Harem

[4][7] In the West, the harem, often depicted as a hidden world of sexual subjugation where numerous women lounged in suggestive poses, has influenced many paintings, stage productions, films and literary works.

[10] The practice of female seclusion is not exclusive to Islam, but the English word harem usually denotes the domestic space reserved for women in Muslim households.

The royal household was controlled by the chief wife and queen, who as a rule was the daughter of a Persian prince and mother of the heir to the throne,[citation needed] and who was subject only to the king.

[37][19] It does not appear that royal and aristocratic women lived in seclusion from men since it is known that they appeared in public and traveled with their husbands,[38] participated in hunting[39] and in feasts;[40] at least the chief wife of a royal or aristocratic man did not live in seclusion, as it is clearly stated that wives customarily accompanied their husbands to dinner banquets, although they left the banquet when the "women entertainers" of the harem came in and the men began "merrymaking".

[47] In contrast to the earlier era of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the Rashidun Caliphate, women in Umayyad and Abbasid society were absent from all arenas of the community's central affairs.

[48] It was very common for early Muslim women to play an active role in community life and even to lead men into battle and start rebellions, as demonstrated in the Hadith literature.

[7][50] In modern usage hijab colloquially refers to the religious attire worn by Muslim women, but in this verse, it meant "veil" or "curtain" that physically separates female from male space.

[11][51] Although classical commentators agreed that the verse spoke about a curtain separating the living quarters of Muhammad's wives from visitors to his house, they usually viewed this practice as providing a model for all Muslim women.

[63] The concubines of Abu Marwan al-Tubni (d. 1065) were reportedly so badly treated that they conspired to murder him; women of the harem were also known to have been subjected to rape when rivaling factions conquered different palaces.

The rulers of the Alaouite dynasty often conducted political marriages, cementing strategic alliances with internal tribal and aristocratic men by marrying female members of their family.

The most famous member of the Ayyubid harem was Shajar al-Durr, who enterred as a slave concubine, was manumitted by the birth of an awknowledged child and, in a unique case, conquered the throne after the death of her former enslaver.

[85] The royal harem were described by a British resident in the 1850s as an institution where the women were isolated from the outside world to such a degree that the sultan preferred to attend to the repairs of the building himself, assisted by female slaves: Slavery was abolished in Brunei in 1928.

[91] The third rank harem women were slave-girls trained in singing, dancing and playing music to perform as entertainers; this category were sometimes given as diplomatic gifts between male power holders.

[92] In 1122, there were six lady treasurers (khuzzan), and during the reign of al-Hafiz a woman, Sitt Ghazal, were appointed supervisor of the caliphal inkwell (dawa), an office otherwise always held by men.

[103][105] The khedive's harem was composed of between several hundreds to over a thousand enslaved women, supervised by his mother, the walida pasha,[103] and his four official wives (hanim) and recognized concubines (qadin).

[115] In general, however, the separation of men's and women's quarters was never practiced among the urban poor in large cities such as Constantinople, and by the 1920s and 1930s, it had become a thing of the past in middle and upper-class homes.

[122] In the early Safavid period, young princes were placed in the care of a lala (high-ranking Qizilbash chief who acted as a guardian) and were eventually given charge of important governorates.

[129] From the middle of the sixteenth century, rivalries between Georgian and Circassian women in the royal harem gave rise to dynastic struggles of an ethnic nature previously unknown at the court.

[136] The love poetry of Islamic Anatolia were often directed toward Christian slave-concubines, and Greek women were idealized and highly sought after by Anatolian Muslim men of all classes as concubines and wives.

[142] A Chinese non-Muslim man had a female Indonesian who was of Muslim Arab Hadhrami Sayyid origin in Solo, the Dutch East Indies, in 1913 which was scandalous in the eyes of Ahmad Surkati and his Al-Irshad Al-Islamiya.

Inside the harem, women performed religious functions such as rawża-ḵᵛāni (the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Ḥosayn at Karbalā); they preached from the pulpit on the day of ʿĀšurā (q.v., the 10th of Moḥarram) and directed the ritual of sina-zadan (beating of the chest).

Nāṣer-al-Din Shah's mother, Jahān Ḵānom Mahd-e ʿOlyā, wielded a major influence that secured his own succession and the dismissal and subsequent assassination in of Prime Minister Mirzā Taqi Khan Amir Kabir.

[162] White slave women were called jariyeh bayza and imported to Oman and Zanzibar via Persia (Iran) and had the reputation that such concubines "soon renders the house of a moderately rich man unendurable".

[168] After the abolition of slavery in Saudi Arabia in 1962, the Anti-Slavery International and the Friends World Committee expressed their appreciation over the emancipation edict of 1962, but did ask if any countries would be helped to find their own nationals in Saudi harems who might want to return home; this was a very sensitive issue, since there was an awareness that women were enslaved as concubines (sex slaves) in the seclusion of the harems, and that there were no information as to whether the abolition of slavery had affected them.

[169] Since the early 1980s, a rise in conservative Islamic currents has led to a greater emphasis on traditional notions of modesty and gender segregation, with some radical preachers in Saudi Arabia calling for a return to the seclusion of women and an end of female employment.

He arranged all the ceremonial events within the harem, including weddings and circumcision parties, and even notified women of death sentences when "accused of crimes or implicated in intrigues of jealousy and corruption.

[22] However, aristocratic Muscovite women were not entirely secluded from mixing with men; it was a common custom for the lady of the house to greet a male guest with a welcoming drink ritual when he arrived.

[4] Under the influence of One Thousand and One Nights, the harem was often conceived as a personal brothel, where numerous women lounged in suggestive poses, directing their strong but oppressed sexuality toward a single man in a form of "competitive lust".

Some examples are the Mozart opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) where the hero Belmonte attempts to rescue his beloved Konstanze from the harem of the Pasha Selim.

Science Fiction writer Poul Anderson in the tales of his Galactic Secret Agent Dominic Flandry, includes an episode where one of his love interests is forced into the harem of corrupt planetary governor, Harald.