Week 4

This week we discussed Pierce’s book The Imperial Harem, which I overall enjoyed reading and I thought that the class’ comments were interesting. I think that she successfully challenged the typical ‘Western’ idea of what a harem really was in the Ottoman Empire, seems like the typical theme of ‘Western’ understanding of Middle Eastern culture and racism is again an issue. As the class discussed, our understanding of slavery is different from the kind described in the book, in which the slaves can rise to power and have some sort of life.
A typical idea that seems to be pop up every semester in history classes- are the ‘victims’ or ‘oppressed’ just that and submissive, or are they active players in their lives? Women in the harem certainly seemed to have some opportunity to work within the system- they were involved in politics once their sons were sent away and they acted as regents and accumulated wealth. We discussed this all in class, but am just saying that I support the idea that their role was more complex then ‘concubine of the sultan’ a.k.a slave would seem to imply. Though this is a limited portion of the population, its reflection on Ottoman culture is important and does seem to encourage discussion.