حيي السلسلة الثانية ذكرى الكاتبة وعالمة الاجتماع المغربيّة فاطمة المرنيسي (2015-1940) المعروفة بكتاباتها عن النّساء والنسويّة والفكر الإسلامي.
The second series commemorates the late Moroccan writer and sociologist Fatema Mernissi (1940-2015), best known for her writings on women, feminism and Islamic thought.
Introductory Remarks
Driss Ksikes is one of the founders and coordinators of the Fatema Mernissi Chair at the Mohammed V University and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Management (HEM) in Rabat, Morocco.
In his presentation, Ksikes sheds light on Mernissi’s personality, approach and lifestyle as well as her intellectual and interpersonal interactions. He focuses on how the Fatema Mernissi Chair honors and perpetuates her legacy, using it as an inspiration to generate novel ideas.
Ksikes is a professor of media, culture, and creative writing at HEM. He previously occupied the position of editor in chief at TelQuel. Starting in 2007, he became the director of the Economia, a research center for sociological, economic, and managerial sciences. He has published various articles and delivered lectures in international academic and media platforms. His book “Le métier d’intellectuel: dialogues avec quinze penseurs du Maroc” (The Intellectual Profession: Interviews with 15 Moroccan Thinkers), co-authored with Fadma Aït Mous (Member of the ACSS Board of Trustees), won the Prix Grand Atlas, Morocco’s most prestigious book prize.
Ksikes was described as “one of the most innovative writers in Morocco today” and named “one of the six best African playwrights” by the National Studio Theatre in London in 2012. He was appointed in 2016 by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) as a juror on living arts, and nominated twice for the title of best Francophone playwright (2015 and 2017). He was chosen by the Center for Art Writing at Northwestern University as a visiting resident writer in Chicago in the spring of 2017.
Ksikes has written a number of plays, including “Pas de mémoire, mémoire de pas” [Absence of Memory, Memory of Footsteps] (1998), “Le Saint des incertains” [The Saint of Uncertains] (2000), “Il” [He] (2008), “180 degrés” [180 Degrees] (2014), and “The Match” (2016). As a novelist, he published “Ma boîte noire” [My Blackbox] (2006), “L’homme descend du silence” [Man Descends from Silence] (2014) and “Au Détroit d’Averroès” [In the Straits of Averroes] (2017).
Main Lecture
Asmae Benadada is a Professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Dhahir Al Mehraz, University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fez, Morocco. She specializes in Women’s Studies and Political Sociology.
Benadada’s publications include “Women and Politics: Sociological Study of Women Partisan Sectors” (2008). She contributed to a number of edited works, including, “Le mouvement des droits humains des femmes au Maroc: Approche historique et archivistique” (2015). [The Women’s Human Rights movement in Morocco: A Historical and Archival Approach] (2015) She has also published a number of research papers in national and Arab journals specializing in women’s issues.
Benadada’s inaugural lecture focuses on the audacity and critical thinking characterizing the work of Fatema Mernissi, as she was among the pioneers who challenged the secrecy and silence surrounding sensitive and taboo issues in the Arab-Islamic culture. These can be summarized by the trinity of gender, religion, and politics, and the position of women within this trinity. With great intellectual courage and academic prowess, Mernissi addressed these issues, transforming them into subjects worthy of research, discussion, analysis, and critique. She utilized both her academic background and women’s rights’ experiences to deconstruct patriarchy in Arab-Islamic culture. Fatema Mernissi noted from the outset that the social and daily problems of women cannot be understood without a deconstructive and critical understanding of the historical, intellectual and religious foundations and cultural backgrounds within which patriarchy and its imaginary are anchored. Nor could these problems be understood without mapping the manifestations of women’s marginalization and inferiority.
In her lecture, Benadada points out that Mernissi adopted two methodological approaches in her writings. She used an analytical historical approach in order to understand the status of women in Islamic heritage and jurisprudence and attempt to find answers to modern questions. Such books include “The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Islam” (1987), “The Forgotten Queens of Islam” (1990), “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood” (1996), and “Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems” (2001).
