Fatema Mernissi was born on this day in Fez, Morocco, where she grew up in the harem of her paternal grandmother (one of her grandfather’s nine wives). In 1957, she left Morocco to study political science at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at Brandeis University in the US, where she gained her doctorate in 1974.
Her 1975 book, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society was written for her PhD thesis and later published as a book in Britain in 1985 and in the US in 1987. It was considered revolutionary at the time, and has since become a classic, especially in the fields of anthropology and sociology, on women in the Arab World, the Mediterranean area or Muslim societies in general.
Fatema Mernissi. Photo courtesy of Morocco World News
Mernissi argued that Muslim women were not victims of their religious practices any more than Western women were victims of the patriarchy; both groups of women were oppressed by specific social institutions within a religion or society created to profit from the marginalization of others. Furthermore, Mernissi explained that Western women were veiled, just as Muslim women were, yet Western veils were much more discreet. She argued that youth and beauty veiled Western women, and once a woman no longer had these, she was hardly recognized by society.
Subsequent works expanded on these theories also garnered acclaim, including Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems. In this book Mernissi discussed the repression and pressures women in different societies face merely based on their physical appearance. Mernissi compared the clothing size 6 to harems and pointed out that Arab women may wear veils, but Western women feel compelled to dress up in uncomfortable body-restricting garments, cover themselves in makeup, and spend most of their lives dieting. She wrote that both Muslim women and Western women are essentially controlled by patriarchal preferences that are detrimental to women’s freedom.
Where the East subordinated women by controlling space, Professor Mernissi argued, the West created a vast de facto harem by controlling time. “The Western man,” she wrote, “declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look 14 years old. If she dares to look 50, or worse, 60, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility.”
Her most famous book as an Islamic feminist, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Islam, (translated into English in 1991) was a quasi-historical study of the role of the wives of Muhammad. The book was subsequently banned in Morocco, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
Fatema Mernissi
She was a renowned public speaker, scholar, teacher, writer, and sociologist. In 1992, the UK Guardian wrote, “Muslim women are now producing the most exciting feminist writing being published anywhere. Professor Mernissi is the most highly regarded among them.”
She remained a Muslim throughout her life. She argued that her deep study of religious texts had turned up little support for women’s long subordination. That reading, she argued, sprang from centuries of misinterpretation by male leaders intent on maintaining the gender status quo.
Mernissi died in Rabat, the capital city of Morocco, on November 30, 2015.
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