Women & No-Men

THE HAREM--N. M. Penzer--Lippincott ($6).

The U. S. idea of a harem is the one frequently pictured in comic cuts, in which a worried sultan or equally worried eunuch is completely surrounded by a bored beauty chorus. Proud purists who know enough to pronounce harem "hareem" may have suspected that this picture was misleading. After conning Mr. Penzer's careful study of the Turkish harem as it once flourished in Constantinople, they can be sure of it.

Since 1909, when the Young Turks drove out Abd ul-Hamid II, there has been no harem in Turkey. Constantinople's Seraglio is now being converted into one of Istanbul's museums. British Investigator Penzer, Master of Arts, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, snooped all through it time & again, took photographs where he was allowed, drew plans, read everything relevant he could lay hands on, calls his report the fullest to date. Much of that report was of interest only to historians and architects, but some of it makes eye-opening reading to vicarious snoopers and plain monogamists. Says Mr. Penzer: The harem was not a man's paradise but a woman's world, "governed with the utmost deliberation and care, not by a man at all, but by a woman." That was the Sultan Valide, the Sultan's mother. No. 2 was neither man nor woman, but the Kislar Agha, the Chief Black Eunuch, "the most feared, and consequently the most bribed, official in the whole of the Ottoman Empire."

In the harem's boom days (16th Century) the Chief Black Eunuch bossed some 600 to 800 of his kind; the Sultan Valide headed 1,200 women. Of these the Sultan legally married only four, but might go a-roving among the other 1,196. To pass the time, the women-in-waiting sometimes amused themselves with the eunuchs (who were of three types), sometimes with each other. Palace plots were common, and occasionally the Sultan cleared the atmosphere by wholesale drowning. That at least one of these occurrences was of fairly recent date is indicated by the story of the diver sent down to investigate a wreck off Seraglio Point, who immediately signalled to be drawn up again, explained that "at the bottom of the sea was a great number of bowing sacks, each containing the dead body of a woman, standing upright on the weighted end and swaying slowly to and fro with the current." The number of children produced by harem mothers, and consequently the number of potential heirs to the Sultanate, made the problem of succession a congested one. Murad III, Sultan of the harem's boom days, had 103 children, of whom 20 sons were living at his death. To simplify matters and start with a clean slate, Murad's legitimate heir put his 19 brothers to death, sewed his father's seven pregnant concubines in sacks and threw them into the sea. This violence was deprecated, and thereafter the heirs-potential were merely locked up for life. Some of these prisoners succeeded to the throne after a lifetime, "when they had all but lost the power of speech, and their minds and bodies were like vegetables." But now, says Penzer, the days of the harem are over. (Only one extant: in Mecca.) When Abd ul-Hamid's big family was broken up, most of his wives went back to the land. And since there is no more harem, there are no more eunuchs. While he was in Turkey, Penzer looked high & low, despite all his efforts "met only two, or possibly three, of these strange beings."

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