The constant gardener
Fatema Mernissi (1940- )
Alina Sajed,
McMaster University
Moroccan author and sociologist, Fatema Mernissi was born in 1940 in Fez, Morocco. Considered a world-renowned Islamic feminist, she grew up in a harem, surrounded by the women in her family, grandmothers, mother, and sisters. The strict separation she experienced between men and women in Moroccan society, and between women and the public sphere have profoundly influenced her thinking and her subsequent intellectual and activist endeavours.
Mernissi was enrolled in one of the first mixed private schools of Morocco at a time when the nationalist project made public education available for both sexes. This experience of liberation through education is discussed in her autobiographical book Dreams of Trespass (1994). She later pursued a political science degree at the Sorbonne and then at Brandeis University, where she obtained her doctorate. She is currently a professor of sociology at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco. Although well known for her research on gender dynamics in the Arab world, Mernissi has recently become interested in communication and the media. The author is active in the "Synergie Civique Research Project," an initiative that brings together NGO leaders and researchers with the purpose of investigating the possible connection between the democratization of access to information technologies and the increasing interest of Moroccan youth in civil society projects.
Whether dealing with the politics of gender dynamics in Islamic societies, as impacted by processes of modernization, with the politics of "reading between the West and the East," or with the effects of communication technologies on the traditional gender divide in the Muslim world, Mernissi's work is particularly relevant in an age of intensification of globalization processes. These processes need to be understood as the worldwide dissemination of ideas, goods, images, technologies, and people (although in unequal degrees).
In Beyond the Veil (1975; 1987 revised edition), Mernissi examines how processes of modernization (and globalization) have impacted on the male-female dynamics in Muslim society. By drawing on an analysis of the Muslim concept of female active sexuality, and by examining the historical and social premises for gender inequality in Islam, the author points to the tensions and contradictions that accompany processes of modernization. Mernissi points to the fact that the requirements of modern life push women into the public sphere and encourage them to demand increased autonomy, something which had been restricted for centuries to men.
Her later works, Dreams of Trespass and Scheherazade Goes West (2001), explore her childhood in a harem and the cultural encounter between East and West. These are autobiographical texts that have more in common with the narrative genre than with "social scientific" discourse, which makes them very accessible and insightful. Dreams is an examination of the experience of living in a harem at a time when the nationalist discourse concerning education of women had just started to gather strength. By dealing with relationships between the women and men in her family, between the women, and between the women and the "outer" world, Mernissi exposes a world largely unknown to the Western reader, that of the harem. She dismantles the exotic fantasy of the harem as a place of eroticism, and muses on the political (and politicizing) aspects of this domestic space. Briefly put, she explores the ways in which the harem is a space of the everyday politics and acts of resistance.
Scheherazade builds on her personal experience of the harem, and examines the ways in which this space has been appropriated by the European imagination as a space of blissful eroticism and pleasures. She focuses in particular on the representations of the harem and of "Oriental" woman by famous European philosophers and artists (such as Kant, Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse). In her analysis, the author points to the fact that such representations speak volumes about the male-female dynamics in European society, more than they speak about an Orient that only exists in the European imagination. The problem of the harem in European exoticism is not, however, a novel theme. This issue has been explored by other authors, such as Alev Lytle Croutier in her Harem: The World behind the Veil and Jan Goodwin in Price of Honour: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World.
Recently Mernissi has focused her research on how communications technologies, such as the satellite and the Internet, have impacted on Muslim societies, and especially on how they undermine the traditional gender divide in the Arab world. In her latest book, Les Sindbads Marocains ("The Moroccan Sindbads," 2004), Mernissi points to the reach of this technology (exclusively associated with the urban space) to the rural regions of Morocco, and analyzes its ramifications. Mernissi's intellectual preoccupations make it possible to explore the ways in which the global dissemination of concepts and practices transform traditionally understood roles and expectations related to male-female dynamics.
Suggested Readings:
Fatema Mernissi's Synergie Civique Network website.
www.mernissi.net (accessed 23 November 2006)
Mernissi, Fatema. 1985.
Beyond the veil: Male-female dynamics in modern Muslim society. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Mernissi, Fatema. 1995.
Dreams of trespass: Tales of a harem girlhood. New York:
Basic Books.
Mernissi, Fatema. 2001.
Scheherazade goes West: Different cultures, different harems. New York:
Washington Square Press.