Tutorial 2a

Tutorial 2:

"Women, Class and Islam"

Images of Relevance: Devshirme Janissaries Ottoman Women

al-Sayyid Marsot, Afaf Lutfi "The revolutionary gentlewomen in Egypt" in L. Beck and N Keddie (ed.) Women in the Muslim World

Bates, U. U. "Women as Patrons of Architecture in Turkey" in L. Beck and N Keddie (ed.) Women in the Muslim World

Dengler, I C "Turkish Women in the Ottoman Empire: the classical age" in L. Beck and N Keddie (ed.) Women in the Muslim World

El Guindi, F. "Hijab" in J Espisito (ed). The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World V.2, pp.108-111

"A pattern of male supremacy is one of the best-known aspects of the Middle East. Even here, a comparison with other non-modern societies -- with such practices as Hindu suttee (the death of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre) and Chinese foot binding -- may put the matter in a different perspective. Some aspects of Islamic practice were drawn from Sassanian and Byzantine customs. Feminists would applaud some of the rights of women in islamic society; for example, women keep their maiden names after marriage, and Islamic law gives them the right to own property and to keep control of it. But polygamy (although the exception in practice), the seclusion of women in the harem ... and the largely urban practice of veiling (ie covering the face) have been important aspects of Islamic culture.... Men's almost exclusively one-sided right to divorce their wives at will is another characteristic of Islamic law. However, Islamic law and practice require each man to provide a dowry to his bride. Sometimes she does not get the whole amount of the time of marriage, in which case an additional amount is reserved for payment if her husband divorces her; the prospect of such a financial loss may constitute an important inhibition to terminating the union."

{Before commenting, just think about the approach being taken here and how useful, or how valid you find it as you read on. Later, come back and comment. This is taken from a 1997 textbook on the region and represents a recent, 'liberal' Western attempt to deal with the issues under discussion here. AND... to present them to a largely western audience of scholars.}

Questions concerning the specific positions of Turkish women in the Ottoman empire are complex and are not amenable to immediate answers. The bulk of information must still be drawn from reports of travellers, with few good archival studies to supplement them. These various sources reveal that women in the Ottoman Empire lived in the same kinds of worlds separate from men that are found in most Islamic societies, worlds with their own rules rewards, social hierarchies and systems of status organization.... In some part they originated in the social organization of the Turkish nomadic peoples prior to their appearance in Asia Minor. Sedentarization and Islamization then accentuated whatever social divisions already existed, so that by the end of the fifteenth century, when Historical sources become more readily available, the organization of the world of women in ottoman society appears to have been set very much in the pattern it was to keep until the reforms at the end of the nineteenth century.

"The societies focused on [here] are primarily those of Egypt, Turkey and Syria and the sources and research drawn on relate chiefly to the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries (the Mamluk and Ottoman periods). The lives of women in these regions and periods appear to have been similar in their broad patterns and particular with respect to the degree and nature of their involvement in the economy and with respect to the customs governing their lives, especially those relating to marriage. Research on Muslim women's history is, however, at a very preliminary stage...

{What is the significance of the "similar" and the "particular" in terms of understanding -- indeed defining -- "Muslim Women's History"? Compare with both Perry's and Dengler's introduction.}

Four factors, and the interplay between them, shaped the possibilities of women's lives in the Mediterranean Middle East in the period under consideration:

(1) the customs and laws regulating marriage, in particular the laws permitting polygamy, concubinage, and unilateral divorce by the husband;

The restrictions placed upon women are what is most often described by our present sources. {You might want to comment on this, keeping in mind what we know about those sources...} First, Turkish women were constrained in the manner of their public appearance. At least from the sixteenth century, and certainly by the end of the seventeenth, urban Turkish women had come to be veiled in public. This custom was never absolute; it was most common among the upper classes, and only laxly enforced among the lower orders and in the rural areas of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, however irregularly observed in individual cases, veiling as a general rule did have the practical effect of helping to isolate women as a group from ordinary public contact with males.

HIJAB: Long before Islam, veiling and seclusion appear to have existed in the Hellenistic-Byzantine area and among the Sassanians of Persia. In ancient Mesopotamia the veil for women was regarded as a sign of respectability and high status; decent married women wore the veil to distinguish themselves from some slaves and unchaste women -- indeed, the latter were forbidden to cover head or hair. In Assyrian law, harlots and slaves were forbidden to veil, and those caught illegally veiling were liable to severe penalties. ... Successive invasions brought into contact the Greek, Persian and Mesopotamian empires and the Semitic people of the regions. The practices of veiling and seclusion of women appear subsequently to have become established in Judaic and Christian systems. Gradually these spread to Arabs of the urban upper classes and eventually to the general urban public. ...

