Fatima Mernissi was a prominent sociologist and Islamic feminist, recognized for her insightful analyses of women's roles within Islamic societies. Her work critically examined the historical development of Islamic thought and its contemporary manifestations, often questioning traditional interpretations. Through meticulous research, Mernissi explored the complex interplay between religious doctrine, cultural practices, and gender dynamics. Her scholarship offered a unique perspective on the historical and modern status of women in Islam, challenging established norms and fostering new dialogues.
In this extraordinary and powerful book, now available in paperback, Fatima Mernissi, one of the most original and distinctive voices in the Islamic world, uncovers a hidden history of women leaders of Islamic states stretching back over fifteen centuries.
Convinced that the veil is a symbol of unjust male authority over women, in The Veil and the Male Elite, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi aims to investigate the origins of the practice in the first Islamic community.
This "wonderful and enchanting" memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl's life in her family's French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review). "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco . . . " So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth—women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.
Fatema Mernissi, the world-renowned Islamic feminist, has shed unprecedented light on the lives of women in the Middle East. Now, in Scheherazade Goes West, Mernissi reveals her unique experiences as a liberated, independent Moroccan woman faced with the peculiarities and unexpected encroachments of Western culture. Her often surprising discoveries about the conditions of and attitudes toward women around the world -- and the exquisitely embroidered amalgam of clear-eyed autobiography and dazzling meta-fiction by which she relates those assorted discoveries -- add up to a deliciously wry, engagingly cosmopolitan, and deeply penetrating narrative.
Sexual inequality is a prominent feature of both Western and Islamic societies, but underlying concepts of female sexuality in Christian and Muslim traditions are very different, and the pattern of heterosexual relation in Muslim societies is probably unique. Fatima Mernissi argues that the Islamic view of women as active sexual beings resulted in stricter regulation and control of women's sexuality, which Muslim theorists classically regarded as a threat to civilized society. The requisites of modernization, however, are incompatible with traditional Muslim structures, and the ensuing contradictions now pervade nearly all Muslim countries. Drawing on popular source materials, Mernissi explores the disorienting effects of modern life on male-female relations, looks at the male-female unit as a basic element of the structure of the Muslim system and shows us the sexual dynamics of the Muslim world.
In this expanded and updated edition, with a new introduction on Muslim women and fundamentalism, Mernissi argues that Islamic fundamentalism is in part a defense against recent changes in sex roles and perceptions of sexual identity.
Mernissi, selber im Harem aufgewachsen, über Schönheit, weibliches Selbstbewusstsein und die Phantasien von Männern.
Fesselnd und sensibel, vereint die Schrift eine Mischung aus Zurückhaltung und Kühnheit.
Cuando desde Occidente se habla de la cultura árabe, no siempre se hace la necesaria distinción entre sociedad civil y religión. El desconocimiento que esto origina desemboca en una retahíla de tópicos y mitos negativos que nada tiene que ver con la fértil civilización arabo-musulmana, a la que tanto debe esa misma cultura occidental. Pero tampoco se puede obviar las contradicciones y conflictos que la apropiación política de la religión ha originado en determinados países del Sur y de Oriente. Para dar respuesta a todos estos interrogantes, "Mil y una voces" dibuja el mosaico, amplio y complejo a la vez, de la cultura que también ha demostrado ser la cultura de la tolerancia.
