Remembering Fatima Mernissi, Acclaimed Moroccan Feminist

Remembering Fatima Mernissi, Acclaimed Moroccan Feminist


Renowned Moroccan sociologist, author and Arab Muslim feminist Fatima Mernissi died on November 30 in Rabat, Morocco. She was 75.



Born in 1940 in a harem in Fez to an affluent family, Mernissi attended Quranic and nationalist schools, followed by graduate studies in sociology at Mohammed V University in Rabat, and the Sorbonne. In 1973, Mernissi obtained a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University, after which she returned to Rabat to teach sociology at Mohammed V University, while holding a simultaneous research appointment at the Moroccan Institut Universitaire de Recherche Scientifique. Though widely read in the Arab Mashriq and the Maghreb, Mernissi worked and lived in Morocco all of her life, and was deeply involved in its social and political causes, including being a member of La Caravane Civique, a pioneering group of Moroccan intellectuals who worked for the education of rural Moroccan women.

The domestic harems such as the one Mernissi grew up in were essentially extended conjoined family units where a man lived with his wife or wives, children and female relatives. The domestic harem was officially dissolved upon Morocco’s independence in 1956 from France, but they retain a profound symbolic power in the Arab ethos. Harems were spatially and architecturally defined by a line of control that was both real and imaginary—the hudud—or a “sacred frontier” in Arabic, whose main purpose was to separate women from the outside world.

In her memoir, Dreams of Trespass, Mina, one of the servants from Mernissi’s harem childhood, herself kidnapped from Sudan as a young girl and sold in Morocco to be a maidservant, tells a young Mernissi, “The frontier indicates the line of power because wherever there is a frontier, there are two kinds of creatures walking on Allah’s earth, the powerful on one side, and the powerless on the other.” The young Fatima asks Mina how she can tell on which side she stood. Mina’s answer was “quick, short and very clear: If you can’t get out, you are on the powerless side.”

In her work, Mernissi relentlessly interrogated the various forms of this hudud—“the veil” or hijab being one of them—all of them manmade lines of control meant to keep women or the powerless in or out. To explain the private and public abjection that Muslim women experienced in normative male-centered Islamic societies under Sharia or Islamic law, Mernissi undertook an exhaustive scholarly and intellectual engagement with Islamic religious texts, including the Quran, the canonical commentaries on the Quran, the Hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet), and other religious and juridical texts of the Sharia. Through rigorous, patient and elegant exculpations, and verifications of concordances, Mernissi imaginatively deconstructed and interpreted the myths of women’s inferiority postulated by the Imams—spiritual leaders—as a cosmic fact in the Muslim community. Mernissi contended that the challenge of modernity to Islam was to balance ta’a (obedience) with ra’y (individual opinion), ‘aql (reason) and khayal (imagination), powerful concepts with varied interpretations in different historical periods of political Islam. A practicing Muslim, Mernissi’s own relationship to her religion manifested all four forces in equal measure.

. . .

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/12/18/remembering-fatima-mernissi-acclaimed-moroccan-feminist/