RABAT, Morocco: Regardless of what she is writing about – whether it's women's rights in the Arab world, the fear of Islam in the West or cultural globalization – Fatema Mernissi, the Moroccan academic and essayist, succeeds not only in informing people, but also in getting them to think. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages and she has received numerous prestigious international awards for her work, including the European Erasmus Prize and the Spanish Prince of Asturias Prize. Mernissi began her career in a traditional Qur'anic school in Fez, where she was introduced to Islam. “Writing is seduction and seduction is the opposite of violence,” said the author during an interview at her home in the Moroccan capital of Rabat. “I learned that in the Qur'anic school. Why do you think books like the Qur'an and the Bible have been bestsellers for over one thousand years? It's simple: because they seek to seduce the reader through language, not with violence.” Mernissi was raised with the mystical currents of Islam as it is practiced in Morocco. And despite its dedication to tradition, her extended family was foresighted enough to send her to one of the first modern French-Arabic schools in Fez. She eventually worked in England and France, and eventually ended up in the United States, where she received a scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. It was the 1960s, the era of the civil rights movement. The struggle of the women's movement in the United States for equal rights and sexual self-determination taught the young sociologist from Morocco that the oppression of women was not specific to the Arab world alone. Nevertheless, Mernissi discovered that she was considered particularly disadvantaged because of her North African and Muslim origins. Mernissi wanted to get to the bottom of these distorted mutual perceptions and so wrote her doctoral thesis on gender and women in the East and West. Her dissertation, Beyond the Veil, which was published in 1975, was translated into 30 languages. It is now considered a standard work of intercultural gender research from the United States to Malaysia. Another of Mernissi's works, The Veil and the Male Elite, published in France in 1987, is also considered a classic. The central theory of the book is that the Qur'an itself does not actually justify the oppression of women. The misogyny actually comes from male religious scholars who, over the course of a thousand years, have interpreted the Qur'an as they see fit and misused it to oppress women. The Veil and the Male Elite was translated into numerous languages as well and published around the world. In Morocco, however, it was only available under-the-counter for many years. “I had stolen the show from the conservative religious scholars and the powers that be,” explains Mernissi. “Just imagine you are living in an absolute monarchy whose claim to power is rooted in Islam. Then along comes a woman and claims that anyone who is opposed to the freedom of the individual is opposed to the Prophet Muhammad. Hassan II's police state was not going to stand for that.” That being said, Mernissi was able to work undisturbed in Morocco. She actively used her name and her position to support democratic initiatives. Since the end of the 1980s, her preferred means of doing so has been through writing workshops with independent authors' collectives. Several of these workshops under Mernissi's leadership led to ground-breaking publications: victims of torture wrote of the torment in their souls, human rights activists denounced the sexual abuse of school children, civic initiatives in southern Morocco reported on grassroots democracy and carpet weavers wrote about their dreams. By now, a new generation that is more interested in the Internet than in books is emerging in Morocco. The writing workshops, however, are still in demand and Mernissi follows social media with great interest. She assumes that YouTube, Twitter and the like will lead to more democracy in Arab countries in the long run, because the powers that be will no longer have a monopoly on the most important resources: communication and information. ### * Martina Sabra is a freelance writer. This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from Qantara.de. The full text can be found at www.qantara.de. Source: Qantara.de, 20 October 2010, www.qantara.de BM
