In a Double Bind Between the Harem and the Museum: Institutionalizing a Book Collection in the Court of Nasir al-Din Shah

In this article, I trace the emergence of the royal library as an institutionalized space within the Gulistan Palace complex in Tehran during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah ( r .1848–96), focusing on the gendered consequences of its consolidation. Drawing on the diaries of I‘timad al-Saltana, architectural histories of Gulistan, and evidence of women’s manuscript ownership, I argue that efforts to organize and secure the library were responding to anxieties about theft and removal intensified by European demand for Persian art. As book collections were increasingly centralized and placed on display alongside museum artefacts, access was reorganized according to the gendered division of andarun (lit. inner space; domestic quarters), and birun (lit. outer space). I show that this process involved recasting women’s quarters as an orientalist harem. Situating the library alongside the palace museum as a site of imperial image-making demonstrates how the management of cultural patrimony in Qajar Iran simultaneously consolidated masculine authority and curtailed women’s control over knowledge. The royal library thus emerges as a key arena in which gender, sovereignty, and Qajar responses to European power intersected.