Harem: image and reality

by Leslie Farmer

During the six weeks in which I was traveling through the Arab world for this study of Arab women I devoted a rather disproportionate amount of time to the subject of the harem—in Arabic, “harem”—in hopes of dispelling some of the mystery—and misinformation—has clouded the West’s view of this now nearly extinct system of polygamy,

This did not involve, as some might imagine, bypassing ferocious retainers and double-locked doors to meet groups of secluded beauties; to uncover any remnants of the classical harem system would have required travels longer and further than mine. Today, in fact, the word “harem” simply means “women” not, as it once did, “inviolable” or “forbidden,” the sense which was beloved by story tellers and which still lingers, hardly less vividly, in Western imagination.

The origin of polygamy of polygamy have been variously ascribed to a superfluity of marriageable women and to the assumption that men must acquire as many women as possible for labor and for producing children—primitive society’s basic form of capital. Whatever its origins, polygamy existed well before Islam—in some cases, by thousands of years—in such diverse areas as India, China, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula and Europe. But it was during the rule of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul that the institution reached its greatest extension in Islam. Historians report top figures of up to 1,200 women, each with a certain rank in a formal hierarchy. The head of the harem was the sultan valideh, the mother of the ruling sultan. Next in importance after the sultan valideh were the four kadines (few sultans ever took legal wives) ranked in order of arrival, the first highest. A women of any grade could be promoted to a higher one, with its accompanying benefits of more luxurious accommodations and cloths and more servants, if she won the favor of the sultan.

Besides waiting hopefully for the sultan’s summons, the women of the harem acted as servants in various capacities if in the lower ranks, and took instruction in whichever fields they showed aptitude – cooking, accounting, music or other subjects. Sometimes laying their rivalries aside, they all danced or played music for the sultan. Occasionally they were allowed out of the palace for a carefully chaperoned boat trip on the Bosporus. That the harem became a byword for intrigue of all kinds is not precisely unfair. All of the women yearned to rise in wealth and prestige within the hierarchy, and some had a taste for politics as well. One, not at all atypical, who combined both interest—and started the so-called “Reign of Women” in the middle 16th century—was a Russian girl called Roxelana. Second kadine, and a great favorite of the sultan. She managed to have her two main rivals for power—the first kadine and the grand vizier—respectively demoted and exiled and herself soon became, next to the sultan, the strongest power in the empire. The following succession of weak and often degenerate sultans provided a vacuum of power—and the women moved to fill it For a century and a half the harem ruled the empire, making and unmaking sultans, the power shuttling between the sultan valideh, the first kadine and occasionally the chief black eunuch, and intrigue, bribery, extortion and sometimes murder the order of the day.

The great harems in Turkey ended with the deposition and exile of the Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1909, but polygamy lived on. As late as the 1930’s about 10 percent of families in the older generation in Beirut and Cairo, still accepted it, with the percentage somewhat higher in the countryside. Today, although it survives in isolated areas it is increasingly rare.

Seclusion is another matter. Up to five years ago there were women in Arab countries who literally never left their houses. They also disappeared when male visitors arrived and others never sat beside their husbands when driving.

Many older women, I must point out, are well content with this arrangement. As one women said, “They don’t want to give up being pampered.” But some educated younger women are beginning to show signs of discontent. As a young married women in Bahrain put it, “I want to know men’s ideas, and not just from books. I think sometimes we have the wrong ideas about men, and they about us.”

The image of the large and rigidly secluded harem—an institution which fascinated western imagination—was formed largely in the West by highly romanticized travel books and colored writings of not-too-objective missionaries. Burton’s English translation of the Arabian Nights, which appeared in the 19th century and circulated widely in America, was taken to present an accurate picture of current conditions. Even today an advertisement for one major airline features an Oriental potentate of some sort, complete with turban, whip-wielding slave—and some three dozen white veiled women trailing behind him.

Such concepts, as they become further and further divorced from present reality, are a sore point among educated Arabs. Characteristics, perhaps, of both the amusement and the annoyance they awake, is the remark of one peninsular amir (not apocryphal) recently planning an official visit to a western community. “Please don’t let the ladies start asking me about how many wives I have,” he begged an American friend. “If I tell them one, they won’t believe me; if I tell them two or three, they’ll wonder why I don’t have all I’m allowed; and if I tell them four they’ll think it’s too many!”