The second approach relied on field and sociological research to explore the everyday life of a large number of Moroccan women and the challenges they faced. Such studies and books include “Le prolétariat féminin au Maroc” [The Female Proletariat in Morocco] (1981), “Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes” [Morocco Narrated by its Women] (1983), Women of the Gharb (1984), “Les Ait débrouille: Haut Atlas” [The Ait débrouille of the High Atlas] (2003), “Les Sindbads marocains: Voyage dans le Maroc civique” [Moroccan Sinbad, Travel in Civic Morocco] (2004).
In this lecture, Benadada addresses both methodological approaches while focusing on Mernissi’s field research and projects that focused on Moroccan women in their diverse contexts as workers, peasants, weavers and employees. She also addresses Mernissi’s study of women and youth in civil society associations. Finally, the lecture touches on the research Mernissi was developing on how the digital revolution and social networking sites have affected media and religious discourse, a project that did not see the light as she passed away before its completion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f0YF_xAkjELink to the lecture:
The Second Lecture (December 17, 2020 – Zoom)
Omaima Abou-Bakr is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University. She is a founding member of “The Women and Memory Forum” and a board member of the global organization “Musawah”, (Equality & Justice in the Muslim Family) and of its Knowledge Building team.
She specializes in medieval Sufi poetry and comparative topics in medieval English and Arabic literature. Her scholarly interests also include women’s mysticism and female spirituality in Christianity and Islam, feminist theology, Muslim women’s history, and gender issues in Islamic discourses. She has published numerous articles in both English and Arabic on poetry and medieval literary texts, on historical representations of women in pre-modern Muslim societies, women and gender in religious discourses, and Islamic feminist issues. One of her book publications is an edited reader that contains translations into Arabic of foundational articles in Christian feminist theology and Islamic feminist research: Al-niswiyyah wa-al-dirasat al-diniyah: Feminism and Religious Studies (2012). Other book publications are two edited volumes of collected articles; in English: Feminist and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of Knowledge and Reform, in Arabic: al-Niswiyyah wa-al-manzur al-islami (2013). Her most recent publications in Arabic include: “The Feminist Method in Reflecting upon the Qur’an: Understanding the Discourse of qist,” (in print, Misbar, 2020). Recent publications in English include a joint study with Mulki Al-Sharmani: “Islamic Feminist Tafsir and Qur’anic Ethics: Rereading Divorce Verses,” forthcoming in Nevin Reda and Yasmin Amin, eds. Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization, Subversion and Change. Toronto: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2020.
This lecture addresses the production of religious (Islamic) knowledge in the Arab world by women writers and researchers from the late 19th century until the beginning of the 21st century. It traces the evolution of this scholarship over its different stages and chapters, one of which is the important work of Fatema Mernissi. The lecture presents an overall analysis of those works and ideas as examples that illustrate the development of feminist research methods that focus on specific aspects of Islamic sciences with a view towards reform from within. The concepts, definitions and critical ideas presented by scholars in this area are discussed, culminating in the current stage of scholarship characterized by increased specialization, reflexivity and awareness of intellectual and ontological positionality.
The lecture addresses three constraints and conundrums in current Muslim feminist discourses: first, the defensiveness vis a vis the rejection of both non-Islamic/secular and Islamic traditional/conservative positions on one hand, and colonialist Islamophobia in the West on the other; second, continued circling in the orbit of deconstructionism and reproducing what has already been proven regarding patriarchal interpretations and monopoly of religious understanding; and third, facing complex political contexts that constrain free and independent thought. There is a need to continue to develop an established Islamic knowledge in Arabic that expresses feminist perspectives in different areas and fields, such as ethics, environmentalism, critical race studies, and decolonial studies, in addition of course to gender relations and gender justice. The last part of the lecture provides examples from current Muslim feminist research that combine the fields of gender, ethics, and Qur’anic exegesis.
Despite the paucity of works by Muslim feminists in Arabic that directly and methodically tackle Qur’anic tafsir in depth, there is a current trend that attempts an interpretive ijtihad and analysis of the Qur’anic text, while scrutinizing the tradition of interpretation and its methodologies. This research studies verses that conceptualize gender (such as qiwamah/male authority), and address marriage and divorce relations, femininity and masculinity, and women’s rights. It also studies the problem of applying Qur’anic ethical principles (especially justice, egalitarianism, and kindness) to human interactions both in private and social contexts, legal theories, and juristic rulings.
Finally, it revisits literary approaches/methodologies (e.g. aesthetic features, textual patterns, structural coherence of suras, images, etc.) that can be used in spiritual, theological, and ethical interpretations.