Veiling of Arab Muslim urban women became more pervasive under Turkish rule as a marker of rank and exclusive lifestyle...

The Quran has a number of references to hijab, none of which concern women's clothing. At the time of its founding, as Islam gradually established itself in the Medina community, "seclusion" for Muhammads wives was introduced in a Quranic verse:'O ye who believe, enter not the dwellings of the Prophet, unless invited... And when you ask of his wives anything, ask from behind hijab, Tat is purer for your hearts and for their hearts". This refers not to women's clothing but rather to a partition or curtin...

Evidence from its usage in the Quran and from early Islamic feminist discourse... supports the notion of hijab in Islam as referring to a sacred divide or separation between two worlds or two spaces: deity and mortals, men and women, good and evil, light and dark, believers and nonbelievers, or aristocracy and commoners...

The European term 'veil' (and its correlate seclusion) therefore, fail to capture these nuances and oversimplify a complex phenomenon. Furthermore, "veil" as commonly used gives the illusion of having a single referent, whereas it ambiguously refers at various times to a face cover for women, a transparent head cover, or an elaborate headdress. Limiting its reference obscures historical developments, cultural differentiations of social context, class or special rank and sociopolitical articulations.

In Western feminist discourse "veil" is politically charged with connotations of the inferior 'other' implying and assuming a subordination and inferiority of the Muslim woman.

{Reflect upon these last two passages, Dengler and el Guindi. They speak to the more general introductions as well.

'Hijab' today is used to refer to the head-scarf worn by Muslim women, and as el Guindi comments at the end of the article "Resistance through al-hijab or against it... has generated dynamic discourse around gender, Islamic ideals, Arab society and women's status and liberation".

El Guindi's statement about implications of the 'inferior other' recalls our discussion of Said and Orientalism last week. Comments?}

Polygamy and concubinage occurred chiefly among the ruling classes; there they were the norm. Among the Mamluks, the rulers of Egypt from 1250-1517, keeping large harems of concubines and marrying the maximum number of wives [four] probably expressed a man's class and power.... Chroniclers of the day not infrequently mention that homosexuality was common among Mamluk men, yet this did not curtail the number of wives they had nor the size of their harems.

[herein a biography of one woman suspected of being poisoned]...giving a muted glimpse of the contention for status and power in the harem, where the rise of one favourite meant the displacement and fall of another, breeding resentment as surely as in the political arena. Julban, daughter of a Circassian woman [from the Caucasus region, Russia] was bought by Sultan Barsbay; their son, Yousef, succeeded barsbay to the sultanate. Barsbay married Julban after he married the chief princess, wife of his former Master, Duqmaq; the chief princess was the mother of his other son, nasir. After marrying the sultan, Julban became the new chief princess and received many further signs of his favour, including his having her family brought from Circassia and bestowing important positions on them. She died of poison, her murder doubtless following from her rise in the harem. She left a vast fortune.

Outside the ruling class polygamy and concubinage were relatively uncommon...Monogamy was a characteristic of the 'progressive middle class'. European visitors to eighteenth-century Asleep and nineteenth-century Cairo mention polygamy as rare, and one study of seventeenth-century Turkey found only twenty cases of polygamy in documents relating to two thousand estates. Finances certainly curbed the practice among other than very wealthy men, for the law required that wives be treated equally; maintaining separate establishments for each wife, probably necessary for the sake of harmony, would be onerous, if not beyond most men's means.

Even though accepted practice among the ruling class, the plight of women who shared their husband with other wives or concubines nonetheless appears to have been viewed as unhappy. When contemporary authors reported of a particular woman that she was in a monogamous marriage, they regularly went on to note how fortunate she was in this. Similarly when families were in a position to stipulate monogamy for their daughters, they often did so.

Because Islamic law permits women to inherit and independently own property, women of the middle class often had property and engaged in various business activities, such as selling and buying real estate, renting out shops, and lending money at interest. A host of evidence attests to these activities. Studies of women in sixteenth and seventeenth century urban Turkey, eighteenth-century Asleep and nineteenth century Cairo show that they inherited in practice, not merely in theory, and they were able and willing to go to court if they thought themselves unjustly excluded from inheriting estates.

