Harem System.

Leila Ahmed has written that women in ՙAbbāsid society were explicitly excluded from the public life of the dynasty by being made absent. “In the records relating to this period,” she continues, “they are not to be found, as they were in the previous era, either on battlefield or in mosques, nor are they described as participants in or key contributors to the cultural life and productions of their society.” So, Ahmed concludes, “women of the elite and bourgeois classes would live out their lives in seclusion, guarded by eunuchs if wealthy.”