Honoring Fatema Mernissi: Personal and Professional Impact
Panel 033, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 18 at 10:00 am
Panel Description
The death of the Moroccan activist, feminist and prolific scholar, Fatema Mernissi, who passed away on November 30, 2015, calls for an assessment of her life's work and the impact that her scholarship and activism had on her many readers and their personal and intellectual development. To date, she is the most widely translated and read Moroccan scholar in history. The proposed panel honors Mernissi by discussing the various areas of her scholarship and its influence. The four papers demonstrate how Mernissi created a legacy through her courageous activism and pioneering scholarship on women's rights, democracy, and Islam. Based on personal conversations and formal interviews with Mernissi, one presenter will look at Mernissi as an "intellectual nomad" who managed to pioneer new fields of research that inspired generations of scholars in different disciplines in various parts of the world during her lifetime. Having been influenced by the Sufi tradition, Mernissi initiated discussions on women's rights in Islam, significantly influencing, what later became known as, Islamic Feminist thought. Mernissi broke new ground in social science research through her work on "cyber ummah" which preceded the advent of social media. Another presenter will examine Mernissi's relevance and influence on feminist scholarship and the women's movement in Iran through the translation of her book, The Veil and the Male Elite, in spite of the banning of the translation. Mernissi's insistence on understanding Islam in its historical and political context has created a bridge between "secular" and "Islamic" feminist debates. The presentation will also consider Mernissi's contribution to debates on feminism and democracy. Looking at Mernissi as an "agent of social change", another presentation focuses on Mernissi's discussion of Prophet Muhammad's views and treatment of women though examining the Hadith literature thus opening new ways of rethinking Islamic primary texts. The fourth presentation argues that Mernissi has also contributed to changing orientalist views of harem life by tracing Mernissi's own journey from the private walls of the harem to public intellectual arenas through examining Mernissi's discussion on the lives of women and men in the harem in her memoir, Dreams of Trespass.
The overall goal of the eclectic and critical approach of Fatima Mernissi to gender and women’s rights seems to be overlooked. Scholars and activists attempt to analyze her work within one academic category or another. With few exceptions, her overwhelming personal and professional commitments to social change appear to be forgotten.
In this presentation, I will focus on Mernissi scholarship/activism that addresses the Prophet Muhammad’s reported views and treatments of women, based mainly on the Hadith literature. During the last decade of my research that culminated in a recent monograph on Hadith, I was amazed, but not surprised, by how few references were made to Mernissi’s work on the subject.
It is especially important to realize that she had re-opened the way for women’s rethinking Islamic primary texts that will lead to social and attitudinal change. I will shed some light on her study of the Hadith, its apparent ramifications and consequences for building a feminist position that enables social change toward gender justice and woman’s agency.
I will synthesize some examples from her books, particularly her seminal book, the Veil and the Male Elite. The objective is to develop strategies for challenging both the injustices done to women in the name of Islam, and the different approaches that still view women as subjects of change instead of agents of change.
Following a brief description and reflection on personal impact of Fatima Mernissi on myself as a scholar and women’s/human rights activist, I will discuss how Mernissi’s work have been received in Iran, particularly by Iranian feminists. One of her books The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, was translated from English into Persian for the first time by Malihe Maghazei and published by Nay Publications in 2001. The first edition was well received and all 3000 copies sold out in couple of months. Almost half of the copies of the second edition was sold before being banned and the remaining copies getting confiscated by the order of the then Prosecutor General of Tehran, Saeed Mortazavi in May 2002. The manager of the publishing company was arrested temporarily and interrogated. The translator was persecuted and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. She appealed and hired a lawyer and paid a huge fine in order to turn the verdict into three months in jail and the remaining 15 months as suspended. Ironically, all this drew more attention to the book, especially among Iranian feminists. Reportedly 200,000 underground copies were sold with higher price. In my paper, I will explain the significance and relevance of Mernissi’s work to Iranian feminists, including her stress on understanding the historical and political factors in construction of Islamic tradition rather than the scripture, and her analysis of socio-political, cultural and socio-psychological factors behind the tension and fear of many members of the Muslim male elite of democracy and modern world rather than Islamic faith per se. I will try to show how Mernissi is understood by major ideological tendencies within Iranian women’s movement, what has been her influence on rethinking feminist approach to religion and the debates over “secular feminism” versus “Islamic feminism.” What has been Mernissi’s contribution to the construction of self-identity as “Muslim feminist” and what have we learned or can learn from Mernissi about the inter-connection between feminism and democracy.
