Library Weekly

The ASCL's Library Weekly is our library’s weekly spotlight on African people and events. Inspired by the SciHiBlog, this service is based on information retrieved from Wikipedia and Wikidata and is completed with selected titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue.

N.B. The weeklies are not updated and reflect the state of information at a given point in time.

Library Weekly archive

Fatema Mernissi

Fatima Merinissi (Source: Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-4.0) On 30 November 2015, Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist Fatema Mernissi died in Rabat at the age of 75. Her legacy can be greatly attributed to her scholarly and literary contributions to the early Islamic feminist movement. She tackled issues such as Eurocentrism, intersectionality, transnationalism and global feminism in her publications and public lectures.

Fatema Mernissi was born on 27 September 1940 in Fez, Morocco. She grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother along with various female kin and servants. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the French protectorate. In 1957, she studied political science at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at Brandeis University in the US, where she gained her doctorate in 1974.

She returned to work at the Mohammed V University in Rabat and taught at the Faculté des Lettres between 1974 and 1981 on subjects such as methodology, family sociology and psychosociology. Further, she was a research scholar at the University Institute for Scientific Research at the same university.

Mernissi's 'Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society' was written for her PhD thesis and later published as a book which recognizes the power of Muslim women in relation to the Islamic faith. Mernissi is known for her sociopolitical approaches towards discussing gender and sexual identities, specifically those in Morocco and other Muslim countries.

(Source: Wikpedia)