Gifts for women a duty for men

On the morning of Eid Al Fitr, Arafat Helles will start the day with a special prayer at the mosque to mark the end of Ramadan, and eat a breakfast of salty cheeses to line his stomach for what is to come. Then, he will set out with his three brothers and father across the Gaza Strip.

They will begin with their mother but eventually visit some 15 sisters, aunts and nieces, doling out dinars and shekels as part of a Palestinian custom of men marking the Muslim holiday by giving an eidiya, a gift of money, to female relatives.

The visits will follow an almost choreographed routine. At each home, the men will be plied with coffee and sweets. After little more than 15 minutes, the social calls will end — a rarity in a society where such visits may last for hours, and often end in an invitation to stay for dinner.

“This is the eidiya visit,” said Helles, 48, a professor of social services at Al Quds Open University, in Gaza. “It’s one of our important traditions.”

Giving an eidiya has long been a practice among Muslims — though it has no religious basis — and is believed by some to date back 1,000 years to the Fatimid dynasty and the practice of emirs giving gold coins or gifts during festivities.

But in most Muslim cultures, adults give an eidiya to children, sometimes in small, token amounts. Palestinians give the money to both children and adult female relatives, making the tradition far more expensive, with the kind of financial burden and expectations that Christmas gift giving has in the West. The amounts can range from 20 shekels, about $6, to 365 shekels, about $100.

These days, coming up with the money for the eidiya is especially onerous.

The 16-year blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt has undermined the living conditions of more than 2 million Palestinians, and led to a nearly 50 per cent unemployment rate that is among the highest in the world.

To give the eidiya, some men will go into debt. Others will wait until their wives get their eidiya from relatives before turning around and using that money to give the gift to their other female relatives.

“However bad one’s financial situation is, we have to go and give,” said Helles’ father, Hamid Al Abid Helles, 74. “This is a tradition we won’t abandon.”

The practice comes at the end of a month of already added expenses for Ramadan, with the elaborate dinners after daily fasts, and decoration of homes and purchase of new clothes to be worn on Eid. In the weeks leading up to the holiday — which this year begins on Friday — shopping districts in Gaza were packed, with seasonal religious music just audible over the din of shoppers and honking horns.

At each relative’s house, Arafat Helles, his brothers and father will be served strong Turkish coffee, Eid date cookies and chocolates — part of the Eid diyafah, or hospitality. They will eat just enough to be polite but remain conscious that at the next stop they will be offered the same spread and encouraged to indulge.

“By the end we have a stomachache,” said Helles, a father of six. “We put all the chocolate in our pockets and tell them we’ll eat it later.”

“He comes back home and his pocket is bulging with chocolates,” said his wife, Basima Helles, 44.

During each visit, the men will keep an eye on their watches. After 15 minutes, they’ll begin making moves to leave, and call to the women of the house to accept the eidiya. The women, in turn, will protest out of politeness. “Really, there’s no need,” they’ll say. Some will put their hands behind their backs to avoid being handed the money.

To lessen the embarrassment of bills being pressed into palms, shops across Gaza are now offering eidiya cards and small boxes to put the money in, to make the custom feel more like gift giving and less transactional. Some cards mention every female relation that could be on the receiving end of an eidiya: my granddaughter, my wife, my mother-in-law.

Every year Basima Helles tells her own brother not to give her an eidiya, because she knows that his financial situation is precarious, and that she is one of six sisters.

“We say, ‘we forgive you, we excuse you,’ but he’s not willing to come empty-handed,” she said. “He considers this a social obligation.”

The next day, when women go to visit their families for Eid, she will return the money by giving it as an eidiya to his children.

As the economic situation in Gaza has worsened in recent years, men unable to afford the gift giving have stopped visiting relatives altogether during Eid to avoid embarrassment.

But religious leaders urge men not to abandon a religious obligation — visiting family — for the sake of a cultural one — the eidiya.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times