Harem Histories: Envisioning places and living spaces (review)

In Harem Histories, editor Marilyn Booth has compiled an innovative and multidisciplinary volume on the historical “concept/institution/image” of the harem in the Middle East and North Africa (4). Based in part upon the proceedings of a 2004 conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the collected essays here examine the harem through a wide range of historical contexts, geographic locales and archival sources. Perhaps the most important contribution of this volume is the ways in which it broadens the definition of the harem—as an architectural space, social institution and representative symbol/trope in literary-political discourses both in Muslim-majority societies and Euro-American imaginations. In particular, the book emphasizes indigenous representations of the harem as “produced in and by the societies of which they were a part—while questioning exactly what in and by might mean, in times and places already constituted by perpetual cultural motion” (9–10).

The book is divided into three thematic sections that are largely chronological. The first, “Normative Images and Shifting Spaces” addresses representations of gendered space in Islam over time. Asma Afsaruddin looks at women living during the Prophet Muhammad’s time to examine women’s changing relationship towards domestic and public space in different historic moments and ideas of women’s moral excellence. Yaseen Noorani moves into a discussion of the public and private in early Islamic society by emphasizing that the harem was a relational space based on status rather than a modern construction of a private family domain of roles and relationship which simultaneously have public values (50). She applies Habermas’ theory of the public/private division in her critique of the harem and uses poetic sources. Irvin Schick’s chapter “The Harem as Gendered Space” unfolds the origins of the word harem and its seminal role in gender construction through examining the work of several theorists. He notes that like any social institution the harem is “in essence a representation” and its history is largely one of its representation as an institution of patriarchal hegemony, whether reflected in Oriental despotism and phallocratic oppression, or as a space of female agency and resistance towards male oppression across a range of social, economic and political issues (81).

Section Two, “Rooms and Thresholds: Harems as spaces, socialities, and law,” examines the harem in legal dialogues and varying historical locations. Leslie Peirce’s article, “Domesticating Sexuality” provides a fascinating interpretation of the harem through the legal codes of the Ottoman Kanunname, which reveals that the “patriarchal household appears less as an axiomatic oriental social formation than an evolving phenomenon that was, to a degree, consolidated by legal action” (130). Jateen Lad’s “Panoptic Bodies” provides an illuminating look into the role of black eunuchs in the Topkopi harem. Lad focuses primarily on the idea of the harem as the forbidden and guarded private home of the imperial family and not solely as a female-oriented space (138). In “Where Elites Meet,” Julia Clancy-Smith paints a vibrant portrait of the bathing pavilions of elite families from Tunis and examines the “surprisingly intimate” social interactions between European notables and aristocratic Muslim Tunisians, particularly the friendships between women from both communities where binary definitions of Muslim versus Christian, premodern versus modern, household versus the state and colonial versus precolonial, were blurred (178). Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh’s “The Harem as Biography” examines ideas of gendered architecture and nostalgia in Syria, particularly through the revived popularity of the old courtyard house (bayt ‘arabi) in urban domestic architecture (213).

The third section, “Harems Envisioned” is perhaps most relevant for scholars of colonial history and colonialism. It focuses on portraits of the harem by European artists in painting, photography and literary texts (237). In “Harem/House/Set,” Nancy Micklewright critiques photographs of the Ottoman domestic interior by European commercial photographers, tourists and local families. As she suggests, this photographic archive

on the one hand [is]… a powerful and evocative construction, primarily by European artists and authors, of an imagined lifestyle, only loosely, connected to an actual domestic...