Description
Join instructor Steve Tamari, Professor of Middle East and Islamic History at SIUE, to learn about how women of the Ottoman imperial harem exerted power over the palace and the empire. Ancient Turco-Mongolian traditions and Ottoman succession patterns allowed women of the imperial harem to all but run the empire during the 17th century behind closed doors. This history challenges deeply held assumptions about how elite women exerted power in ways that Western scholars—until relatively recently—could not see.
