Harem - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The same theme was and still is repeated in numerous historical novels and thrillers. For example, Angélique and the Sultan, part of the bestselling French Angélique series by Sergeanne Golon, in which a 17th century French noblewoman is captured by pirates, sold into the harem of the King of Morocco, stabs the King when he tries to have sex with her and stages a daring escape.

In Leonid Solovyov's well-known Russian novel Tale of Hodja Nasreddin (translated to English as The Beggar in the Harem: Impudent Adventures in Old Bukhara), a central plot element is the protagonist's efforts to rescue his beloved from the Harem of the Emir of Bukhara – an element not present in the original tales of the Middle Eastern folk hero Nasreddin, on which the novel was loosely based.

H. Beam Piper used the theme in a science fiction context, portraying a gang which kidnaps girls from a Western-dominated, technologically advanced timeline and sells them to a Sultan's harem in an Asian-dominated timeline.

In the Soviet movie White Sun of the Desert the main character is a Red Army soldier protecting woman from an abandoned harem, while also inciting them to live a Soviet lifestyle.

Much of the plot of The Janissary Tree – a 2006 historical crime novel by Jason Goodwin, set in Istanbul in 1836 – takes place in the Sultan's harem, with the main protagonist being the eunuch detective Yashim. The book in many ways aims to overturn the above stereotypes and rooted conventions. For example, in one scene the Sultan groans inwardly when a new concubine is brought to his bed, since he does not feel sexual at all and would much rather send her away and curl up with a book. He does not, however, have that option; were he to reject the concubine, "she would spend the whole night crying bitterly, by the morning the whole palace will hear that the Sultan has become impotent, by noon all Istanbul will know it, and within a week the rumour will reach the entire empire."