Fatima Mernissi

Fatema Mernissi (b. 1940–d. 2015) (spelled Fatima in her publications prior to 1997) was a Moroccan sociologist and an influential feminist writer and activist in the Arab world. Mernissi was born into a middle-class family in 1940 in Fes, Morocco, during the French Protectorate. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalists. After high school, she began undergraduate studies at Mohammed V University (MVU), Rabat, in political science in 1959, which she interrupted realizing her vocation for sociology. Thanks to a scholarship, she went to Paris, France, to study sociology in 1964 at the Sorbonne University. In 1970, she left the Sorbonne for Brandeis University, Massachusetts, from which she was granted a PhD in 1974. Mernissi returned the same year to Morocco, obtaining a teaching position at MVU, which she kept until 1984, the year she joined the Institut de Recherche Scientifique, Rabat, as a research associate. Mernissi was a prolific writer, authoring over sixteen books, some of which have been translated into over twenty-five languages. Her early feminist writings were secular and socialist in outlook, targeting both Islam for its misogyny and capitalist development for its gender-blindness, and foregrounding the intersection of both systems in producing the marginalization of women. As a sociologist, she undertook pioneering fieldwork in the late 1970s and early 1980s, mapping women’s work by conducting lengthy interviews with rural and lower-class working women. In addition to her academic publications, she also contributed articles to Moroccan magazines and periodicals and accompanied the creation of several feminist organizations and projects. Mernissi is also credited with introducing women’s studies in Morocco as early as the beginning of the 1980s, having created several research groups on the themes of gender and the family. In the second half of the 1980s, Mernissi shifted her secularist standpoint on Islam to adopt a more sympathetic position to the religion, arguing that Islam’s fundamental message is egalitarian, but that it has been distorted by male interpretation, and that it is the task of contemporary Muslim women to reread the foundational texts to produce more women-friendly interpretations. This position has been identified as exemplifying “Islamic feminism,” inspiring and setting the stage for a transnational movement of Muslim women engaged in reclaiming Islam. Since the late 1990s, in the context of the first and second Gulf Wars, Mernissi’s work marked a new shift, producing scholarships marked by a more frontal critique of Orientalist discourses and writings that aim at promoting local civil society and youth. Mernissi was the recipient of prestigious awards such as the Prince of Asturias Award in 2003 and the Erasmus Prize in the Netherlands in 2004. The Guardian ranked her among the top one hundred most influential women in the world in 2011.