Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (53 page)

For the women, however, life’s obsession was escape. “Ahhh,” Mernissi recalled, “but we dreamed of trespass beyond the gates all the time.”

In her memoir,
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood,
Mernissi recounted her mother’s yearning.

The women’s view of the sky was confined to a patch visible by looking up from the courtyard. Most windows were shuttered or draped so the outside world could not peek inside.

Their one connection to the outside world was a large radio. It was supposed to be for the men’s ears only; it was locked in a large cabinet when they were out. But the girls eventually found the key and, when the men were away, they turned it on—and danced to local music, sang along with a Lebanese chanteuse, or listened to the news on Radio Cairo.

“The news became very important to me,” Mernissi recalled, as she sipped a cup of sweet mint tea. She still remembers hearing on the radio about World War II for the first time.

“They were killing each other on such a big scale! This is why we were scared of the Europeans,” she told me.

Her father eventually found out about the females’ secret pastime. He grumbled that they would next find a key to open the front gate.

That’s exactly what Mernissi did—with her mother’s help.

Mernissi’s mother was illiterate, but she was an independent spirit. She rejected restrictions on her life as an absurdity, and male superiority as anti-Islamic.

“Allah made us all equal,” she would say, with indignation.

“My mother didn’t know the alphabet, but that didn’t make her ignorant. She knew
A Thousand and One Nights
by heart,” Mernissi told me. “She was
very
clever.”

Her mother ensured that Mernissi, from the age of three, was enrolled in Koranic school. It was the only form of education for females at the time. The family was devout. She shared her first name, Fatima, with one of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughters. Many revere Fatima as the greatest Muslim woman who ever lived.

“I memorized many parts of the Koran as a child,” Mernissi told me. “I say to women to this day: Swallow history and use it. You have to
sing
the Koran. It gives you a good memory.”

She rose off a little divan and, in full theatric voice, recited from the forty-first chapter, or sura, of the Koran. “Respond to aggression with softness,” she said, “and you will see your worst enemy become your fervent partner.”
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The key out of the front gate—and eventually the harem—was education. When the Moroccan government opened public education to girls in the 1950s, Mernissi’s mother pleaded with her husband to let their only daughter attend the new school. That meant learning arithmetic and foreign languages and even playing sports in shorts, none of which was allowed in religious school.

It also meant crossing the
hudud,
the sacred frontier, after which there was no going back.

Mernissi’s father called a family council of senior male members. Debate was heated, but the council eventually decreed that Mernissi—as well as her ten female cousins—could go to public school.

“If I had been born two years earlier,” Mernissi told me, “I would not have obtained an education.”

Modernization only went so far; tradition still restricted personal freedom. When the Mernissi women were allowed to attend their first movie, the men bought tickets for four rows, so all the seats both in front of and behind the females were empty. The women spent hours doing their makeup and hair for the outing—only to have to don veils, or
hejab,
to cover it all.

Her mother once tried to change their
hejab,
replacing the heavy white cotton that impeded breathing with a lighter, sheer black chiffon. But her father resisted, Mernissi wrote.

Mernissi’s mother was never able to break out of the harem prison. When she appealed for permission to attend literacy classes, the family council turned her down. So she turned around and advised her daughter to learn to “shout and protest” just as she had learned to walk and talk.

“She would turn to me and say, ‘You are going to transform this world, aren’t you? You are going to create a planet without walls and without frontiers, where the gatekeepers have off every day of the year,’” Mernissi recalled.
¹⁶

At the time, the Middle East offered few feminist role models for its women. Indeed, the groundbreaker was arguably a man.

Qasim Amin was an Egyptian judge, cofounder of Cairo University, and an activist in Egypt’s nationalist movement. He is also considered the father of Arab feminism. He wrote
The Liberation of Women
in 1899 to argue that the education and liberation of women were pivotal in ending British colonial rule. In
The New Woman,
published in 1900, he then boldly condemned Arab societies for their attitudes and treatment of females. The book resonates with a single word—slavery.

It was much harder for women to campaign for their rights. Among the early critics was Aisha Taymour, an Egyptian born in 1840 who was never able to leave the harem. She spent her life penning angry poems against the veil in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish—languages otherwise largely useless since she could not leave her confinement to speak them in public.

Zaynab Fawwaz grew up in a Lebanese village. Through self-instruction and the men she married, she eventually became a noted literary figure. In the 1890s, she wrote a 500-page volume of women’s biographies entitled
Generalizations of Secluded Housewives.

Hoda Shaarawi was married at thirteen and lived sequestered for years in an Egyptian harem, yet she dared to gradually challenge convention. She organized the first lectures for women, founded the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women, led women’s street protests against British occupation in 1919, campaigned successfully to have the age of marriage raised to sixteen, and, in 1923, dared to publicly remove her veil. Shortly before her death, in 1947, she founded the Arab Feminist Union.