Whereas very wealthy women might invest in trade -- the spice trade, for example, or the slave trade -- or in commercial ventures as silent partners, middle-class women apparently invested largely in real estate. Other forms of investment included making loans at interest, often to family members, frequently to husbands, and sometimes to other women....

The scholarly establishment, especially in the West, has enthusiastically hailed the documentary evidence showing that women inherited and owned property and vigorously pursued their economic interests, even in court. The evidence attests that Muslim women were not, after all, the passive creatures, wholly without material resources or legal rights, that the Western world once imagined them to be. But women were active, let me emphasize, within the very limited parameters permitted by their society.

{It seems to be there are several agenda at work here. Let me just begin the discussion by asking: what is the significance here of what the 'Western Scholarly Establishment' does or does not do? WHY does she feel it is important to emphasize what she does in the last sentence? And what does that really mean?}

Perhaps the most effective way in which Ottoman society enforced the separation of the sexes was by depriving women of all but a few functions in the public sector of government. Women were virtually excluded from the governmental apparatus (the army, the court system, and thus most of the state administration). Indeed, the only visible sign of women's presence in the public sector comes from reports of women employed as teachers in girls' primary schools in sixteenth-century Anatolia.

Monumental architecture, because of its public nature, is everywhere a political statement about the society in which it occurs. When one considers the limited formal political status of women in an Islamic society, it is a surprise to find a considerable number of buildings dedicated to, or commissioned by, women in Seljuq and Ottoman Turkey. ... Emerging from an overview of architectural patronage is the discovery that women of the elite classes were active in areas of the formal political system where it is unexpected.

Of apporximately one hundred medreses known to date from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, 5 bear the names of women, and 3 of these are mothers of Artukid and Seljuq sultans. According to one study of caravansarays (built for travellers), 6 bush buildings out of a total of 119 are named after women. Significantly, 5 ot the 6 were erected by Mahperi Hatun, who here too describes herself as "The Mother of the Sultan of Sultans" This extraordinary lady emerges in the history of the Seljuqs of Rum as one of the most prolific builders. One immediate conclusion... is that the de facto social and political participation of women in Seljuq society was greater than their formal political status would suggest.

In the Ottoman period, mosque arthictecture surpasses the mausoleum in its association with female names....[a catalogue]of mosques in and around Istanbul lists 953 structures. of these 68 (7%) were built for or by women. Some of these mosques are among the great monumental ;mosques of Istanbul.

How did women achieve and exercise publicly recognized power?... In general Ottoman women founded religious institutions: mosques, shcools, zawiyas, and mausoleums. Secular buildings are far fewer in number and they were erected to serve as sources of income for the maintenance of religious buildings. There are no records of independent residential sturcutres. For example. palaces were never erected for woemen. This finds its parallel in Ottoman society. Only rarely does a woman become the formal head of a household or separate from her family to establihs a dwelling on her own.

Women had little more place in commerce and industry. Certain kinds of work roles, most notably those linked to health care, such as nursing and midwifery, were of necessity open to them, as well as a few others connected with textile manufacture, such as winding and weaving, cap-making, embroidery, stitching, and handkerchief-making. Such work was special labor role, however, traditionally that of women and could be carried out in the home or in a work area separate from that of males.

{Compare with Ahmed and Bates, above, and Ahmed and Inalcik, below. There seems to be some tension between whether we should look at this as the consequence of Islamic society's desire to keep the sexes apart, or 'proof' that both that aim and that achievement have been exaggerated in the literature. Or, that the 'separation' was not the consequence of Islam at all!}

Women's initial education was obtained in the family, but at later stages they could have access to male scholars and teachers. Scholarships consisted in learning texts by rote -- hadith, fiqh (juridical theology) and tafsir -- and teachers awarded certificates attesting that the student had attained, and might teach, to a certain level. Umm Hani (d.1466) who learned the Quran in childhood, received her first education from her grandfather; she later accompanied him to Mecca and there, and again on their return to Cairo, she was "heard" in her recitations and "certified" by a number of male scholars. Al-Sakhawi reports that she knew hadith and fiqh and was one of the distinguished scholars of her day.

