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Mary-Catherine DalyThe Ottoman EmpireOver the course of its history, the Ottoman Empire
incorporated religiously and ethnically diverse pop-
ulations that held varying beliefs about proper con-
duct between men and women. This entry focuses
largely on official discourse regarding modesty as
directed at elite Ottoman women in the fourteenth
to the sixteenth centuries, with an emphasis on nor-
mative discourse regarding gender segregation and
standards of dress. It also emphasizes how expecta-
tions of gendered behavior – especially the seclusion
and veiling of women – differentially affected
women according to status and class.
The Ottoman tribe was one of a number of no-
madic pastoralist Turkish tribes that migrated from
Central Asia into the lands of the ≠Abbàsid and
Byzantine Empires beginning in the twelfth cen-
tury. Central Asian Turkish tribes included women
in positions of political and military power and
maintained relatively egalitarian public roles for
men and women compared to those in the imperial
states of the Near East. Women’s involvement in
public activities persisted as Turkish tribes gained
dominance in Anatolia. The Muslim traveler and
chronicler Ibn Ba††ùta, who visited Ottoman terri-
tory during the reign of Orhan I (ca. 1324–62),
especially remarked on the fact that in general
“among the Turks and the Tatars their wives enjoy
a very high position.”
As the Ottomans consolidated power in Anatolia
and surrounding areas, however, Turkish culture
gradually incorporated some of the gender patterns
the ottoman empire 501of the sedentary ≠Abbàsids and Byzantines, which
emphasized exclusive male succession, and a male
administration and military. An ethic that removed
elite women from both positions of power and the
public sphere gradually became so dominant that
by the sixteenth century, women of the Ottoman
court were strictly veiled and segregated in the
closely guarded imperial harem. Gender segrega-
tion was also practiced by the ≠ulamà±, though less
formal segregation was the norm among lower sta-
tus families.
Political discourse about modesty reinforced
strict gender segregation as various officials and
members of the ≠ulamà±publicly objected to any
involvement of royal women in political activities.
Various scholars throughout Muslim history cited
women’s supposedly inferior intellectual or moral
capacity as the basis for women’s exclusion from
politics, while others saw women’s political activity
as contrary to divine law. In 1599, for example,
Mufti Íun≠Allàh issued a written criticism of
women’s influence in the Ottoman court, claiming
that such involvement was an abuse of Sharì≠a. To
bolster his argument, Íun≠Allàh drew on a popular
™adìth, in which the Prophet Mu™ammad proclaims,
“A people who entrusts its affairs to a woman will
never know prosperity.” While Íun≠Allàh’s criti-
cisms of politically active women may have been a
play for power in the face of court women who
were agitating against him, he was following a long
tradition in which questions of female modesty
served as a mechanism that kept royal women from
becoming overly involved in politics and in general
limited women’s power. Indeed, Íun≠Allàh’s state-
ment about the segregation of the genders echoes
earlier pronouncements by religious officials such
as the sixteenth-century Mufti Kemalpaçazade, and
scholars such as Birgivi Mehmed Efendi (d. 1573)
and Ibn al-£ajj, all of whom decried the involve-
ment of royal women in politics.
The modesty discourse was directed at the power
exercised by royal women, but official statements
also called for the exclusion of all women from the
public sphere. Íun≠Allàh declared that no women
should walk among men in the markets, claiming
that such mixing of men and women was a harmful
innovation and an abuse of Sharì≠a. Kemalpaçazade
likened the socializing of unrelated men and
women to cheating in the marketplace and selling
alcohol, while the influential ≠àlimBirgivi Mehmed
Efendi devoted a significant portion of his work
Tarikat-ı Muhammediyeto arguments in favor of
strict gender segregation as a means of establishing
the ideal society.
For these officials and other elites, the control of