In Memoriam: Fatima Mernissi, 1940–2015

Fatima Mernissi’s impact on scholarship and writing on Arab and Muslim women has been so profound that it is almost easy to overlook. Eclectic in her interpretations and her methodologies, Mernissi wrote variously as a sociologist and a historian, a literary scholar and a novelist. Her expansive interdisciplinarity, willingness to challenge entrenched taboos wherever she found them, and real gift for narrative writing together allowed her to make significant contributions in multiple fields. Rather than playing the game of academic hyperspecialization, though, she has been our feminist Scheherazade: committed to undermining patriarchal authority by weaving together the textual threads of multiple women’s lives (some of them unknown and others reclaimed from venerable tradition) to create an alternative model of both the storyteller and the story.

Her first book, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (1975), became an instant classic, ushering in possibilities for scholarship on Middle Eastern women in a period when any feminist scholarship was still considered a radical political project. The date of publication positions Mernissi firmly within the burgeoning generational curve of second-wave feminism. Her clear, confident focus on women’s lived experience (rather than on more oblique theoretical engagements) also marks her as a member of that pioneer cohort. But she remained energized, skeptical, and firmly committed, continually striking out in new directions that disconcerted any facile efforts to pigeonhole her writing or perspective. Educated in Morocco, France, and the United States, she was from first to last a creative paradox: a cosmopolitan hybrid emphatically rooted in Morocco, a feminist who refused to be classified as either “secular” or “Islamic,” a defender of women’s claims to equal public participation and personal self-determination, and a lyrical narrator of feminine voices, spaces, and subjectivities.

Her project as a scholar and a writer was simple: to make room in the present and excavate from the past the forthright agency of Muslim women. Championing a feminist and remarkably nonsectarian interpretation of Islam produced through secular scholarship, Mernissi opened up genealogical possibilities for Muslim women seeking to reconcile their religious identity with contemporary tensions over individual autonomy and traditional gender roles. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (French 1987; English 1991) was one of the first texts to offer an alternate reading of traditional (patriarchal) interpretations of important hadith, contextualized in their historical and cultural contexts. The Forgotten Queens of Islam (French 1990; English 1993) is with hindsight even more radical. Coming from the less communitarian (Sunni) religious context of Morocco but writing for an international audience, Mernissi unapologetically presents laudatory descriptions of the lives of Fatimid Yemeni and Egyptian (Ismaʿili Shiʿa) women rulers. She carefully situates their biographies within the relevant contexts of dynastic, theological, and state politics, but her approach is explicitly catholic. For Muslim women to function as their own organic intellectuals and challenge hegemony (patriarchal, religious, or both),they cannot afford to be alienated from any of their own rich legacy of female agency. Mernissi’s chosen women are meant to be inspirational examples for all Muslim women, their stories to be neither affirmed nor dismissed on the basis of sectarian claims. Allergic to orthodoxy (religious or secular) in her writing and her life, she knew it is the stories that matter: grounded in the lineage of the telling (in the evidence and the archive) but set free by the narrative skill of the storyteller. She learned that skill from the women’s oral narrative tradition she absorbed as a girl. Whether Huda Shaʿrawi or Scheherazade, the Yemeni queens Asma and ʿArwa or a Berber step grand mother arrived out of the mountains in the midst of civil war, Mernissi celebrated examples of Muslim women who had succeeded in challenging reigning norms of passive feminine obedience.

This eclecticism in the service of feminist and scholarly commitment may have also been what supported her decision to insert her own story directly into her oeuvre. For a respected woman Arab academic to make the move from scholarly writing to first-person original narrative was shocking...