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A nahiyah or nahiya ( , plural , ), also spelled nahia, nahiyeh or nahiye, is a regional or local type of administrative division that usually consists of a number of villages or sometimes smaller towns. The Ottoman nahiye, also called a bucak, was a third-level or lower administrative division, and remains as such in some successor states such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, with the Balkan states of Serbia and Montenegro having preserved the term for a while after liberation for the highest administrative unit as nahija. In Tajikistan and the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang, both from the Turco-Persian or Turkic regions of Asia, it is a second- and third-level division, respectively. A nahiyah can constitute a division of a qada', mintaqa or other such district-type division and is sometimes translated as "subdistrict".
The nahiye () was an administrative territorial entity of the Ottoman Empire, smaller than a . The head was a (governor) who was appointed by the Pasha.
The was a subdivision of a and corresponded roughly to a city with its surrounding villages. s, in turn, were divided into s (each governed by a ) and villages (, each governed by a ). Revisions of 1871 to the administrative law established the (still governed by a ) as an intermediate level between the kaza and the village.
After achieving national liberation, the Principality of Serbia (1817âÂÂ1833) and Principality of Montenegro (1852âÂÂ1910) preserved the term as ().
Persian has borrowed the Arabic word with the spelling ÃÂçÃÂÃÂÃÂ. Encyclopædia Iranica transliterates it mostly as nahia or, with diacritics, nÃÂḥia/nÃÂḥëa. In modern contexts it may be used with the meaning of anything between 'census region', and 'section' as in "Section (nÃÂḥia) 2 of eleven local fishing stations".