Born in Fez in 1940, Fatima Mernissi was brought up in a sex-segregated household that inspired her 1994 Dreams of Trespass. Along with other members of her family's harem, she dreamt of breaking taboos and with time she realized her childhood dreams of trespassing everywhere.
Mernissi was committed to changing whichever part of the world she happened to be in. In the academy, she took on the sacred cows. She critiqued the near untouchable Tradition authorities, as in The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam (1991) where she unveiled the misogyny that had informed Muslims’ scriptural interpretations of their Prophet's words and actions across the centuries. Prophet Muhammad was a revolutionary in her eyes, a man who respected and loved women unlike some of the early Muslims who were intent on excluding women from public office and even space. She revealed the historians’ neglect of Muslim women leaders across the ages in The Forgotten Queens of Islam (1993) and she challenged Western feminists’ dismay with the elite harem, as in Dreams of Trespass. In her 1984 Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (published under the pseudonym Fatna Ait Sabbah), she uncovered the fear women's sexuality inspires in men and the measures they take to deal with that fear.
In the community, she engaged with peasant and urban working class women. These exchanges led to the publication of her 1988 Doing Daily Battle: Interviews With Moroccan Women whose French title Le Maroc raconte par ses femmes indicates her goal to provide a Moroccan herstory. Mernissi wanted to make these rural and urban poor women question what had seemed beyond doubt. One summer, she invited me to attend a few of the sessions she held in a Tamara primary school. At the first meeting, we arrived during a break between classes and the children were playing in the schoolyard. Elegant and colorful as always, she strode down the aisle between the women crammed into tight, narrow rows. The women knew her, loved her—you knew because of the way their faces lit up when she appeared. She opened the windows to let in some cool air, placed her papers on to the teacher's table and, softly, began to speak. Sitting at the back, I could not hear a word. Nor could the women seated in front of me, and they shouted to her to speak up. She stopped then asked: “Do you know why you can't hear me?” The women sat back, surprised by the question. She walked over to a window and stared out almost in a reverie: “It's the children. That's why you can't hear me. You are having too many children.” A lesson in family planning in five minutes! Next week, the lesson plan turned to women's intelligence. She narrated the famous “Aisha in the Cellar” folktale that all Moroccan girls hear from their grandmothers and then tell their own granddaughters. The women seemed to enjoy hearing this well-known story from the lips of their respected teacher. Just as they were settling into the comfort of a hakawati audience, Fatima posed to them the question that runs through the story: “Who is more clever men or women?” Although the tale celebrates the wits of this poor woman who outwits and then marries a prince and the women knew the story by heart, they seemed perplexed. Another simple question had them scratching their heads. They turned to each other and even to me sitting on the side. What did I think? It was not enough to agree with the obvious moral of the tale; the question mattered. After we left the school building Fatima was as elated as she had been the week before. Weren't these women great? She knew that her sessions were making a difference in the lives of these illiterate but highly intelligent women. She later founded La Caravane Civique that sent educated women to engage with disenfranchised women in rural communities and prisons.
How different was this grassroots activist from the fiery speaker I had invited to the plenary panel of the 1993 MESA meeting in North Carolina. Along with Nawal El Saadawi, Mahnaz Afkhami and Deniz Kandiyoti, Mernissi challenged the audience to take gender seriously and to mainstream women's studies throughout Middle East studies. The women's studies she and her co-panelists were proposing were not derived from Western feminism but rather a gender politics rooted in Middle Eastern realities. This form of Arab Islamic feminism she had first articulated in her path-breaking Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (1975), a book based on her Brandeis PhD that launched the Islamic feminism wave of the late twentieth century.
Fatima Mernissi was a towering figure in Middle East studies, compelling everyone to question their assumptions and to confront injustice. Her legacy lives on in all who knew her and who will pass on her wisdom. She is survived by her brother Mohamed and her sister Ratida Mernissi.
