Fatema Mernissi

Fatema Mernissi (27 September 1940 – 30 November 2015) was a Moroccan sociologist and writer, born at Fez and raised in the harem of her wealthy paternal grandmother. ^{1 2}

She became one of the founding figures of Islamic feminism: a scholar who argued, from within the Islamic tradition, that the subordination of women rests on manipulated history and contested traditions rather than on the Qur'an itself, and whose books — Beyond the Veil, The Veil and the Male Elite, The Forgotten Queens of Islam — reshaped the study of women in Muslim societies. ¹

She shared the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2003 and the Erasmus Prize in 2004. ¹

Mernissi was born on 27 September 1940 in Fez, and grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother, among various female relatives and servants — the world she later recreated in her memoir Dreams of Trespass. ¹

She received her primary education in a school established by the Moroccan nationalist movement, and her secondary education in an all-girls school funded by the French protectorate. ¹

She began political science at Mohammed V University in 1959, then won scholarships that took her to the Sorbonne in 1966 for sociology and to Brandeis University in 1970, where she gained her doctorate in 1973. ¹

Returning to Morocco, she taught at the Faculté des Lettres of Mohammed V University in Rabat between 1974 and 1981 — methodology, family sociology and psychosociology — and was a research scholar at the university's Institute for Scientific Research. ^{1 2}

As a sociologist she worked mainly in the field in Morocco: in the late 1970s and early 1980s she conducted interviews mapping attitudes to women and their work, and she carried out research for UNESCO, the International Labour Organization and the Moroccan government. ¹

Her first monograph, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Muslim Society (1975), written from her doctoral thesis, examined the power of Muslim women in relation to the Islamic faith; revised editions appeared in Britain in 1985 and the United States in 1987, and the book became a classic of anthropology and sociology on women in the Arab world and Muslim societies. ¹

As an Islamic feminist, Mernissi analysed the historical development of Islamic thought and its modern manifestations; through a detailed investigation of the succession to Muhammad, she cast doubt on the validity of some of the hadith — the sayings and traditions attributed to him — and therefore on the subordination of women that she saw in Islam, but not necessarily in the Qur'an. ¹

Her best-known book in this vein, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam — a quasi-historical study of the role of the wives of Muhammad — was published in French in 1987 and in English in 1991, and was subsequently banned in Morocco, Iran and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. ¹

In The Forgotten Queens of Islam (French 1990; English 1993) she recovered the political careers of fifteen women rulers and actors in pre-modern Islam, distinguishing what she called "Political Islam", in which women's roles were disregarded or forgotten, from the Islam of the original message, in which women's lives were transformed. ¹

Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (French 1992) asked whether the fundamentalism of the post-Gulf-War Middle East could ever be compatible with democracy, and urged progressive Muslims, feminists among them, to argue from the same sacred texts as those who sought to oppress them. ¹

Her other writings include the interview book Doing Daily Battle (1991), built from conversations with peasant women, women labourers, clairvoyants and maidservants; the fictional memoir Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994); Scheherazade Goes West (2001), whose essay "Size 6: The Western Women's Harem" argues that Western beauty standards confine women as surely as any harem; and essays on women and the digital media, in which Scheherazade becomes the emblem of the woman communicator. ¹

Under the pen name Fatna Aït Sabbah she published La femme dans l'inconscient musulman (1982). ^{1 2}

Alongside her writing, the Arabic article records, she led a civil-society struggle for equality and women's rights, founding the Civil Caravans and the group "Women, Families, Children". ²

In 2003 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature jointly with Susan Sontag; her acceptance speech, "The Cowboy or Sinbad?", addressed globalisation and the dialogue of cultures. ¹

In 2004 she received the Erasmus Prize, shared with Sadik al-Azm and Abdolkarim Soroush, on the theme "Religion and Modernity", in recognition of her sociocultural impact. ^{1 2}

Her work has been cited as an inspiration by other Muslim feminists, among them the founders of the Musawah movement. ¹

This section reports what the sources record of Mernissi's belief, without a verdict from the museum.

Wikidata and the Arabic article's infobox record her religion as Islam in general; neither names a branch or a school. ^{3 2}

The English article describes her stance from inside the tradition: an Islamic feminist "embracing the Islamic faith" while contesting its patriarchal readings, who held that the texts had been manipulated by a male elite — "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", as her New York Times obituary quoted her. ¹

No source consulted names a legal school or order for her, and the majority school of Morocco is not evidence about an individual; the museum therefore records her faith as unknown, with her Islamic-feminist position carried here as the sources state it. ^{3 1}

Mernissi died at Rabat on 30 November 2015. ^{1 3}

In 2017 the Middle East Studies Association created the Fatema Mernissi Book Award, to recognise outstanding scholarship in the study of gender, sexuality and women's lived experience. ¹

• English Wikipedia article "Fatema Mernissi" (revision 1379690558); Arabic Wikipedia article «فاطمة المرنيسي» (revision 77056601); Urdu Wikipedia article «فاطمہ مرنیسی» (revision 10953622); Wikidata item Q242376.
• Conflicts recorded, not resolved: her education sequence is given by the English article as Mohammed V University (from 1959), the Sorbonne (1966) and a Brandeis doctorate in 1973, but by the Arabic and Urdu articles as the Sorbonne in 1957 and a doctorate in 1974 — the English sequence, which the Brandeis alumni page cited by the articles supports, is followed. Her birth day is 27 September in both articles; Wikidata also carries a 28 September claim. Encyclopaedia Britannica's Mernissi entry, cited by the Urdu article, returned 404 on the day of checking and is not used.