In the 1950s, Mernissi’s mother was dogged about her daughter’s future. She prodded her husband to allow Mernissi to go on to high school, then college, and next to the Sorbonne in Paris for graduate work. Mernissi ended up working on a doctorate at Brandeis University, where she began to write about the Middle East’s harem culture—and, more to the point, how to break out of it.

Along the way, Mernissi told me with a chuckle, she also got her own radio.

Mernissi was in the last generation born into the traditional Moroccan harem and the first to break out of it. She soon emerged as one of the most audacious feminists in the Arab world.

Mernissi has grown into a defiantly flamboyant woman. I first met her in the mid-1990s. She generates energy, speaks in long, rambling, stream-of-conscious sentences that cover many subjects in a single breath, and is usually an idea or two ahead of most people around her. She is as sure of herself as any woman I’ve ever met. She is larger-than-life physically, too. She has high cheekbones and a long leonine nose; her hair is a mass of frizzy curls, rinsed in warm, auburn henna. She dresses in the deep, bright colors of Morocco, rich dark red, burnt orange, or dark violet. She is usually adorned with big jewelry, long dangling earrings, a chunky Bedouin necklace, and large rings. She wears neither scarf nor veil.

Her modest apartment in Rabat is filled with Berber carpets and big pillows. But when I visited her in 2006, what struck me the most were the big windows.

“Yes,” she laughed, “I paid a lot to have this view. I love to see the sky. I have to see it, especially the moon.”

Liberated from harem traditions, Mernissi now has the certainty of a convert. She has poured her obsession into a torrent of books that are the essential feminist primers in the Middle East.
The Forgotten Queens of Islam
chronicles the lives of fifteen female rulers in the medieval Islamic world—from Asia to North Africa, from Queen Arwa of Yemen to the sultanas of India and Persia—to refute misogynist claims that it is un-Islamic for women to lead.
The Political Harem: The Prophet and the Women
tackles the taboo subject of human sexuality.

Her most ground-breaking works challenge traditional interpretations of women’s rights. In
The Veil and the Male Elite,
Mernissi offers a feminist interpretation of Islam. Most Arab governments have banned it. In it, she argues that the Prophet Mohammed actually sought equality between the sexes and gave a place to women in public life for the first time. In the period before Islam—known as the Jahaliya, or period of ignorance—females were treated brutally. They could claim no rights. They could be sold, stolen, abandoned, or claimed as booty in warfare. Female infanticide was common; unwanted baby girls could be buried alive.
¹⁸

Islam revolutionized the treatment of women with new laws. It gave females the right to inherit, divorce, own and operate businesses, have partial custody of children, and pray in mosques.

“You can’t blame the repression of women on the Prophet,” Mernissi told me. “By comparison, he liberated women!”

And just how were women of other faiths treated in the eighth century? she asked.

In
Women and Islam,
Mernissi applied the mores of the early Islamic era to the present—with a vastly different spin than the region’s conservative sheikhs and imams.

Practices discriminating against women, she told me with dismissive self-confidence, are misinterpretations of the Koran and Muslim traditions added by despots, dynasties, sheikhs and sultans, fundamentalist preachers—and husbands—over the centuries.

“You find in the Koran hundreds of verses to support women’s rights in one way or another and only a few that do not. They have seized on those few and ignored the rest,” Mernissi said.

The first convert to Islam, she noted, was Khadija, a prominent businesswoman who ran trade caravans across the Middle East. She hired Mohammed, eventually proposed marriage to him, and after his revelations became a Muslim. After his death, his third wife Aisha provided roughly one-quarter of the hadith, the traditions of the Prophet that are still considered as authoritative as the Koran in guiding the way a good Muslim should live. Aisha also raised an army, gave fiery speeches, and even went to the battlefield in a litter behind a camel.

Islam’s original egalitarian values, Mernissi insisted, are actually the best vehicle for change in the Middle East.

“Equality isn’t a foreign idea and doesn’t need to be imported from other cultures. It is at the heart of Islam, too. Allah spoke of the two sexes in terms of total equality as believers,” she said. Muslim politicians who scream that equality for women is alien to Muslim tradition, she added, are like those who protested a century ago that banning colonial slavery was anti-Islamic.

It does not bother her that many Muslim scholars, past and present, interpret Islamic history and the Koran differently than she does. “Men have no monopoly on knowing what is right.”

The first United Nations report on the status of Arab women, published in 2006, called Mernissi’s work “pioneering” and described her as a “luminary” in the Islamic world.
²⁰
Yet the same report also revealed how far Arab women still have to go. More than five decades after Morocco’s public schools were opened to girls, over sixty percent of its female population still could not read and write—even though public opinion overwhelmingly supported equal education.
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