Where Will the Troubled Women Go? : Fatima Mernissi’s Memoir of Growing up in the Moroccan Harem of her Childhood
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Mernissi was published in 1994 and made an immediate impact on our understanding of life in the harem and the women and men who lived within its confines. There are multiple ways that Mernissi’s memoir of her childhood made an important contribution to the scholarship of the harem. Her memoir was and remains a powerful rebuttal of the Orientalist view of the harem and of Arab/Muslim women generally. This must rank as one of the most important contributions to our understanding of harem life. Also, we do not have to imagine the voices of harem women whom we come to know through research in the archives. Instead there is Mernissi who speaks for herself and remembers the voices of the women with whom she lived.
Her memoir provides scholars with first-hand information about an institution that in its essence cherishes and protects the privacy and intimate relationships of the men women and children living together as what Mernissi described as an extended family. Mernissi cites her father, who had multiple wives as well as eight concubines, who believed fervently in the hudud, or sacred frontier between men and women that must be respected. Trespassing, according to her father, had to be rejected. Nevertheless, the harem into which Mernissi was born in 1940 was on its way to extinction for multiple reasons including the influence of the French who had declared Morocco a protectorate, World War II and the Moroccan nationalists who advocated the end of seclusion and the veil. One of the strengths of the memoirs is that the harem is situated within the politics of the time and events outside the harem that begin to break down the hudud that Mernissi’s father believed was crucial to tranquility.
Mernissi grew up to transgress this boundary. What my paper on Mernissi’s memoir will address is the link between her childhood experiences in the harem and her evolution into one of the best scholars of her generation, a feisty feminist and an internationally known and respected public intellectual.
What are the roots of Fatema Mernissi’s quest for uncovering new frontiers in scholarship? Mernissi’s books have inspired generations of scholars in a variety of disciplines; few contemporary female Muslim Arab authors have had such an enduring influence over such a varied geographic reach during their lifetime. This paper explores the intellectual trajectory of Mernissi’s scholarship based on extensive personal conversations, formal interviews and her writings. First and foremost are Mernissi’s upbringing in an urban Moroccan well-to do family in the historic city of Fez, her education as one of the first cohort of girls in newly established western schools, her studies in Paris during tumultuous 1968 and graduate studies at Brandeis University in the US. Being open and absorbing external influences while remaining steadfastly rooted in the culture of her origin, allowed Mernissi to venture into unknown territories. She described herself as an “intellectual nomad” who was shaped by the Sufi tradition of the wanderer. Such a wanderer seeks out new lands and listens to strangers encountered along the way. One of Mernissi’s strengths was her ability to listen, absorb, and then analyze in unconventional ways. She was equally attentive to fellow scholars, students, people in the marketplace and in later decades, rural, semi-literate or illiterate rural populations. She had an uncanny ability to anticipate future developments. She worked on feminism based on Islam before the term Islamic feminism existed, she worked on “cyber ummah” before the advent of social media, she broke new ground in social science research. Thus, as with all pioneers, she broke new ground for which she was scorned in Morocco. In spite of her international acclaim, she never received comparable recognition in her home country. This paper sheds light on the various influences that shaped this innovative thinker without whom some contemporary forms of feminism in the Muslim world would not exist.
