Collection explores the idea and actualities of "harem" and gendered space through historically shifting social and architectural constructs and as a literary and artistic trope, in Islamic societies and in Euro/American imaginations.

Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt, and books and essays on Arabic vernacular poetry, modern Arabic fiction, constructions of masculinity in early Arabic gender discourse, and the theory and practice of literary translation. She is an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction.

Introduction / Marilyn Booth 1
I. Normative Images and Shifting Spaces
1. Early Women Exemplars and the Construction of Gendered Space: (Re-)Defining Feminine Moral Excellence / Asma Afsaruddin 23
2. Normative Notions of Public and Private in Early Islamic Culture / Yaseen Noorani 49
3. The Harem as Gendered Space and the Spatial Reproduction of Gender / Irvin Cemil Schick 69
II. Rooms and Thresholds: Harems as Spaces, Socialities, and Law
4. Caliphal Harems, Household Harems: Baghdad in the Fourth Century of the Islamic Era / Nadia Maria El Cheikh 87
5. Domesticating Sexuality: Harem Culture in Ottoman Imperial Law / Leslie Pierce 104
6. Panotopic Bodies: Black Eunuchs as Guardians of The Topkapi Harem / Jateen Lad 136
7. Where Elites Meet: Harem Visits, Sea Bathing, and Sociabilities in Precolonial Tunisia, c. 1800-1881 / Julia Clancy-Smith 177
8. The Harem as Biography: Domestic Architecture, Gender, and Nostalgia in Modern Syria / Heghmar Zeitlian Watenpaugh 211
III. Harems Envisioned
9. Harem/House/Set: Domestic Interiors in Photography from the Late Ottoman World / Nancy Micklewright 239
10. Dress and Undress: Clothing and Eroticism in Nineteenth-Century Visual Representations of the Harem / Joan DelPlato 261
11. Harems, Women, and Political Tyranny in the Works of Jurji Zaydan / Orit Bashkin 290
12. The Harem as the Seat of Middle-class Industry and Morality: The Fiction of Ahmet Midhat Efendi / A. Holly Shissler 319
13. Between Harem and Houseboat: "Fallenness," Gendered Spaces, and the Female National Subject in 1920s Egypt / Marilyn Booth 342
Bibliography 375
Contributors 401
Index 405