Fatema Mernissi teaches sociology at University Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco. She is the author of more than eight books, including Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, Scheherazade Goes West, The Veil and the Male Elite, and Beyond the Veil.
Mernissi, an internationally known Moroccan sociologist, endeavors to show that discrimination against women, so common in the Muslim world today, is not a fundamental tenet of Islam as many contemporary male Muslims would like us to believe. Her basic premise is that Islam is inherently egalitarian and, using extensive documentation from the Koran, the Hadith, and other Islamic historical commentary, Mernissi successfully proves her hypothesis. While doing so, she teaches the reader a great deal about Mohammed (the man as well as the prophet), his wives, his companions, and early Islamic society. Like Mernissi's other books ( Beyond the Veil , Indiana Univ. Pr., 1987; Doing Daily Battle , Rutgers Univ. Pr., 1989; Women in Emergent Morocco , Flame Internat., 1982), this fascinating, well-written, and well-documented work is an excellent addition to scholarship on Muslim women. Recommended for academic libraries and others with women's studies or Middle East collections.-- Ruth K. Baacke, Bellingham P.L., Wash .
Muhammad was a chief of state who publicly acknowledged the importance of affection and sexuality. He was a polygynous husband whose wives were not just background figures but often shared decision-making with him. According to Moroccan sociologist Mernissi ( Beyond the Veil ), the founder of Islam asserted the equality of women, rejected slavery and envisioned an egalitarian society. Mernissi further claims that successive Muslim priests manipulated and distorted sacred texts, from the seventh century onward, in an effort to maintain male privileges. Her close textual analyses of the Hadith , or stories of words and deeds attributed to the Prophet, support her far-reaching reinterpretation of the historic roots of Islam and its modern tendency to reduce woman to a ``submissive, marginal creature.'' (Aug.)
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