A Concubine in the Middle East

A Concubine in the Middle East PDF Author: Ezra Sohar
Publisher: Gefen Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
America's foreign interest in the Middle East and Israel's dependency on the United States are fully scrutinized.

A Concubine in the Middle East

A Concubine in the Middle East PDF Author: Ezra Sohar
Publisher: Gefen Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
America's foreign interest in the Middle East and Israel's dependency on the United States are fully scrutinized.

Concubines and Courtesans

Concubines and Courtesans PDF Author: Matthew S. Gordon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190622199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
Concubines and Courtesans contains sixteen essays that consider, from a variety of viewpoints, enslaved and freed women across medieval and pre-modern Islamic social history. The essays bring together arguments regarding slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production (songs, poetry and instrumental music), sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time. They range over nearly 1000 years of Islamic history - from the early, formative period (seventh to tenth century C.E.) to the late Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal eras (sixteenth to eighteenth century C.E.) - and regions from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Central Asia (Timurid Iran). The close, common thread joining the essays is an effort to account for the lives, careers and representations of female slaves and freed women participating in, and contributing to, elite urban society of the Islamic realm. Interest in a gendered approach to Islamic history, society and religion has by now deep roots in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The shared aim of the essays collected here is to get at the wealth of these topics, and to underscore their centrality to a firm grasp on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.

Women in the Ancient Near East

Women in the Ancient Near East PDF Author: Marten Stol
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614512639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 706

Get Book Here

Book Description
Women in the Ancient Near East offers a lucid account of the daily life of women in Mesopotamia from the third millennium BCE until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The book systematically presents the lives of women emerging from the available cuneiform material and discusses modern scholarly opinion. Stol’s book is the first full-scale treatment of the history of women in the Ancient Near East.

Empress of the East

Empress of the East PDF Author: Leslie Peirce
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
The "fascinating . . . lively" story of the Russian slave girl Roxelana, who rose from concubine to become the only queen of the Ottoman empire (New York Times). In Empress of the East, historian Leslie Peirce tells the remarkable story of a Christian slave girl, Roxelana, who was abducted by slave traders from her Ruthenian homeland and brought to the harem of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul. Suleyman became besotted with her and foreswore all other concubines. Then, in an unprecedented step, he freed her and married her. The bold and canny Roxelana soon became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women, from Isabella of Hungary to Catherine de Medici, increasingly held the reins of power. Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher

The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher PDF Author: Douglas Scott Brookes
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292783353
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the Western imagination, the Middle Eastern harem was a place of sex, debauchery, slavery, miscegenation, power, riches, and sheer abandon. But for the women and children who actually inhabited this realm of the imperial palace, the reality was vastly different. In this collection of translated memoirs, three women who lived in the Ottoman imperial harem in Istanbul between 1876 and 1924 offer a fascinating glimpse "behind the veil" into the lives of Muslim palace women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The memoirists are Filizten, concubine to Sultan Murad V; Princess Ayse, daughter of Sultan Abdulhamid II; and Safiye, a schoolteacher who instructed the grandchildren and harem ladies of Sultan Mehmed V. Their recollections of the Ottoman harem reveal the rigid protocol and hierarchy that governed the lives of the imperial family and concubines, as well as the hundreds of slave women and black eunuchs in service to them. The memoirists show that, far from being a place of debauchery, the harem was a family home in which polite and refined behavior prevailed. Douglas Brookes explains the social structure of the nineteenth-century Ottoman palace harem in his introduction. These three memoirs, written across a half century and by women of differing social classes, offer a fuller and richer portrait of the Ottoman imperial harem than has ever before been available in English.

Unveiling the Harem

Unveiling the Harem PDF Author: Mary Ann Fay
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815651708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
A history of elite women who were concubines and wives of powerful slave-soldiers, known as Mamluks, who dominated Egypt both politically and militarily in the eighteenth century.

Sexual Politics in Modern Iran

Sexual Politics in Modern Iran PDF Author: Janet Afary
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521898463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book charts the history of Iran's sexual revolution from the nineteenth century to today. The resilience of the Iranian people forms the basis of this sexual revolution, one that is promoting reforms in marriage and family laws, and demanding more egalitarian gender and sexual relations.

The Imperial Harem

The Imperial Harem PDF Author: Leslie P. Peirce
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195086775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
The unprecedented political power of the Ottoman imperial harem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is widely viewed as illegitimate and corrupting. This book examines the sources of royal women's power and assesses the reactions of contemporaries, which ranged from loyal devotion to armed opposition. By examining political action in the context of household networks, Leslie Peirce demonstrates that female power was a logical, indeed an intended, consequence of political structures. Royal women were custodians of sovereign power, training their sons in its use and exercising it directly as regents when necessary. Furthermore, they played central roles in the public culture of sovereignty--royal ceremonial, monumental building, and patronage of artistic production. The Imperial Harem argues that the exercise of political power was tied to definitions of sexuality. Within the dynasty, the hierarchy of female power, like the hierarchy of male power, reflected the broader society's control for social control of the sexually active.

Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam

Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam PDF Author: Kecia Ali
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674050592
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
A remarkable research accomplishment. Ali leads us through three strands of early Islamic jurisprudence with careful attention to the nuances and details of the arguments.

Women in the Middle East

Women in the Middle East PDF Author: Nikki R. Keddie
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140084505X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by a pioneer in the field of Middle Eastern women's history, Women in the Middle East is a concise, comprehensive, and authoritative history of the lives of the region's women since the rise of Islam. Nikki Keddie shows why hostile or apologetic responses are completely inadequate to the diversity and richness of the lives of Middle Eastern women, and she provides a unique overview of their past and rapidly changing present. The book also includes a brief autobiography that recounts Keddie's political activism as one of the first women in Middle East Studies. Positioning women within their individual economic situations, identities, families, and geographies, Women in the Middle East examines the experiences of women in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, in Iran, and in all the Arab countries. Keddie discusses the interaction of a changing Islam with political, cultural, and socioeconomic developments. In doing so, she shows that, like other major religions, Islam incorporated ideas and practices of male superiority but also provoked challenges to them. Keddie breaks with notions of Middle Eastern women as faceless victims, and assesses their involvement in the rise of modern nationalist, socialist, and Islamist movements. While acknowledging that conservative trends are strong, she notes that there have been significant improvements in Middle Eastern women's suffrage, education, marital choice, and health.