Fatima Mernissi's "The Veil and the Male Elite"

Mernissi, Fatima. Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. (Also titled The Veil And The Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation Of Women's Rights In Islam: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam)

Fatima Mernissi is a Moroccan writer and sociologist, born into a middle-class family in 1940. She studied political science at the Sorbonne and earned her doctorate from Brandeis University in 1957. She is popularly noted as an “Islamic feminist” because of her deep interest and studies in women’s roles in Islam, and she is concerned with the historical development of Islamic thought and how it should be viewed in modern times. Her other works include Dreams of Trespass: Dreams of a Harem Girlhood, Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory, Forgotten Queens of Islam, and Doing Daily Battle.

In Women and Islam, Mernissi argues that the reason women’s rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men is not because of the Quran; it is because these rights contradict the interest of the male elite. She believes that religious texts are often manipulated, either for ideological advantage or material advantage. Since many of the original teachings of the Prophet have been manipulated by misogynists, Mernissi explicates, Muslims must be careful when accepting certain anti-women hadith as authentic. Mernissi also challenges the idea of hadiths accepted as “authentic” by Al-Bukhari, as well as modern scholars today, without the inclusion of Aisha’s or the Prophet’s other wives’ rebuttal to those hadiths. Citing examples of “rebellious” women like Sukayna, granddaughter of Caliph Ali who was divorced at least four times and who fought with her husbands to prevent them from practicing polygamy, Mernissi points out that Muslims are suffering from amnesia and need a reminder about their past, a past in which women were respected for their intellect and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with men, as did the Prophet’s wives Aisha and Umm Salama, as well as his great-granddaughter Sukayna.