Fatema Mernissi

Mernissi's Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society was written for her PhD thesis and later published as a book which recognizes the power of Muslim women in relation to the Islamic faith. Mernissi is known for her sociopolitical approaches towards discussing gender and sexual identities, specifically those in Morocco and other Muslim countries. She is regarded as an influential feminist figure, as she was a renowned public speaker, scholar, teacher, writer, and sociologist. Mernissi died in Rabat on 30 November 2015.

In 2003, Mernissi was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award, along with Susan Sontag. Mernissi's acceptance speech, The Cowboy or Sinbad?, covered the topic of globalization, and was recognized for her pensive take, considering both the issue and effects of culture. In 2004, she was awarded the Erasmus Prize, alongside Sadik Al-Asm and Abdolkarim Soroush. For this award, she was recognized for her sociocultural impact, since it was dedicated to "Religion and Modernity". In 2017, The Middle East Studies Association created the Fatema Mernissi Book Award to "recognize outstanding scholarship in studies of gender, sexuality, and women’s lived experience".

In her book, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, Fatima Mernissi employs a transnational approach to analyse the socio-political context of the Arab-Islamic world shortly after the Gulf war. She debates whether the established fundamentalism dominating the Middle East could ever be compatible with the democratic processes used in Western societies. Mernissi raises questions around the uncertainty Muslims feel towards a form of government that is “unislamic” and may compromise their Islamic way of life, including morals and values, such as modesty. Moreover, she explores issues such as the fear of the Islamic religion, democracy, the United Nations Charter, freedom of thought and individualism (Mernissi, 2002).

In the book Women's Rebellion & Islamic Memory, Fatima Mernissi analyzes the role of women in relation to the world of contemporary Islam. In her work, she explores the idea of sexual identity and gender roles in the Islamic world and helps to redefine the narrative surrounding it. Mernissi discusses some of the most prominent issues to do with the status of Muslim women, such as the masking of women's contribution to the economies of Arab states (Mernissi, 1996). Furthermore, Mernissi delves into different demographic, including education and literacy. She uses this to help explain the importance of these factors not only for the empowerment of women in Islam, but also for their health (Mernissi, 1996).

For instance, the role that female slaves played in leading slave revolts against religious rulers without the use of violence (Mernissi, 1994). Moreover, Mernissi distinguishes between “Political Islam,” the period where radical change occurred and women's roles were disregarded or forgotten, and “Rislala Islam,” where women's lives were transformed (Mernissi, 1994). She was fundamental in contributing to the overall academic literature on women's visibility in Islamic history outside of their traditional roles by highlighting their involvement in politics, religion, and cultural change.

Her work has been cited as an inspiration by other Muslim feminists, such as those who founded Musawah and others. For Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women (1991), she interviewed peasant women, women labourers, clairvoyants and maidservants. In 1994, Mernissi published a fictional memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (in the US, the book was originally titled The Harem Within: Tales of a Moroccan Girlhood, and is still known by that title in the UK).

Mernissi's legacy can be greatly attributed to her scholarly and literary contributions to the early Islamic feminist movement. Mernissi tackled issues such as Eurocentrism, intersectionality, transnationalism and global feminism in her publications and public lectures. The New York Times quoted her in an obituary: "Not only have the sacred texts always been manipulated, but manipulation of them is a structural characteristic of the practice of power in Muslim societies,” Fatema Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (1991)

In 1984, she contributed the text "The merchant's daughter and the son of the sultan" to the anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan. Her most famous book as an Islamic feminist, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Islam, is a quasi-historical study of the role of the wives of Muhammad. It was first published in French in 1987 and translated into English in 1991. The book was subsequently banned in Morocco, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

Mernissi's first monograph, Beyond the Veil, was published in 1975. A revised edition was published in Britain in 1985 and in the US in 1987. Beyond the Veil has 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.

In 1975, Fatima Mernissi's first book, Beyond the Veil, was published, and it was considered revolutionary. Mernissi broke down the ethnocentric stereotypes Western society had developed towards Islam, especially Muslim women. She distinguished Muslim women from the homogenized group of ‘third-world women’ that Western feminism had created. Mernissi also fought to overcome Western assumptions that Muslim women were helpless victims of both their religion and the men of their religion. Western stereotypes ostracized Muslim men who did not fit the white, masculine, hegemonic mold dominating the first world society, developing racist ideas towards a religion that was believed to oppress women.

She returned to work at the Mohammed V University in Rabat and taught at the Faculté des Lettres between 1974 and 1981 on subjects such as methodology, family sociology and psychosociology. Further, she was a research scholar at the University Institute for Scientific Research at the same university.

As a sociologist, Mernissi mainly undertook field work in Morocco. On several occasions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she conducted interviews in order to map prevailing attitudes to women and their work. She did sociological research for UNESCO and ILO as well as for the Moroccan government. In the same period, Mernissi contributed articles to periodicals and other publications on women in Morocco and women and Islam from a contemporary as well as from a historical perspective.

Fatema Mernissi (Arabic: فاطمة مرنيسي, romanized: Fāṭima Marnīsī; 27 September 1940 – 30 November 2015) was a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist.

Fatema Mernissi was born on 27 September 1940 in Fez, Morocco. She grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother along with various female kin and servants. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the French protectorate. In 1957, she studied political science at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at Brandeis University in the US, where she gained her doctorate in 1974.