WEST COMES EAST 227The sequestration of women had been hundreds of years in the making
in the Islamic world, but even at this point, it didn't run through the
whole society, only through the upper classes. In rural areas, the casual
traveler might still see peasant women working in the fields or driving an-
imals along the roads. In urban areas, lower class women went about their
business in the public bazaars, shopping for their households or hawking
their handicrafts. Among the middle classes, some women owned prop-
erty, managed businesses, and directed employees. But the public visibility
of these women denoted the humble status of their men.
Privileged men showed off their status by keeping their womenfolk out
of public life and hidden from view in the private quarters of their house-
holds. The psychology underlying this custom was (I think) the feeling that
a man's honor-which really means his ability to hold his head high among
his fellow men-depended on his ability to keep any women associated
with him from becoming the objects of other men's sexual fantasies. In the
end, this is what the sequestration of women boiled down to, and in such a
cultural milieu, even men in the lower strata of society felt a pressure to
keep their women out of sight, so they wouldn't look bad to other men.
In the sultan's harem, this syndrome had magnified to a staggering
level. In ordinary usage, especially among western Orientalists, the word
harem has a lascivious connotation to it, as if everyday life in a harem con-
sisted of sexual frolicking from dawn to dusk; but how could this possibly
have been the case? The sultan was just one man, and no other man ever
even saw the women of the imperial harem except the guards, and the
guards were all eunuchs. And the sultan, some may be surprised to learn,
didn't spend his leisure hours hanging around the harem, playing around
with the women. One of the eunuchs had the specific job of choosing one
woman for the sultan to sleep with each night, and this eunuch would es-
cort the chosen woman secretively and properly bundled, under cover of
night, to the sultan's chamber. Sexual license and sexual repression were
weirdly intertwined in this institution.^2
Eunuchs could move freely between the harem and the world, and so
acted as the women's eyes and ears and hands, their means of learning
about the outside world, their instruments for effecting changes out there.
The sultan's children, including his sons, grew up in the harem until they