One cannot understand what's happening to women in the Middle East if they don't realize that the mothers are a strong, progressive force. The mothers push the daughters to get out of the harem, to get the education, to achieve what they could not even dream of.

Fatema Mernissi

Categorized in : Dream Mother Daughter

The most precious gift God gave humans is reason. Its best use is the search for knowledge. To know the human environment, to know the earth and galaxies, is to know God. Knowledge (science) is the best form of prayer.

Fatema Mernissi

use prayer religion

The real mistake of women was to let the memoir, the collective, the history, space of producing history - to let it in the hands of men.

Fatema Mernissi

real mistake men

By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces Immanuel Kant's nineteenth-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a woman looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.

Fatema Mernissi

wall beautiful children

Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible that other people are good, that you can awaken their generosity and their desire to do better.

Fatema Mernissi

communication prayer believe

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'.

Fatema Mernissi

stars nature water

I, as a Muslim woman living in 1993, I want to have two things - the mosque and the satellite, both at the same time. And no one can mutilate me by telling me I cannot have the mosque or the Koran.

Fatema Mernissi

mosques want two

Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eye of its beholder turn the educated modern Western women into a harem slave.

Fatema Mernissi

frozen slave eye

I am intelligent enough to be critical towards the West and take what I need and reject what is bad for me.

Fatema Mernissi

intelligent west needs

Maturity is when you start feeling the motion of zaman (time) as if it is a sensuous caress. p.216

Fatema Mernissi

caress maturity feelings

Morocco is such a beautiful place. It's incredibly beautiful. And also it is captivating place because for a writer, you feel that you make impact.

Fatema Mernissi

morocco impact beautiful

Pessimism is the luxury of the powerful.

Fatema Mernissi

pessimism luxury powerful

Someone else is going to read for me or go at my place to the mosque, and/or to tell me you shouldn't take anything from the West because the West is the enemy and so on. It is to me to decide.

Fatema Mernissi

mosques west enemy

Morocco is such a beautiful place. It's incredibly beautiful. And also it is captivating place because for a writer, you feel that you make impact. I mean, when I write something in the press, the day after in the fish market, people will be discussing it.

Fatema Mernissi

day you beautiful people

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.

Fatema Mernissi

economic political power religion

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.

Fatema Mernissi

women conflict tradition men

Consumerist ads brainwash us into individualist and egotistic self-love.

Fatema Mernissi

individualist self-love us ads

The woman with dark hair, wide hips, and a few extra pounds has always been the essence of beauty in Morocco.

Fatema Mernissi

woman dark hair beauty

To me, the Quran is a research book.

Fatema Mernissi

me research book

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.

Fatema Mernissi

woman walk look life

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?'

Fatema Mernissi

i-am me you girl