Fatema Mernissi

Moroccan feminist sociologist and author whose memoir Dreams of Trespass gave Western readers their most intimate portrait of traditional harem life in Fez.

Fatema Mernissi was born in Fez, Morocco in 1940, the daughter of a family that lived in a traditional domestic harem — not a harem of concubines, as Western fantasy imagines, but a domestic arrangement in which women lived in an entirely separate, female-controlled domestic world. She was educated in Fez and Rabat, then at the Sorbonne and Brandeis University, where she received a PhD in sociology.

She taught at Muhammad V University in Rabat and became one of the most important feminist intellectuals in the Arab world, arguing for a feminist reading of Islamic texts and challenging the interpretation of veiling and female seclusion. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994) was her most widely read work in the West — an autobiographical account of her childhood in the Fez harem that treated the domestic world she grew up in with complexity and affection rather than simple condemnation.

She received the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters in 2003. She died in Rabat in 2015.