Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (review)

As the veil has become a topic of political contention and a symbol of gendered differences between the Muslim Middle East and the secular or Christian West, it is timely and relevant to reflect on the harem, a place and concept from which the veil extends. Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, a compilation edited by Marilyn Booth, Iraq chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, provides a rich account of the laws, expectations, literature, and cultural exchanges that constructed the real and imagined spaces and concepts that constituted Middle Eastern and North African harems dating from early Islamic Mecca to early twentieth-century Cairo. The real strength of this book is its focus on the complexity of these spaces and its refusal to allow harems to be simplified by a uniform description. This interdisciplinary volume presents harems as neither solely protective nor solely oppressive spaces for the women who occupied them. Rather, as Booth writes, the authors “suggest its variability, as [they] recognize its allusive power.”

The authors ask not just what harem means and has meant, but also how harems have been represented in the societies in which they exist and by observers looking in from the outside. The authors reveal how harems and gender roles have evolved in relation to each other, under the forces of religion and government, and how their depictions in other societies have shaped wider cultural perceptions of this region of the world.

The first section of the book, “Normative Images and Shifting Spaces,” examines early Islamic roots of the term harem, as well as the relationship between the Prophet Muhammad and his female companions. In the first chapter, Asma Afsaruddin examines historical texts regarding the earliest generation of Muslims to reveal that some women were allowed public roles and were considered “exceptional Muslims” for many of the same reasons that well-known men from this time were. She also points out that later narratives regarding the beginning of Islam have since written out of accounts the importance of these women.

The following two chapters focus on the usefulness of the concept of space in understanding gender. For Yaseen Noorani, space is a less useful focus than differences in status, which shaped differing practices of male control of females. Irvin Cemil Schick, on the other hand, argues that spatial arrangements act as a primary influence in the creation of gender norms. He traces the etymology of the word harem to meanings of the taboo, prohibited, sacred, and holy. From the root of this word, Schick argues, comes Arabic speakers’ conception of “inside-outside dichotomies.” However, he says, the question of gender has been overlaid on this dichotomy based on constructions resulting from spatial arrangements and corresponding representations, rather than from the root of the word or the mandates of the Quran.

The second section of the book, “Rooms and Thresholds,” enters into an analysis of the architectural construction of harems and the laws that have regulated them. A chapter by Nadia Maria El Cheikh takes the reader through the widely differing constructions of harems in different households in Abbassid, Baghdad. Whereas for the modern elite family, households were typically monogamous and strict harem seclusion was possible only for families in which the women did not play prominent roles in the family economy, the caliphal harem was an enormously complicated polygamous space, housing not only the caliph’s wives and concubines but also his mother and children. In both of these spaces, we see that women’s lives were far from isolated, were filled with many activities, and were power structures in their own right. The complexity of the royal harem is shown even more deeply in a chapter by Jateen Lad that examines the role of black eunuchs as guards of the harem in the Ottoman palace. Through this chapter the reader sees the political maneuverings that could take...