Don’t blame a Turk if you don’t know what a harem is
The #haremlife was real
By Asher Kohn
Turkey’s first lady, Emine Erdoğan, is apparently pro-harem. At a commemoration of Turkey’s Ottoman past, she described the Ottoman imperial institution as an “educational establishment” that “prepared women for life” and maybe not so bad.
It’s easy to mock these comments. Emine’s husband, Recep Tayyıp, has a rather conservative view of women’s role in society, and most Americans’ view of the Ottoman harem is along the lines of “a group of barely clothed lady slaves the sultan gets to sex up.”
In reality, the harem was the name for the private residences of the Ottoman palace. Within the harem’s walls women trained for life in courtly mannerisms. No, not bedroom techniques, but things like how to play instruments, how to understand poetry, and how to speak Ottoman Turkish.
After giving birth, a woman would remain part of the harem. She could sometimes be the most powerful part of it. After the death of Suleyman the Magnificent in 1534, his beloved Hürrem Sultan overwhelmed her son to begin a period referred to as The Sultanate of Women. It wasn’t until 1648 that Mehmed IV, a burly hunter and brilliant military commander, convinced his mother Turhan Hatice Sultan to restore power to the men of the empire.
The women of the harem were exclusively Christians or Jews converted to Islam in childhood, which may help explain why Europeans men bristled at their enslavement. A list of the imperial mothers include names like Agnes, Suzanne, and Sofia. Mozart’s 1782 The Abduction from the Seraglio describes a brave Italian rescuing his love from the sultan. It was wildly popular and keyed mental images of the harem full of pretty women and ferocious men.
Artists began painting harem scenes in the 1800s. These odalisques, their name taken from the Turkish odalik (“chambermaid”), were scantily clad and impossibly beautiful. Literally impossible — imagine this grande odalisque standing up. She’d look like Gumby as imagined in the pages of Penthouse.
It’s unlikely that any woman, whether queen mother or lowly chambermaid, would spend her days frolicking with peacock feathers. But the idea of an imperial harem shielded from prying eyes captured European imaginations. By the 1890s there was a whole genre of pulp novels with titles like The Lustful Turk and A Night in a Moorish Harem.
This trope is, shall we say, problematic. Not least because European dudes couldn’t get close enough to the harem to really know what it was like. The word harem, after all, means “secret” as in private life; as in life not accessible to Westerners feeling heroic. The harem was full of women who were negotiating their place in an enclosed hierarchy. It really wasn’t all that different from court life in Europe, except that Europeans weren’t permitted into it. Even by the late 1800s, when Europeans were conquering the globe, they weren’t allowed into an Ottoman woman’s room.
Writing about life in late 19th-century Istanbul, the famed Turkish writer Halide Edib Adivar wrote that “indoors was the delicate, intimate rule of women; out of doors was the realm of men.” Adivar was an aristocratic woman who used the lessons learned indoors to critique the cruel and buffoonish realm of men. With a fashionable bob and a collared shirt, Adivar was nobody’s idea of a woman in need of rescue. But she might be accurately described as a woman prepared for modern life.