Link to the lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdDCt8KVxtk
The Third Lecture (November 30, 2021 – Zoom, 2021)
Zeina Zaatari is the Director of the Arab American Cultural Center and adjunct faculty in Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Previously, she worked as Research Director at Political Research Associates (20017-2018) and as the Regional Director for the MENA Program at Global Fund for Women (2004-2012).
Zaatari earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Davis. Her research focuses on subjectivity and social movements, particularly feminist and queer. She is co-editing with Suad Joseph the Handbook of Women in the Middle East (Routledge, 2022), and with Suad Joseph and Lena Meari The Politics of Engaged Gender Research in the Arab Region: Feminist Fieldwork and the Production of Knowledge (I.B. Tauris, 2021).
She serves as the Associate Editor for the Middle East and Africa for the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, is a trainer and mentor for The Muslim Women in the Media Training Institute, a co-founder and member of the Training to Engaged Research Group, and a co-founder and an elected Advisor for the MENA Coalition of Women Human Rights Defenders.
This lecture reflects on and analyzes feminist and queer movements in the Arab region including their social change projects, institutions and organizations, knowledge production, and transformations over time.
The lecture utilizes a storytelling methodology as an academic methodology and an avenue for social change. It draws on Mernissi’s storytelling methodology evident in several of her books and essays where she tells stories about her life, the lives of others including her family members and people she met, as well as stories from the oral histories she gathered in her research. This methodology allowed her to tell counter-stories, reach and dialogue with the other, give birth to new ideas, and deconstruct stereotypical frameworks about women and gender. Zaatari insists on linking storytelling as a strategy for social change on the one hand and oral and life history as a feminist academic methodology that aims to produce knowledge for social change on the other hand.
The lecture focuses on historicizing the shifts in organizational trajectories, priorities, knowledge production frameworks, and problematics of social change. It then focuses on the birth of the sexual and bodily rights/queer movements and its connection and critiques of the women’s movements.
The lecture then addresses the problematics of visibility which often accompanies social change projects.
Zaatari links between the experiences and strategies of the feminist and the queer movements around this problematic; breaking chains and expecting backlash. Visibility is not only connected to daily practices but has also played an important role in periods of political fervor such as during revolutions and uprisings.
Zaatari argues that the period of revolutions/uprisings in the region starting in 2010 in Tunisia and until today has contributed to important transformations in how queer and feminist activists organize. We witness at once a “return” to and innovation of social change projects which stand in opposition to earlier practices of the movement in the 80s and 90. This is evident through the strong and daring visibility in the streets, protests, and clashes, through the centrality of storytelling and narration (including documentation and blogging and arts projects), through breaking down of the older organizational structures, and through the insistence on accountability to any organizing structure, organization, or communication methods that reproduces patriarchal, classist, and racist practices (in leftist spaces and parties, civil society organizations, and feminist orgs).
Mernissi’s main commitment has always been to social change. She was a rebellious intellectual, ready to cross borders (academic, geographic, theoretical, etc.) and to utilize different strategies for social change projects; as such opening the door for others to take over the public space and create new frameworks and strategies.
Link to the lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3PerFQqyQE
Fatema Mernissi
Fatema Mernissi was an extraordinary woman. Having spent more than half of her life writing and analyzing Islam and women as well as fighting for gender equality, it should come as no surprise that Mernissi was included in The Guardian’s 2011 global list of “Top 100 Women: Activists and Campaigners.”
Fatema Mernissi was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1940. She was a writer, sociologist, and feminist activist whose books reached a broad regional and international audience and were translated to many languages. Mernissi studied political science at Sorbonne University in France before moving to Brandeis University in the United States where she received her doctorate in sociology in 1973 after completing her dissertation: “Beyond the Veil: Sex as Social Engineering”. In the 1980s she became a lecturer at the Mohammed V University in Rabat.
Mernissi was a prolific writer, publishing books that received international acclaim, including “Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World”; “The Veil and the Male Elite; A Feminist Interpretation of Islam”; “Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems”; “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood”, etc.
In addition to her academic work, Mernissi was known for her activism for women’s rights. She conducted interviews in the late 1970s and 1980s to map prevailing attitudes towards women and work. She did sociological research for UNESCO and the ILO.
