THE HAREM: LOOKING BEHIND THE VEIL

In the eighteenth and nineteen-centuries, Europeans traveled to Eastern countries, like Egypt and Istanbul, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, for diplomatic reasons and tourism. Men wrote travelogues describing the sites, landscapes, fauna and flora, culture and customs for the curious back home in Europe who were insatiable when it came to consuming information about exotic, foreign lands. However, one aspect of Eastern culture that European men were not permitted to observe was the harem due to Islamic custom. Thus their writings regarding Eastern women and customs were flawed and fictitious, based purely on the hegemonic beliefs of their Western culture, religion and ignorance of Eastern culture. They drew erroneous conclusions regarding uncontrolled male sexuality and repression of Eastern women who they believed were forced to live in seclusion in a segregated, polygamous culture. The harem was a blank which European men could not investigate firsthand, so they filled in that blank with what they imagined. Their erroneous assumptions became common “knowledge ” to the Western world. Thus harems and Eastern women were sexualized by European male fantasy and became one more facet of Orientalism--the construct of the East made by the West