he formalization of polygamous Islamic households extend that odalisques themselves were trained as servants or concubines. Compare the formal structure to the more anarchic sexual customs in the supposedly monogamous West, where wives were, as elsewhere, customarily subordinate to husbands. Men more or less freely patronized prostitutes but did not openly incorporate them into their legitimate households; meanwhile, the prostitutes, being outside the social norm, could not realistically expect to achieve a legitimate social status.
If the sanction of polygamy in the Koran could be said to authorize the harem as a convention of everyday life in Islamic society, it cannot be said that the Koran specifically identifies the scope and limit of the harem as an institution. The harem is as much a creature of culture and tradition in the Ottoman Empire as of religion, and at the time the harem achieved an institutional status in Constantinople, the tradition of polygamy had been well-entrenched for centuries. Indeed, the convention of cloister
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