Chapter Four - Fatima Mernissi: Women, Islam, Modernity and Democracy

Summary

One of the most essential criteria for choosing the thinkers analyzed in this book has been their influence in the Muslim world. Some of these thinkers have been academics whose discourse has had major impacts outside the academic setting. Others have had some affinity with the academic world, but their influence has been far beyond the rather limited university audience. Fatima Merniss is by training and profession an academic whose discourse enjoys rather broad currency in academic settings in the Muslim world and outside. Most importantly, she addresses gender issues in the Muslim world elaborately and deeply, drawing on a complex theoretical and philosophical approach. Moreover, Mernissi's impact in the Muslim world is not just confined to academia, because in many of her writings, especially of more recent vintage, her idiom is quite non-academic and accessible. From the very beginning of her career, Mernissi's focus has been on gender relations in Muslim societies and Islamic cultures. From early on Mernissi observed that the most urgent problem that Muslim societies had to solve was that of the relation between women and Islam. To solve this problem, she has advocated the agentification of women, continually criticized the notion and practice of veiling and gender-based segregation, and insisted on desegregation of women and men in Muslim societies.

A few scholars who have analyzed Mernissi's discourse usually refer to two phases in her writing. The first phase started with her dissertation, completed in 1973 and continued with Beyond the Veil (1987) and Women in the Muslim Unconscious (1984), which she published under a pseudonym. In this period, Mernissi drew on Freudian, Marxian and Marcusian theories to radically criticize, in a rather essentialzing manner, gender relations in Islam and Muslim societies. In her so-called second phase that begins with The Veil and the Male Elite (1988), Mernissi changed the tone of her writings to address the same issues. Yet, her agenda of women's empowerment, criticism of veiling and support for unveiling and desegregation remains in full force, albeit she treats them in a more nuanced and subtle fashion. For these reasons, making a sharp division in Mernissi's discourse in terms of phases is ultimately inaccurate. Yet for the sake of clarity I have complied with dividing Mernissi's work into two phases.