Harem in the broadest sense of the word means the female half of the house in Muslim countries: women and children lived there, no men were allowed there, except for the owner. But the more common meaning of this word is a group of wives, slaves, concubines and other women of a noble Muslim who live in his palace.
Harem history
The word "harem" comes from the Arabic "forbidden place": this is how the area of the house where women and children lived was called for a long time. No one was allowed to enter the territory of the harem, only the owner of the house could visit it without hindrance. Women rarely left their premises, and if they did, it was only in a burqa - so as not to embarrass other men with their beauty.
Muslim women did not always live so closed. During the reign of the first Abbasid caliphs, in the VIII-IX centuries AD, the wives of rich and noble Muslims had their own houses, palaces and households and led a relatively open, active lifestyle. In the 10th century, women began to be assigned separate rooms in palaces, and stricter rules began to be imposed on their behavior. Some heads of families locked the harem at night and always carried the keys with them.
Harem rules
Harems were placed on the upper floors of the house, usually in front of it. They always had a separate entrance, and next to the door leading to the rest of the palace, there was a hatch - women passed cooked food through it.
Thanks to the completely closed and inaccessible views of outsiders, the harem acquired the features of a territory of luxury and sexual licentiousness with its own laws and rules.
In harems lived not only wives, but also slaves from different parts of the world - Islamic laws prohibited the enslavement of Muslims. Caliphs and other noble people brought concubines from North Africa, the Byzantine Empire and even Europe. The age of the inhabitants of the harem was different: from sixteen to sixty years. Every day, the owner of the harem could choose any woman for the night. The children of slaves had the same rights as the children of official wives - many famous rulers were born to concubines.
In the past, women were not trained to be doctors, but male doctors were denied access to the harem. It was possible to treat the inhabitants of the female half of the house either in words, according to the description of the disease, or by the hand that the patient could stretch out from behind the screen.
The only men in the harem were eunuchs - castrated men, not Muslims, who were ransomed from Jews or Christians. They were very expensive - not everyone survived after such an operation, and many who went through this torture lost their minds. Eunuchs lived in women's territory as servants. At first, the harems were ruled by the owner's favorites, but later the power was transferred to the mothers of the head of the family.
Today, polygamy among Muslims is a very rare phenomenon, therefore, harems have hardly survived, at least in their traditional form.