Another woman, Hajar (b.1388) was educated by her father. She accompanied him when he visited scholars and engaged in discussions with them and she too was heard by, and obtained certificates from, male scholars. Al-Sakhawi says she was among the foremost hadith scholars of her time, and students crowded to hear her. Because she did not wear the veil when she taught, a practice "common among many old women" of which he disapproved, al-Sakhawi did not study with her, although he did have some women teachers, as did his revered teacher and mentor, al-'Asqalani, and his contemporary, al-Suyuti.

Of another women, Nayram, al-Sakhawi says that her father studied the Quran and mingled with the learned and that she grew up sharing in this, and that her studies included tracts by al-Nawawi and al-Ghazali. Her father also took her to Jerusalem; she "recited to the sheikhs there, and taught women of what she had studied." She married and then, al Sakhawi cryptically concludes, "her life changed".

The pursuit of scholarship, whether for pleasure or remuneration, was evidently the prerogative of middle-class and elite women -- even if in later life some of them fell on hard times.

For lower-class women areas of remunerative employment included work as midwives, bakers, greengrocers, sellers of foodstuffs (cooked beans, flour, milk), dallalas (peddlers of clothes, embroidery, and jewellery to the harems ( discussed below), washers of the dead, mourners and singers. They could work as bath attendants, as servants or orderlies in the maristans (hospitals for both male and female patients that employed orderlies of both sexes), and as prostitutes.

Some [urban] guilds employed women. In Ottoman towns, silk-winding and cotton-spinning were usually left to women and children, and in this way poor urban women could earn a living. Cotton-weaving guilds from time to time tried to make the government prevent merchants buying up cotton in the markets, leaving the women unemployed.

{Here, we begin to be made aware of Ahmed's point about the importance of class. How was it reflected in both religion and occupation?}

Of course, not all women were able to exploit to a like degree their position within the social structure. ... the least information is found about the lowest, that is the servitor class. This class was apparently quite large in Ottoman society....[In one study of] the social organization of sixteenth-century Bursa, [it] has been suggested that this class as a whole, including both males and females, made up some 35% or more of the urban population. ... During the early centuries of Ottoman history, when conquests provided a steady source of slaves, the women of this class were largely of servile origin, though some free women were also employed as wage labourers. ... The work they performed was either household labor as cooks, housemaids, washerwomen or domestic servants, or traditional female labor such as work in the textile industry or as barbers and personal attendants in women's baths or hospitals. [See more on 'baths' and women, below. Again, students are advised to look at TUTORIAL B: on slaves and slavery as well.]

The simplest motivation for women in the servitor class, however, was the expectation that they would eventually achieve by marriage the benefits of Ottoman society traditionally bestowed on married women.

To be sure, only a few women from the servitor class could expect to be assimilated into the upper levels of the social order. The majority of these who did marry... most likely did not rise beyond the artisan class, and then perhaps only its marginal elements.... This does not mean that women in the artisan classes enjoyed a life free of the kinds of labor performed by omen in the servitor class. In fact, their work and indeed situation, was very similar, if not identical. The family was small, servants were absent, the marriage unit was monogamous, and extended and multiple kin groups were most likely rare.

Women in the Ottoman empire from the artisan class and above show a marked tendency to eschew the outside world in favour of life within the world of women. It is only among the households of the upper classes, however, that this life became highly rewarding. Women in the families of the urban well-to-do mark a transition state. They were, as a rule, freed from menial household tasks, but were expected in turn to supervise those women who did this work. Occasionally women of the urban well-to-do extended their interest in management beyond the household into the active world of commerce and trade, in partnership with their husbands, or as backers of commercial entrepreneurs.

Women of the ruling elites, in part through personal ability, but primarily through linkage with their own friends, kin groups, and the army of subordinates placed under them, became heads of vast clientage and patronage networks that at times gave them direct control over the entire Ottoman state apparatus.

So, for instance, the daughter of Suleyman I and the widow of the grand vizier Rustem are said to have been responsible for the decision of the Ottoman government to attempt the seizure of the island of Malta in 1565 and themselves paid for the outfitting of 400 warships. Nurubanu, the mother of Murad III (1574-1595) sat regularly on his council of state and concerned herself with all the questions of government. Safiye, the mother of Mehmed III (1595-1603), was given "almost full power as regent" for the whole of the Ottoman empire while her son was away on campaigns..... Whatever the theoretical limitations, therefore, that were placed upon them by the customary divisions of men's and women's worlds in Ottoman society, women at the top of the social order had little to complain about. They had come to possess most of the advantages that Ottoman society could confer on individuals of either sex: wealth, power and virtually unlimited control over self, property and leisure time.

