probably have been commissioned and completed at the modern professional workshops. The thread would have either been actual thin gold thread, or more commonly gold-colored wire wrapped around yellow thread. The design was cut out of cardboard, with one side covered with the thread and subsequently tacked on to the dress.35 The heavy velvet fabric of Figures 1 and 2 would have made such intense labor nearly impossible for the leisurely aristocratic young girl fit for wearing the gown.

Despite this lack of personal construction similar to the machine-embroidered Aleppan gown, the ideology behind the embroidery would have remained intact. It still signified the worth of the bride as a domestic and private individual. Embroidery was so symbolically aligned with the woman’s character that while arranging a marriage, a groom’s mother or professional matchmaker would “look over the girl’s embroidery to see how well executed it was. This, it was said, gave her an idea of the girl’s character.”36 European fashions would never entirely negate this key female trait and symbol.

The social statement of wearing the cinched-waist European gown would have therefore been eased by their heavy embroidery. Figures 1-3 again make use of the flowering symbolism of fertility, again showing the ability of the Damascene bride to cling to her traditions while simultaneously appearing fashionable. The difference in aesthetics of these floral motifs from the more structured Syrian tribal embroidery is quite obvious, however, and referred to as bindallı, or “thousand branches.” Although bindallı’s design was mostly prevalent in the nineteenth-century, its aesthetic appearance was truly just an extension of previous Ottoman embroidery traditions (Figs. 12-14). And indeed, its innovative design continued to be used on highly traditional wedding garments, such as this şalvar (long, baggy trousers) and jacket construction from the Turkish region of Eskişehir (Fig. 15). The motif of the bouquet as seen in Figure 1 dates back to eighteenth century Ottoman textiles, as evidenced in Figure 12. Despite its popularity in the nineteenth century, the twisting forms of the “thousand branches” are present even in Figure 13, from the seventeenth century. The bindallı can therefore be seen as another Ottoman holdover on even the most western of bridal gowns.

Conclusion

The collection of bridal items in the Azem Palace exemplifies the shifting ideologies of the appropriate Syrian bride. Whether in the bridal chamber, hamam, or on the bride herself, a Damascene woman’s family had multiple opportunities for showing off the attractive purity, fecundity, and wealth of the bride. Damascus’ nineteenth-century atmosphere of political change inexorably added an additional socio-political ideology to the bride’s choice of garments. In abandoning the traditional entari for the fashionable two-piece European gown, the Damascene bride displayed a feeling of solidarity with the recent western influence. Her family was also reflected in such a statement, often seeking a reputation of their own great wealth and influential camaraderie with the aristocratic foreigners. The atmosphere begun by Mahmud II’s preferential treatment of European fashion as “modern” in 1829 would inexorably alter the western sentiments throughout all provinces of the Ottoman Empire. As this pivotal Azem collection shows, the full adoption of western customs was slow and perhaps never complete. Though attempting to imitate the west, Syrians would inevitably incorporate known customs into their European designs to symbolically allude to their traditional values. In the bridal costume, the values of purity and fecundity were repeatedly alluded to in the elaborate embroidery. The blend of two very different fashions in the bridal wear of nineteenth-century Damascus shows a society’s shifting desire to continue traditional values while simultaneously adopt customs and align themselves with the most current influential power.

References

Nancy Micklewright, “Women’s Dress in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Mirror of a Changing Society” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1986), 5.
Nancy Micklewright, “Late-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Wedding Costume as Indicators of Social Change.” Muqarnas 6 (1989): 173.
Micklewright, “Women’s Dress in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Mirror of a Changing Society,” 49.
Ibid., 52-54.
Ibid., 58-60.
J.A. Reilly, “Women in the Economic Life of Late-Ottoman Damascus.” Arabica (1995): 79.
Ibid., 85.
Ibid., 93.
Ibid., 94.
Reilly, 93-95.
Micklewright, “Late-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Wedding Costume as Indicators of Social Change,” 162.
Micklewright, “Women’s Dress in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Mirror of a Changing Society,” 70.
Brigid Keenan, Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000),
134.
Ibid., 134.
Micklewright, “Late-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Wedding Costume as Indicators of Social Change,” 171.
Micklewright, “Women’s Dress in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Mirror of a Changing Society,” 147.
Marianne Ellis “Ottoman Style: Embroidered Textiles for Decoration.” Hali 133 (2004) 85.
Godfrey Goodwin, The Private World of Ottoman Women (London: Saqi Books, 1997) 26.
Leslie Luebbers, “Documenting the Invisible: European Images of Ottoman Women, 1567-1867.” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 24 (March-April 1993) 5.
Goodwin, 207.
Fanny Davis, The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918 (Wesport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 70.
Ibid.
Ellis, 80.
Luebbers, 5.
Micklewright, “Late-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Wedding Costume as Indicators of Social Change,” 162.
Davis, 74.
Goodwin, 45.
Davis, 74.
Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 44.
Abdullah Yusufali, transl., The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an, (Beltsville: Amana Publications, 2001), 103.
Goodwin, 71. It must be noted, however, that Islamic muftis would repeatedly declare that a woman could not be legally rejected if found deflowered on the wedding night. This ruling went against strong local custom, however, and was often contested. See Tucker, 45-50.
E.S. Ermakova “Central Asian Embroideries and Fabrics.” Arts and the Islamic World 33 (1998) 20.
Goodwin, 78.
Roderick Taylor, Ottoman Embroidery (New York: Interlink Books, 1993) 199.
Micklewright, “Late-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Wedding Costume as Indicators of Social Change,” 162-164.
Davis, 229.

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