The Harem Geometry

Ba Ahmed had a logistics problem.

As Grand Vizier of Morocco in the 1890s, he wielded more power than the Sultan himself. He had wealth beyond counting. And he had women — four wives (the Islamic maximum) and twenty-four concubines, each with her own expectations, her own jealousies, her own need for status.

His solution was architecture.

The Palais Bahia — "Palace of the Beautiful" — covers eight acres in the heart of Marrakech. It looks like a maze because it is one. Ba Ahmed designed it so that each wife had her own apartment, her own courtyard, her own entrance. The concubines had smaller rooms, but still separate. No woman needed to cross another's territory. The geometry enforced peace.

Walk through the palace today and you'll feel the strategy. The courtyards don't connect logically. Corridors turn unexpectedly. Doorways lead to more doorways. This wasn't incompetence — it was intention. Ba Ahmed could visit any wife without the others knowing. Messages could be delivered privately. Drama could be contained.

The favorite wife was Bahia herself — a former slave who rose to become Ba Ahmed's primary partner. Her apartments are the grandest: soaring ceilings painted with geometric patterns, walls of carved stucco, floors of zellige tile in 27 colors. She got the best light. She got the largest garden. She got the name on the palace.

When Ba Ahmed died in 1900, the palace was immediately looted. The new Sultan's family stripped it of carpets, furniture, anything movable. They couldn't take the architecture — and they couldn't replicate the logic. No one has lived in the Bahia since. It remains a monument to one man's attempt to solve an unsolvable problem through geometry.

Visit at noon, when the tour groups thin. Stand in the central courtyard and count the doorways. Imagine trying to keep twenty-eight women happy in a world without privacy.

Then appreciate the architecture.