Sexual slavery
Sexual slavery - the harem
Concubinage may be defined as the more or less permanent cohabitation (outside the marriage bond) of a man with a woman or women, whose position would be that of secondary wives, women bought, acquired by gift, captured in war, or domestic slaves.Encyclopaedia of Islam
Muslim cultures are thought to have had more female slaves than male slaves.
Enslaved women were given many tasks and one of the most common was working as a domestic servant.
But some female slaves were forced to become sex workers: not prostitutes, as this is forbidden in Islam, but concubines. Concubines were women who were sexually available to their master, but not married to him. A Muslim man could have as many concubines as he could afford.
Concubinage was not unique to Islam; the Bible records that King Solomon and King David both had concubines, and it is recorded in other cultures too.
Being a concubine did have some benefits: if a slave woman gave birth to her owner's child, her status improved dramatically - she could not be sold or given away, and when her owner died she became free. The child was also free and would inherit from their father as any other children.
Concubinage was not prostitution in the commercial sense both because that was explicitly forbidden and because only the owner could legitimately have sex with a female slave; anyone else who had sex with her was guilty of fornication.
The harem
Concubines lived in the harem, an area of the household where women lived separately from men. The nature of Ottoman harems is described by Ehud R Toledano:
The harem system grew out of the need in Ottoman society to achieve gender segregation and limit women's accessibility to men who did not belong to their family.
Households were divided into two separate sections: the selamlik, housing the male members, and the haremlik, where the women and children dwelt.
At the head of the women's part reigned the master's mother or his first wife (out of a maximum of four wives allowed by Islam).
The concubines were also part of the harem, where all the attendants were women. Male guests of the master were not entertained in the harem.
An active and well-developed social network linked harems of similar status across Ottoman towns and villages; mutual visits and outdoor excursions were common.
For the women who actually spent their lives in the harems, reality was, of course, far more mixed and complicated.
The women who came into the harem as slaves (câriyes) were taught and trained to be "ladies," learning all the domestic and social roles attached to that position. As they grew up, they would be paired with the men of the family either as concubines or as legal wives.
However, harem slaves' freedom of choice was rather limited, as was that of women in general in an essentially male-dominated environment. Harem slaves frequently had to endure sexual harassment from male members of the family.
Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, 1998
The nature of concubinage
Writers disagree over the nature of concubinage and the harem:
- Some argue that it was seriously wrong in that
- it was just slavery
- it breached human rights
- it exploited women
- women could be bought and sold, or given as gifts
- it involved compulsory non-consensual sex - which would nowadays be called 'rape'
- it reinforced male power in the culture
- Others say that it was relatively benign, because
- it gave female slaves a relatively easy existence
- it gave female slaves a chance to rise socially
- it gave female slaves a chance to gain power
- it gave female slaves a chance to gain their freedom
A balanced view might be to say that sexual slavery in this context was a very bad thing, but that it was possible for some of the more fortunate victims to gain benefits that provided some degree of compensation.
The political role of concubines
Concubines could play an important political role and have considerable direct political influence on the policy of the state.
More than any other Muslim dynasty, the Ottomans raised the practice of slave concubinage to a reproductive principle: after the generations of Osman and Orhan, virtually all offspring of the sultans appear to have been born of concubine mothers.Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, 1993
The benefit to the state, or at least to the ruling dynasty, of having the ruling line born through concubines rather than wives was that only one family was involved - the family of a concubine was irrelevant, but the family of a wife would expect to gain power and influence through their relationship to the mother of the son. These conflicting interests could threaten the succession and weaken the ruling family. (This didn't eliminate conflict between heirs and families altogether, but it probably reduced it.)
Concubines as well as wives also played an important role in strengthening cohesion, stability, and continuity at household level too, as this remark about 18th century Cairo demonstrates:
Marital and nonmarital unions strengthened the links among men; women legitimized the succession of men to power, and women's property ownership added to the overall wealth, prestige, and power of a household.Mary Ann Fay, From Concubines to Capitalists: Women, Property, and Power in Eighteenth-century Cairo, Journal of Women's History, 1998
And later in the same article the writer describes the inevitable tension inherent in the status of harem women in that society:
However, the harem was not a prison; it was instead the family quarters of an upper-class home which became exclusively female space when men not related to the women were in the house and whose entry into the harem was forbidden. Women, heavily veiled, could and did leave their homes...
... Women were not imprisoned in the harem or in the veils and cloaks that concealed their bodies and faces on the street, but both customs were important signifiers of women's lack of sexual autonomy and of men's control over the selection of women's sexual and marital partners.
In the economic sphere, however, women had a great deal of autonomy...
... Therefore, the eighteenth-century Egyptian household should not be seen as the site of unrelieved oppression of women but rather in terms of asymmetries of power between men and women.
Mary Ann Fay, From Concubines to Capitalists: Women, Property, and Power in Eighteenth-century Cairo, Journal of Women's History, 1998
In the Ottoman Empire the sale of woman as slaves continued until 1908.