Ancient Royal Harem

There is ample license of a tendency in progressive Western gloss to deplore polygamy, slavery, the harem, and the inferior perspective of women, even though on that point is likewise evidence of oppression of women in Western last. What makes the status of women particularly noteworthy in Islam, however, is that their institutional inferiority as a matter of what could be called cultural policy has survived or been reinvigorated in the face of progressive tendencies in non-Islamic cultures. As Croutier says, "Islam holds women in particularly low esteem, considering them intellectually dull, spiritually vapid, expensive only to satisfy the passions of their masters and provide them staminate heirs. 'Woman is a field, a sort of property that a husband whitethorn use or abuse as he sees fit,' says the Koran." This belief of women, recognizable in the history of Islamic countries to the present day, is consonant with such traditions as polygamy, slavery, and the institution of the harem and is widely perceive as retrogressive. However, Croutier explains Mohammed's "altruistic intentions when he sanctioned polygamy, seeing it as a solution to the pre-Islamic practice of female infanticide, as fountainhead as a practical way to deal with the pleonastic female population." To put it another way, the rationale behind institutional polygamy, while undoubtedly meant to serve the interests of men in the culture (who could divorce their wives more or less at will), also had

The exotic harem was to continue as it had always been perceived--exotic--something incapable of being penetrated unless the residue of comfort power were itself compromised. In the travel accounts, the form of penetration was an drift of understanding and explaining, but always in the context of what state says is the impersonal European observer as watcher, standing in "disengagement . . . from the productive processes of Oriental society." It might be nasty to see how such an effort bears comparison with the gross empurpled reach of Victorian military expansion, were it not also the boldness that such expansion was itself an attribute of cultural norms and assumptions derived from presumably objective coverage.

Indeed, the aesthetic culture of Victorian England appears to have had an insatiable longing for the exotica surrounding the harem.

One history may be that the reportage of boredom came from a female voice, which was less to be certain by Western empire builders than the provocative evidence of male travelers such as Lane and Burton. A second, related to the first, is that maneuver observation does not have the explanatory power of manufacture or sexy supposition in the popular imagination. A third, perhaps more prosaic and undoubtedly more complex, explanation is simply that the Victorian discourse of the Orient was (or rather off out to be) not wholly unitary, but that different aspects of it could be adapted according to the demands of the imperialist project.

We have seen in the accounts of Florence nightingale and Lady Anne Blunt that harem life for women was perceived to be unutterably dull. Similar observations are reported by Amelia Edwards. Her password of a harem in an area some miles from capital of Egypt focuses on the dreariness of harem life, but it is most pertinent for the present research because, as will be seen shortly, it is implicative for reasons other than those that Edwards apparently intends. To see what those reasons are and why they
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