Within the household and certainly within the palace, women haead up a clearly demarcated area of activities. This comes to extend, in many instances to less formally recognized power and influence in public affairs.

This is seen in the social organization of the harem at the court (see Inalacik, "The Harem", below), which was headed unqeustionably by the valide sultan (mother of the sultan). She ruled the women's and her own servants' quarters with absolute authority. Her titles were fanciful, "Cradle of the Great", "Mother of the Pears", or "Ot the Pearl of the Caliphate". She was instrumental in the choice of wives and concubines for her son. She extended ther voice and power to the men's quarters discretly through the black eunuch and indireclty through her son, the ruler. As the influence of the valide sutlan increased in the court, so did that of the black euuch who eventually came to be the most important officer in the palace. The valide sultan is the woman who, more than any other woman of rank, commissioned buildings. She as the mother of the sultan, enjoyed freedom, power and wealth.

The women in the palace harem were paid regular salaries in addition to allowances for clothing, and they could control their own 'treasurey" Women of hight rank in the Ottomand court or those from wealthy familites of the society were given rich dowries, some of which were in the form of money and jewellery. If a woman brought with her an unusally high dowry, the husband undertook on his part to avoid concubines and to be faithful to one wife.

Women dwelling in ribats, and Sufi women in general, seem to have occupied a borderline status between the reputable and the disreputable. {Why would this have been the case?} To some extent they, like their counterparts in the numerous ribats for men, were religious not merely in the general sense of observing the religious commands, and leading a pious life but in the more specific sense of being members of a Sufi order. From the earliest times sufism was the vehicle by which the mystical dimensions of Islam were expressed.[See "What is Sufism?" under Web-Links in RESOURCES.] By the thirteenth century bands of devotees lived together in convents and followed the "way" (tariqa) of a master revered in common; the heads of such bands or convents were known as sheikhs or sheikhas, depending on their sex.

Information about sufi women in the premodern age is scant. One of the fullest accounts is by the jurist and scholar Ibn al-Hajj. In one passage he rails against sheikhas, their practices and their followers... He denounces "those who are called sheikhas" for performing dhikrs (religious chants sometimes involving dance), which he views as illegitimate in that women's voices are 'awra and should not be heard.... Ibn al-Hajj denounces the sheikhas for causing their women followers to adopt sufi practices what were improper and were like those of Christian women in their convents, who did without husbands; that was against the law of the Prophet, who, according to Ibn al-Hajj, said "Women's striving should be solely to the pleasing of her lord/husband".

With respect to buildings other than mausoleums, one important building from the Ottoman period belongs to a rather unusual type, a zawiya or a convent for dervishes. A zawiya was built in 1388 at Iznik by Sultan Murat I in memory of his mother Nilufer Hatun who must have been long dead by then.

{In what ways does this brief discussion of women and sufism -- do read the article itself for more information -- challenge some of the statements made here and elsewhere in our texts about the nature of Islam? About the place of women? What is the significance, if any, of these findings?}

Women's social activities included visiting each other on formal occasions -- weddings, births, funerals -- and informally calling on each other and going to the public baths; public bathing, reported for all communities, was indulged in about once a week. Weddings and births involved elaborate festivities, perhaps with professional female singers and dancers performing within the harem ... but placed to be also visible to the men....

Attending the baths appears not to have been prohibited, although some theologians frowned upon the practice for women and pronounced it unIslamic. Ibn al-Hajj censures the practices... He argues that religious law required that women be covered from navel to knee when among other women but that women at the baths paid no attention to this.... This indecency was compounded by the fact that Jewish and Christian women also attended the baths: Islam required that Muslim women's bodies not be seen by non-Muslims. All the women were there naked together, he complains. Among other objections, he mentions that women always put their best clothes on after bathing in order to show off to each other, then asked their husbands for better cloths. He concludes his criticisms with the remark that hammams led to numerous corruptions, including some he had not mentioned (and that were perhaps "unmentionable") that would be "clear to whomsoever reflects" on the matter.

The Harem (see also Bates, above): the section reserved for the sultan's women and family, formed a Palace within a Palace, and was, as in every Turkish household, a private place, forbidden to all strangers. Its organization complemented the slave system {students are encouraged to consult the documents and discussion in TUTORIAL B: 'Slaves, Slavery and the Ottomans'} an aspect of its character forgotten amidst a proliferation of fanciful tales, and paralleled the Page Organization.

