Immoral Earnings: Portraying Prostitutes in Ottoman Turkey
In: Illuminating the Dark Side: Evil, Women and the FeminineSearch for other papers by Aytu Çakıcı in
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From its foundation to its fall, Ottoman Turkey was under the rule of Kanun (Sultan’s secular law) and Islamic (Sharia) Law. This means that every walk of life was dominated by these two legal bases, including the regulation of women in the public and private spheres. That women have almost always been regarded with suspicion is axiomatic: the oppression they have been subjected to from time immemorial is now well-recorded by feminist historians among others. The image of prostitutes in particular has generated much interest across a range of disciplines. Yet there has been little commentary to date about prostitution in Ottoman Turkey. This paper seeks to redress this omission by investigating how prostitutes were viewed in the Ottoman Empire and how society’s perception of them affected the maltreatment of Muslim women in general in urban areas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To this end, I shall analyse various Sultans’ edicts, which regulated women-related issues such as suitable attire and public visibility. The portrayal of women in these male-produced edicts is negative to say the least: immoral, socially threatening, their very presence suggested the likelihood that they would at any moment turn to prostitution and bring the entire society into a state of moral decay. In other words, from a male perspective, all women were potential prostitutes, an evil force capable of corrupting men solely through their socio-sexual visibility.