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Culture of the Ottoman court or the culture that evolved around the court of the Ottoman Empire was known as the "Ottoman Way". To get a high position in the empire, one must be skilled in the Way.
It included both knowing Persian, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish and how to behave in court, in front of the sultan, and in formal and religious occasions. Coming from the Arab tradition, the harîm حريم (compare haram) is the part of the household forbidden to male strangers. The world knows the Harem by way of the Ottoman Empire. The word itself means privacy that is very respected and honored.
In Western languages such as English, this term refers collectively to the women in any polygynous household as well as to the "no men allowed" area, or in more modern usage to a number of women followers or admirers of a man.
In other Western languages, the term seraglio - from an Italian variant of Persian saraay, meaning 'palace, enclosed courts' - has much the same connotations.
Word history
The word has been recorded in the English language since 1634, via the Turkish harem, from the Arabic haram (forbidden), originally entailing "women's quarters," literally: "something forbidden or kept safe," from the root harama: "he guarded, forbade." The triconsonantal H-R-M is common to Arabic words entailing forbidden. The word is cognate to the Hebrew herem, rendered in Greek as ’anáthema when it applies to excommunication pronounced by the Jewish Sanhedrin court - all these words mean that an object is "sacred" or "accursed".
Female privacy in Islam is very respected and honored, to the extent that any unlawful breaking into that privacy is harām (forbidden).
Contrary to the common belief, a Muslim harem does not necessarily consist solely of women with whom the head of the household has sexual relations (wives and concubines), but also their young offspring; and it may either be a palatial complex, as in Romantic tales, in which case it includes staff (women and eunuchs), or simply their quarters, in the Ottoman tradition separated from the men's selamlik.
History
The harem of the Turkish Great Sultan, which was in the Topkapı Palace seraglio, typically housed several hundred - at times over a thousand - women including wives. It also housed the Sultan's mother, daughters and other female relatives, as well as eunuchs and slave girls to serve the aforementioned women. During the later periods, the sons of the Sultan also lived in the Harem until they were sixteen, when it might be considered appropriate for them to appear in the public and administrative areas of the palace. The Topkapı Harem was, in some senses, merely the private living quarters of the Sultan and his family, within the palace complex.
It is claimed that harems existed in Persia under the Ancient Achaemenids and later Iranian dynasties (The Sassanid Chosroes II reportedly had a harem of 3,000 wives, as well as 12,000 female slaves) and lasted well into the Qajar dynasty. The women of the royal harem played important though underreported roles in Iranian history, especially during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. However, this claim is disputed by some Persian historians.
Harem is also the usual English translation of the Chinese language term hougong, —literally meaning "the palaces behind." Hougong are large palaces for the Chinese emperor's consorts, concubines, female attendants and eunuchs. The women who lived in an emperor's hougong sometimes numbered in the thousands.
Some Muslims assert that Islam never prescribes the use of harems, and that they (re)emerged rather as part of Ottoman culture, as the institution pre-dates Islam and even Christianity (obviously under other names).
The institution of the harem exerted a certain fascination on the European imagination, especially during the Age of Romanticism (see also Orientalism), due in part to the writings of the adventurer Richard Francis Burton. Many Westerners imagined a harem as a brothel consisting of many sensual women lying around pools with oiled bodies, with the sole purpose of pleasing the powerful man to whom they had given themselves. Much of this is recorded in art from that period, usually portraying groups of attractive women lounging by spas and pools.
A centuries-old theme in Western culture is the depiction of European women forcibly taken into Oriental harems - evident for example in the Mozart opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") concerning the attempt of the hero Belmonte to rescue his beloved Konstanze from the seraglio/harem of the Pasha Selim.
The same theme was and still is repeated in numerous historical novels and thrillers. For example "Angélique and the Sultan", part of the bestselling French series by Sergeanne Golon, in which a 17th Century French noblewoman is captured by pirates, sold to the King of Morroco and installed in his harem, stabs the king with his own dagger when he tries to have sex with her and stages a dramatic and successful escape.
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