IN AN EMIR’S HAREM
BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Langston Hughes (1901-67) was an American writer of significantly mixed slave and slave-owning ancestry who was allowed, most unusually for a foreigner, to travel in Soviet Central Asia for five months of 1932-3. He then wrote two articles on what he learned there that touch on Greek love, one “The Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan” very much about it, and the other, from which an extract is presented here, “In an Emir’s Harem,” published in the magazine Woman’s Home Companion 12 (September 1934), pp. 91–92, much less so.

What follows is from an interview Hughes conducted with the help of an interpreter of Zevar Razik (become “Comrade Razikova”), a former wife of Mohammed Alim Khan (1880-1944), who reigned as the last Emir of Bokhara from 1911 to 1920. Only part of the third sentence is of direct Greek love interest. The rest is given to further understanding of it in view of the unhistorical and simply erroneous presentation of Greek love typically given by 21^st-century writers with a vision so constrained by the dogma of fixed sexual orientation that they feel bound to invent in order to present a narrative conforming with it.^[1]

“Before the revolution,” she said, “everybody was afraid of the Emir. He was ruler and he took what he wanted. People had to give him their sons and daughters if he wanted them.^[2] He had old women who went about the city taking notice of all the pretty girls in the houses they visited and carrying word back to the Emir.

“The Emir was always getting fresh young wives. When he sent for me I was only twelve. After my father’s death the servant of the Emir came and carried me away from my house in the night. They took me to his palace and put me in the women’s quarters. But it was many weeks, maybe months, I don’t know, before I saw the Emir. Then one night he sent for me. I cried and cried. He never sent for me again.

“He had so many wives,” Zevar said.

Always new ones coming, younger ones. Sometimes more than a hundred at once were in the women’s quarters. […]

Thus lived the wives of the great Emir Alim-Khan.

The rest of this article, both preceding and following the extract, is highly recommended as a vivid reconstruction founded on a witness account, of life in the last Emir’s female harem and the breathtaking changes to ways of living and thinking wrought in Bokhara by the soon-ensuing Bolshevik revolution.

^[1] See, for example, the profusion of imbecilic online articles claiming the last Emir of Bokhara was “gay”, and, in particular, the detailed account of him by one Greg King, https://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.php?topic=879.0, pretending amongst other things, without citing a single source and in contradiction of every single nearly primary source (as well as the fact that the Emir begat children), that his harem of “young women” (itself a typically dishonest modernist description of girls of around 12) was there only “for the sake of appearance”, since he was really only interested in “young men” (equally dishonest and even more misleading misrepresentation). Is it stupidity or dishonesty that makes so many moderns incapable of grasping a simple point manifestly obvious from all the primary sources about Central Asian and most other historical pederasty: that liking boys was not for most men evidence of an “orientation”, but was a manifestation of a single male sexuality that took for granted that both boys and females were attractive to men in general?

^[2] For other accounts of the Emir Alim Khan’s boy harem, see The Diary of a Slave by Rustam Khan-Urf and The Emirs of Bokhara by Fitzroy Maclean.