One way for women to gain access to property is through inheritance. According to the prevalent laws of succession in the region a woman is entitled to inherit both from her kin and her husband. Many women I spoke with, in the city as well as in the rural areas, were aware of their inheritance rights. But at the same time they underlined that if urban women might take their share in the estate, rural women by and large refrained from doing so. Such an urban–rural dichotomy is also prevalent in the literature on the subject. A summary of how the literature has dealt with this issue is presented first. This is followed by a brief description of the ways in which women's succession rights have been defined in the legal system. The main body of this chapter concentrates on the question of under which circumstances various categories of women inherit and what this means to them.

Historians and anthropologists: an urban–rural dichotomy?

In the literature on inheritance practices the urban–rural divide tends to coincide with disciplinary boundaries, historians largely focusing on the cities and anthropologists mainly paying attention to the rural areas. Detailed case studies by historians indicate that Muslim women in Ottoman cities did, indeed, inherit. Gerber (1980: 232, 240) argues that in seventeenth-century Bursa the law of inheritance was fully effective concerning women and in many cases they inherited.