IjtihadReason Malta Forum In the News Lectures at the Grand Mosque, Oman Photo Essay

Fatema Mernissi

فاطمة المرنيسي
Fatima al-Mirnisi

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EDITOR'S NOTE
The 100 Influential Voices from the Arab World is an ongoing research project on leading voices and themes in Arab public discourse. The principal investigator is Hassan I. Mneimneh.
BIODATA

Fatema Mernissi is a professor of sociology at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco. Her books include: Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, New York, Basic Books, 1994; La peur-modernité: Conflit Islam démocratie (Islam and democracy: fear of the modern world), Paris, Albin Michel, 1992; Sultanes oubliées: Femmes chefs d’état en Islam (The forgotten queens of Islam), Paris, Albin Michel, 1990; Le harem politique: Le prophète et les femmes (The veil and the male elite: a feminist interpretation of women’s rights in Islam), Paris, Albin Michel, 1987; Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, Cambridge, Schenkmann, 1975. Born in 1941 in Fez, Mernissi studied at Mohammed V University and the Sorbonne prior to receiving her Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University in 1974.

SYNOPSIS

Mernissi has been a defining force in underlining the lack of recognition of the role of women in Arab thought and history. She has characterized this lacuna as a symptom of the failure of modern Arab thought to engage in a critical self-assessment, to serve intellectual and social development. Her efforts are thus two-pronged: a call for an appropriation of the global (Western) tools and methods, with their focus on empirical and rationalistic approaches, and an attempt at exploring Muslim heritage to reinstate both women and reason into their natural places at its center.

http://www.mernissi.net/

EXCERPT (Translated)

. . . my conclusion [is] that the famous conflict Mr. Samuel Huntington sells as a “Clash of Civilizations” (West/Islam) is in fact a clash between Aql, rational thinking, and consumerist advertising! Islam, just like the scientific Western civilization, encourages us to develop our aql so as to fight desire: “The one who is not ruled by his aql (reason) is destroyed by what he loves most”, stressed the Imams such as Ibn al Jawziya (born in 691 AH/1292 CE), who carried up to the 14th century Ibn Hazm’s tradition of writing treaties on love. And Ibn al-Jawziya, just like any science-worshipping Western scholar, stressed that “fighting desire increases one’s physical and emotional power and makes one eloquent as well.”1

–Fatema Mirnissi, from “Love in Digital Islam: Why Ibn Hazm is a best-seller on the Internet,” a new conclusion to the book L’amour dans les pays musulmans, April 2008


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