HIST342

Description

In the West, the harem has been understood as a space of sexual excess. This course engages that stereotype while exploring the historical realities of the harem as one structured by concubinage and dynastic political power in the Islamic World. Though harems existed outside the Islamic World, we will begin with the example of the Prophet Muhammad's household in the 7th century. Most attention will be given to the Ottoman Empire where the harem was comprised of powerful mothers, concubines, and wives during "The Sultanate of Women." At the turn of the twentieth century, women like Huda Shaarawi, raised in an Egyptian harem, were at the forefront of feminist and revolutionary movements. Later, the Armenian and Yazidi Genocides exposed how concubinage and slavery could emerge as a form of cultural genocide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course will include a survey of Orientalist literature (primary and secondary) and new historiography of the harem. Students are required to write a final iterative research paper using primary sources.