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.

This "wonderful and enchanting" memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl's life in her family's French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review).

In this book the author, who is both a feminist and a Muslim, aims to shed light on the status of women in Islam by examining and reassessing the literary sources as far back as seventh-century Islam.

Mernissi recounts the extraordinary stories of fifteen queen s and reflects on the implications for the ways in which politics is practiced in Islam today, a world in which women are largely excluded form the political domain.

In this story, she tells of her childhood in a Fez harem in the 1940s, a period of social transition in Morocco.

In this now-classic book, Islamic sociologist Fatima Mernissi explores the ways in which progressive Muslims--defenders of democracy, feminists, and others trying to resist fundamentalism--must use the same sacred texts as Muslims who use ...

Rather, it is a construction of the 'ulama', the male jurists-theologians who manipulated and distorted the religious texts in order to preserve the patriarchal system.

The book first explores some of the concrete issues fundamental to status of Muslim women, such as the production of statistics which mask women's contribution to the economies of Arab states.

"For her book's inspired central metaphor, Mernissi turns to the ancient Islamic tradition of oral storytelling, illuminating her grandmother's feminized, subversive, and highly erotic take on Scheherazade's wife-preserving tales from The ...