Harem and power

Abstract

The common place of the harem conceived as a confinement of women in the service of the One, watched over by the eunuchs, was a figuration and a reality of the classical period of Orientalism, especially in the 17th to 19th centuries, attributed to the Ottoman world, but extended to the entire Islamic universe. The seraglio, however, was also a place of strict hierarchies, complicities and intrigues that influenced the shaping of power. In colonial times the orientalizing imagination was satisfied in the many brothels of the colonies. His influence in the environment of power reaches today, when one of the last seraglio, that of Hassan II in Morocco, has been dissolved.