Mernissi published a number of articles and papers that had major impact within and beyond her homeland, in the Arab region and the whole world. However, this success was preceded by a ban on her writings in some Arab countries due to her progressive ideas and the audacity of her discourses. This ban led her to publish her first book “Woman in the Muslim Unconscious” (1982) in France under the pseudonym “Fatna Ait El Sabbah.” The ban was eventually lifted and she was able to publish under her real name. She wrote “The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Islam”, which was received with both praise and criticism.
In his article “Fatema Mernissi… The wings of women’s ‘reality’ with which she flew to the dream”, the journalist Karim El Hani said “Fatema Mernissi is a Moroccan woman who dedicated her life to sociology and women’s rights. She weaved together her understanding of reality and tradition to demonstrate how patriarchy limits women’s effective engagement in Arab and Muslim societies.” (Marayana 5 September 2019).
Mernissi received a number of international honors and awards, most notably the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2003, and the Dutch Erasmus Prize which was awarded at a conference organized in 2004 under the theme of “Religion and Modernity.”
In 2016, after her death, a new Chair at the Mohammed V University in Rabat was named after her; and since then, two additional chairs have been established in Mexico City and Brussels.
Fatema Mernissi passed away on November 30, 2015, leaving behind a great legacy and a greater intellectual wealth, which would immortalize her as one of the eminent thinkers and writers of the Maghreb and the Arab region.
Video
The ACSS produced a short video briefly narrating Mernissi’s life.
Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eyxkSYhPhM
.كما أصدر المجلس فيديو قصيرًا بعنوان “فاطمة المرنيسي: السيرة والمسيرة” يختصر من خلاله سيرة المكرَّمة وإرثها الفكري
Booklet on the three Lectures (Arabic, English and French):
http://www.theacss.org/uploads/cke_documents/ACSS-Fatema-Mernissi—Booklet-2021.pdf
Fatema Mernissi was an extraordinary woman. Having spent more than half of her life writing and analyzing Islam and women as well as fighting for gender equality, it should come as no surprise that Mernissi was included in The Guardian’s 2011 global list of “Top 100 Women: Activists and Campaigners.”
Fatema Mernissi was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1940. She was a writer, sociologist, and feminist activist whose books reached a broad regional and international audience and were translated to many languages. Mernissi studied political science at Sorbonne University in France before moving to Brandeis University in the United States where she received her doctorate in sociology in 1973 after completing her dissertation: “Beyond the Veil: Sex as Social Engineering”. In the 1980s she became a lecturer at the Mohammed V University in Rabat.
Mernissi was a prolific writer, publishing books that received international acclaim, including “Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World”; “The Veil and the Male Elite; A Feminist Interpretation of Islam”; “Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems”; “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood”, etc.
In addition to her academic work, Mernissi was known for her activism for women’s rights. She conducted interviews in the late 1970s and 1980s to map prevailing attitudes towards women and work. She did sociological research for UNESCO and the ILO.
Mernissi published a number of articles and papers that had major impact within and beyond her homeland, in the Arab region and the whole world. However, this success was preceded by a ban on her writings in some Arab countries due to her progressive ideas and the audacity of her discourses. This ban led her to publish her first book “Woman in the Muslim Unconscious” (1982) in France under the pseudonym “Fatna Ait El Sabbah.” The ban was eventually lifted and she was able to publish under her real name. She wrote “The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Islam”, which was received with both praise and criticism.
In his article “Fatema Mernissi… The wings of women’s ‘reality’ with which she flew to the dream”, the journalist Karim El Hani said “Fatema Mernissi is a Moroccan woman who dedicated her life to sociology and women’s rights. She weaved together her understanding of reality and tradition to demonstrate how patriarchy limits women’s effective engagement in Arab and Muslim societies.” (Marayana 5 September 2019).
Mernissi received a number of international honors and awards, most notably the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2003, and the Dutch Erasmus Prize which was awarded at a conference organized in 2004 under the theme of “Religion and Modernity.”
In 2016, after her death, a new Chair at the Mohammed V University in Rabat was named after her; and since then, two additional chairs have been established in Mexico City and Brussels.
Fatema Mernissi passed away on November 30, 2015, leaving behind a great legacy and a greater intellectual wealth, which would immortalize her as one of the eminent thinkers and writers of the Maghreb and the Arab region.