Medieval Misconceptions: Harem Harlots

You are a sibyl.

A seer.

What you divine now, as you gaze into the future, is the trumpeting of false history. 

A fallacious history of your own nation, written by those of another with an imperialist agenda to perpetuate. It is an ignorant history constructed by aristocrats who impose the values of their own nation onto every nation, and judge all according to one.

Far into the future, you watch as Western history transforms the women of your nation into willing whores, sexualized sylphs – a purposeful construction which sells their smut to entertain their men – while canonizing their women, who feel superior by comparison. The caricatures created by this history entertain their children – who grow up to pass the historical sludge on to to their children.

And the twisted image of your nation lives on in perpetuity…

There’s always been a cult-like myth about the idea of a harem.

These myths come from the Western world – showcased in Western art and in the Hollywood ‘Orientalizing‘ of characters from the ‘Middle East.’ Such images are invariably of half-naked women wearing “I Dream of Jeanie” silk and gossamer fabrics through which curvaceous bodies can be seen.

These fantasy Harem girls dance like nymphs in seductive motions bordering on vulgarity. Their large bedroom eyes with sooty, foot-long lashes generally end up wooing some White Western hero who has gallantly rescued her from a tyrannical Arab Sheik.

Make no mistake about it, peops – this over-sexualization of harem women exists only in Western minds and movies. 🙄

This perverted myth of harem women originated in the minds and works of early Orientalist scholars. One of the most famous is the early 1700’s French translation of the “One Thousand and One Nights,” followed by many different English versions which titillated Western minds and became hugely popular.

In addition to the typical images of exotic nude women laying seductively around a pool in Turkish hamams (or rather, the Western imagination of what a hamam might be like), Orientalist scholars also depicted harem women as helpless captives, or ravenous harlots feeding on their master Sultan.

Unfortunately for harems, scholars were Western male travelers to the Ottoman Empire. As documented in renown author and lecturer Asli Sancar’s book Ottoman Women: Myth & Reality: “Foreign men were never permitted to enter an Ottoman harem, so there were no eye-witness reports to contradict the myth.”

As Sancar details in her book on the subject: “The Western male’s traditional polarized images of women [i.e. historical Madonna/Whore depictions] combined with the ‘exotic’ appearance of oriental females, made a strong case for the myth of the harem. Male travelers cited other male writers, whose information was often based on hearsay or their own fantasies.”

It wasn’t until the wife of a British ambassador, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, was invited inside a harem that the myth was finally challenged.

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Take a peek inside the harem!

Harem Habibati 

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Medieval Monday