The Veil and the Male Elite by Fatema Mernissi

However, a deeper study of Mernissi’s thought indicates that she distinguishes between two Islams: orthodox Islam and authentic Islam. This stance threw so much confusion on her position that some Muslim scholars, including Islamic feminists, refused to consider her one of them. In this vein, she declared that Islamic religious patriarchy ostensibly “professes models of hierarchical relationships and sexual inequality and puts a sacred stamp onto female subservience.” Mernissi’s project of feminist scholarship was characterized by secularism at first, as she believed then that the reconciliation between religion and feminism was a lost cause.

The ferocious battle that she subsequently committed herself to was to problematize and dismantle the foundations on which this cultural patriarchy rests. In “Dreams of Trespass,” Mernissi argues that the oppressive act of restricting women’s mobility in traditional Muslim societies was meant to prevent women from becoming too smart and then gaining agency and autonomy. The book inventively brings to the fore the questions of cultural patriarchy, gender roles, public and private spaces, and gender inequality. Her book “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood” fictionally recounts the early days of her protagonist’s life – Fatima- and her growing awareness of the predicament of women in Muslim societies. The dream that preoccupied her juvenile mind thereafter was trespassing the frontiers and jumping over the walls to land on the ground of gender equality. Fatima Mernissi’s journey towards the deconstruction of the misogynistic cultural practices that were attributed to Islam started from the very moment she questioned the validity of those rules as a child.

The Veil and the Male Elite by Fatema Mernissi