Background
Mrs. Mernissi was born in Fes, Morocco, on September 27, 1940. She grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother along with various female kin and servants.
(When Benazir Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan in ...)
When Benazir Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan in 1988, many claimed that it was a blasphemous assault on Islamic tradition since no Muslim state, critics alleged, had ever been governed by a woman. But Fatima Mernissi examined fifteen centuries of Islamic history and discovered that the critics were wrong.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816624399/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(Convinced that the veil is a symbol of unjust male author...)
Convinced that the veil is a symbol of unjust male authority over women, in The Veil and the Male Elite, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi aims to investigate the origins of the practice in the first Islamic community.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201632217/?tag=2022091-20
Mrs. Mernissi was born in Fes, Morocco, on September 27, 1940. She grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother along with various female kin and servants.
Fatema Mernissi received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the French protectorate. In 1957, she studied political science at the Sorbonne and at Brandeis University, gaining her doctorate there.
Mrs. Mernissi returned from France to work at the Mohammed V University and taught at the Faculté des Lettres between 1974 and 1981 on subjects such as methodology, family sociology and psychosociology.
She was a lecturer at the Mohammed V University of Rabat and a research scholar at the University Institute for Scientific Research, in the same city. She also was a writer.
(Convinced that the veil is a symbol of unjust male author...)
(When Benazir Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan in ...)
1993As an Islamic feminist, Mrs. Mernissi was largely concerned with Islam and women's roles in it, analyzing the historical development of Islamic thought and its modern manifestation. Through a detailed investigation of the nature of the succession to Muhammad, she cast doubt on the validity of some of the hadith (sayings and traditions attributed to him), and therefore the subordination of women that she sees in Islam, but not necessarily in the Qur'an. She wrote extensively about life within harems, gender, and public and private spheres.
As a sociologist, Fatema Mernissi mainly did field work in Morocco. On several occasions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she conducted interviews in order to map prevailing attitudes to women and work. She did sociological research for UNESCO and ILO as well as for the Moroccan authorities. In the same period, Mrs. Mernissi contributed articles to periodicals and other publications on women in Morocco and women and Islam from a contemporary as well as from a historical perspective. Her work has been cited as an inspiration by other Muslim feminists, such as those who founded Musawah.