Women for the sultan's Palace were carefully selected from among prisoners-of-war, or from the slave markets. Women were not, however, subject to the devshirme. In 1475 there were 400 female slaves in the Topkapi Palace and 250 in the Old Palace, and these girls, like the Pages, passed through a long period of education and training. When they first came to the Palace they lived together in two large rooms, the Greater and Lesser Chambers, and were known as acemis - novices. Under the strict supervision of the Kahya kadin - a woman superintendent - they grew up as refined and skilful women. They learned the principles of Islam, at the same time acquiring such skills as sewing, embroidery, dancing, singing, playing musical instruments, puppetry or story-telling, each according to her capabilities... Women from this group whom the sultan chose for his bed were distinguished with the title has odalik or haseki.

A haseki who bore the sultan's child received special privileges. Ceremonially crowned and dressed in sable, she went to kiss the sultan's hand, and a private apartment was set aside for her use. The first woman to give birth to a son took precedence over all the others, with the title bas kadin. The staff of the harem, like the pages, received a daily stipend and a clothing allowance, each group having its own special uniform.

Most of the Palace girls went as wives to the Pages when these left the Palace for outside services.

Until the time of Suleyman I, Ottoman sultans also took the daughters of foreign rulers as canonically legal spouses. Suleyman contracted a religious marriage with the Russian slave-girl, Roxelana, known as Hurrem Sultan, but in the period between 1574 and 1687, when the influence of the valide sultans (mothers of the sultans)came to dominate the Palace, the sultans no longer contracted canonically legal marriages. The valide sultans themselves were not legal wives according to the seriat (sharia).

Roxelana was probably of Slavic origin, hence the name Russo or Roxalana. She came to the Ottoman palace as a slave but later contracted a legal marriage with Sultan Suleyman II as Hurrem Sultan (1504?-1558). ... When she became the favorite consort of the sultan, the valide sultan was still alive, and there was already a reigning "first woman" in the court who had given birth to the crown prince, the elsdest sone of Suleyman. The mother of Suleymand dies in 1533 and the 'first woman' who could no longer resist the unlimited influence of Hurrem on the sultan resigned from her position at the courst and chose to live with her own son in a distant province. Hurrem, now married and a "sultan" herself, reigned without a rival. Soon, through her plotting, the eldest son of Suleyman was strangled, wich left the promise of the future throne to the sons of Hurrem. ... Her participation in politics became apparent particularly during the long absences of her husband. She, joingin with her duagher Mihrimah and son-in-law Rustem Pasha, took part in the dismissal and execution of one grand vizier....

Mihrimah Sultan, daughter of Sultan Suleyman and Roxalana, is the most famous princess in Ottoman history. She was also the patron of extensive pious, educational and charitable institutions. She was an ambitious woman with a strong personality, ...Mihrimah Sultan played a considerable role in political life during the reigns of her father Suleyman II and her brother Selim II.... Through her own dowry, from the revenues of the structures [buildings] she sponsored and from the inheritance she secured from her husband, Mihrimah Sultan amassed a huge independent fortune. She willed her possissions to pious and charitable institutions.

If an Ottoman woman is to be chosen to represent the power of the valide in her full capacity, it should be Kosem Mahpeyker Sultan (1589-1631), wife of Sultan Ahmed I. She came to the harem of the Topkapi Palace as a slave but quickly distinguished herself not so much by her beauty as by her intelligence, actractiveness, vivaciousness and tact. She was at least a year older than Sultan Shmed when she became a haseki. Sultan Ahmed died in 1617 at a young age and she was forced to retire to the Old Palace for a short interval. During her banishment she still held considerable power... She returned to the Topkapi Palace as her son Murat IV ascended the throne in 1623, and she remained there as a strong ruler during the reigns of two sons and one grandson, until she was strangled on the orders of her own daughter-in-law... in 1651. During her tenure in the palace as the valide and grand valide, a period which forms part of the Era of Women's Reign in Ottoman history, she was directly and unquestionably instrumental in governmental politicies. She occasionally presided at meetings. When the janissaries staged an uprising, it was Valide Kosme Mahpeyker Sultan who made the decision to melt precious metals from the place treasury to mint coins whith which to bribe these elite corps. When her son Ibrahim (1640-48) showed an interest in governmental affairs, instead of relinquishing her power to him, she replenished the number of concubines in his haram to keep Ibrahim occupied with debauchery. ...