Fatema Mernissi

Sociologist

1940-09-27 – 2015-11-30

Fatema Mernissi was a Moroccan sociologist and writer known for her work on gender, Islam, and social change. Her scholarship and essays influenced discussions on women"s rights in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Quotes by Fatema Mernissi

When you are in trouble, you need to put all your energies into thinking that there is a way out. Then, the bottom, the dark hole, becomes just a springboard from which you can leap so high that your head might hit a cloud.
Read quote
There are many ways to be beautiful. Fighting, swearing, and ignoring tradition could make a women irresistible.
Read quote
Nature is woman's best friend,' she [Yasmina] often said. 'If you're having troubles, you just swim in the water, stretch out in a field, or look up at the stars. That's how a woman cures her fears'.
Read quote
But when your situation is hopeless, all you can do is turn the world upside down, transform it according to your wishes, and create anew.
Read quote
But when your situation is hopeless, all you can do is turn the world upside down, transform it according to your wishes, and create anew.
Read quote
Nature is woman's best friend,' she [Yasmina] often said. 'If you're having troubles, you just swim in the water, stretch out in a field, or look up at the stars. That's how a woman cures her fears'.
Read quote
There are many ways to be beautiful. Fighting, swearing, and ignoring tradition could make a women irresistible.
Read quote
When you are in trouble, you need to put all your energies into thinking that there is a way out. Then, the bottom, the dark hole, becomes just a springboard from which you can leap so high that your head might hit a cloud.
Read quote
A woman can walk miles without making one single step forward. As a child born in a harem, I instinctively knew that to live is to open closed doors. To live is to look outside. To live is to step out. Life is trespassing.
Read quote
Growing up, I was taught that a woman should lower her gaze so that men could never know her thoughts. The so-called modesty of Arab women is, in fact, a war tactic.
Read quote
Educated women armed with computers have defeated extremists by denying them a monopoly to define cultural identity and interpret religious texts. No extremist can say that women are inferior to men without being made a laughingstock on Al Jazeera. Islam insisted on equality between everyone.
Read quote
The waves of religion based on terrorism in the 1990s are based on the tormented response of a mutilated Muslim society whose progressive forces have been savagely emasculated. Why on earth is the Arab world so hostile to women? Why can it not see women as a force for development?
Read quote
To understand the fanatic rejection of women's liberation in the Muslim world, one has to take into account the time factor. Most of us educated women have illiterate mothers. The conservative wave against women in the Muslim world is a defense mechanism against profound changes in both sex roles and the touchy subject of sexual identity.
Read quote
If women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Quran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.
Read quote
Since all power from the seventh century on was only legitimated by religion, political forces and economic interests pushed for the fabrication of false traditions.
Read quote
The modern Muslim state has never presented itself as secular. Muslim nationalist forces, trapped by a militant and colonialist West unable to share or export its humanism, were driven to build up a rampart, to entrench themselves within the past.
Read quote
There, they tell me to wear the veil. Here, they are telling me to put my hips in a little girl's skirt, and I am this lovely full woman. You've got this Ph.D. and you're worrying, 'Am I skinny enough?'
Read quote
The Taliban is the Muslim version of the Salem witch trials.
Read quote