From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Rest, as if rapt in glory there.

Many, if not most of the erroneous notions which have been obtained respecting the Osmanlis have had their origin, at least in the minds of the great majority of people, in the ludicrous conceptions which have long been current regarding the harem life of these much maligned people. When a harem is referred to in Europe or America it is pictured as consisting of a swarthy, fierce, and sensual pasha, seated on a broad divan, garbed in richly embroidered robes, armed with a highly ornate scimitar, and contentedly smoking his narghile while his ever-youthful wives are entertaining him with music and dance and song.

Nothing could be more preposterous, or further from the reality. For monogamy and not polygamy is the rule in the Ottoman Empire especially in Anatolia, and always has been. The Koran does, indeed, permit polygamy but under such restrictions that a plurality of wives is confined to those who are able to make due provision for their support. And even among the wealthy monogamy is daily becoming more prevalent. Thus the late Sultan, Mohammed V, unlike some of his polygamous predecessors, had but a single wife and to her, also unlike his predecessors, he was legally married.

Indeed, so unpopular has polygamy become among enlightened Mussulmans that an eminent authority on the subject declares that “if Mohammedanism had a Pope and a Church, in a word, an authority always living and invested with the right to modify the precepts of the Koran, in order to adapt them to the needs of the age, it is almost certain that polygamy would already have disappeared.”[116]

Much of the prevailing misconception concerning the harem life in the Orient arises from the lamentable ignorance in our western lands regarding the true meaning of the word harem. To many who should know better it is synonymous with a place of debauchery, whereas, it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of this. Derived from the Arabic word harim, Turkish harem, it signifies anything forbidden or a sacred thing or place. Thus the part of a Moslem’s home which is assigned for the exclusive use of his wife and children, for their female servants and friends is called the harem. It is their sanctuary to which no males are admitted except the immediate members of the family. It may be but the half of a Bedouin “House of hair,” or the wing of a marble palace on the Bosphorus but it is still the harem—the sacred abode, the sanctum sanctorum, of the feminine members of the household and women visitors.[117]

In ordinary Ottoman houses the harem occupies the upper story and is the best and most commodious part of the building. The usual term employed to designate the wife’s apartment is haremlik, while that occupied by the husband—his reception room where he receives his male friends—is known as selamlik, and is generally on the ground floor. The women’s apartment is always recognized by its screened windows. The occupants of the haremlik can thus see everything in the immediate vicinity without being seen.

The name harem applies not only to the wife’s part of the home but also to the sections reserved for women on tram cars and steamers, and to the women’s waiting rooms in railway stations and women’s compartments on railway trains. The harem, thus understood, is an institution that has very much to recommend it. It secures its occupants a privacy which, in the estimation of Oriental women, more than counterbalances their apparent loss of liberty.

But, contrary to what is usually thought, the harem is not a Mohammedan institution. It long antedates Islam for, as archæological investigations in the Orient clearly evince, there were separate apartments for women in the buildings of ancient Persia, Assyria, and Babylonia.[118]

Nor do the inmates of the harem consider themselves as imprisoned in their houses like birds in a cage. Far from it. Mrs. Meer Ali, an English lady who married a Mohammedan gentleman and resided twelve years in Lucknow, India, clearly states the Oriental women’s view of harem life when she writes:

To ladies accustomed from infancy to confinement, this kind of life is by no means irksome. They have their employments and their amusements, and though these are not exactly to our tastes, nor suited to our mode of education, they are not the less relished by those for whom they were invented. They, perhaps, wonder equally at some of our modes of dissipating time and fancy we might spend it more profitably. Be that as it may, the Muslim ladies, with whom I have been long intimate, appear to me always happy, contented and satisfied with the seclusion to which they were born; they desire no other, and I have ceased to regret that they cannot be made partakers of that freedom of intercourse with the world we deem so essential to our happiness, since their health suffers nothing from that confinement by which they are preserved from a variety of snares and temptations; besides which they would deem it disgraceful in the highest degree to mix indiscriminately with men who are not relations. They are educated from infancy for retirement and they can have no wish that the custom should be changed which keeps them apart from the society of men who are not very nearly related to them. Female society is unlimited and they enjoy it without restraint.[119]