Word: sultanism
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...fall of the Turkish Empire its ruler was both Sultan and Caliph or "pope" of Islam. On the French Riviera, thoroughly deposed so far as Turkey was concerned, lived and still lives "His Imperial Majesty the Caliph Abdul Medjid II" and a ripe 17 was his beauteous daughter Princess Dur-e-Shawar in 1931. Beauteous too was his niece the Sultana Nilofar Hanim, great-granddaughter of Turkish Sultan Murad V. Best of all, the Caliph had no son and his hoary beard was that of a Patriarch unlikely to become again a father. At the death of this pope...
...idea of a harem is the one frequently pictured in comic cuts, in which a worried sultan or equally worried eunuch is completely surrounded by a bored beauty chorus. Proud purists who know enough to pronounce harem "hareem" may have suspected that this picture was misleading. After conning Mr. Penzer's careful study of the Turkish harem as it once flourished in Constantinople, they can be sure...
...makes eye-opening reading to vicarious snoopers and plain monogamists. Says Mr. Penzer: The harem was not a man's paradise but a woman's world, "governed with the utmost deliberation and care, not by a man at all, but by a woman." That was the Sultan Valide, the Sultan's mother. No. 2 was neither man nor woman, but the Kislar Agha, the Chief Black Eunuch, "the most feared, and consequently the most bribed, official in the whole of the Ottoman Empire...
...harem's boom days (16th Century) the Chief Black Eunuch bossed some 600 to 800 of his kind; the Sultan Validé headed 1,200 women. Of these the Sultan legally married only four, but might go a-roving among the other 1,196. To pass the time, the women-in-waiting sometimes amused themselves with the eunuchs (who were of three types), sometimes with each other. Palace plots were common, and occasionally the Sultan cleared the atmosphere by wholesale drowning. That at least one of these occurrences was of fairly recent date is indicated by the story...
Thirteen years ago, when tubby, profligate Sultan Ahmad, Shah of Persia, was debauching along the French Riviera French newsorgans came out with the old French proverb: La mdt tous les chats sont gris. This means literally: "At night all cats are grey." A punning interpretation is: "At night all Shahs are drunk. In 1925 Sultan Ahmad Shah was toppled off the throne, and swashbuckling, self-made Reza Shah Pahlavi declared himself the King of Kings. From the outset he pompously made it clear that his country would stomach no further insults of the drunken Shah variety. Last year the King...