This "wonderful and enchanting" memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl's life in her family's French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review). "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth -- women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.

This "wonderful and enchanting" memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl's life in her family's French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review). "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth -- women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.

This "wonderful and enchanting" memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl's life in her family's French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review). "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth -- women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of the work of Fatima Mernissi. Mernissi is considered to be one of the major figures in Feminist thought for both Morocco and Muslim society in general. This work discusses Mernissi's intellectual trajectory from 'secular' to 'Islamic' feminism in order to trace the evolution of so-called Islamic feminist theory. The book also engages critically with the work of other Muslim feminists, using frameworks and approaches developed in the works of Muslim reformist thinkers, namely Mohammed Arkoun and Nasr Abu Zaid, with the aim of engaging the theorization of this emerging Feminism.

Examining late twentieth-century autobiographical writing by Arab women novelists, poets, and artists, this essay collection explores the ways in which Arab women have portrayed and created their identities within differing social environments. The collection goes well beyond dismantling standard notions of Arab female subservience, exploring the many ways Arab women writers have learned to speak to each other, to their readers, and to the world at large. Drawing from a rich body of literature, the essays attest to the surprisingly lively and committed roles Arab women play in varied geographic regions, at home and abroad. These recent writings assess how the interplay between individual, private, ethnic identity and the collective, public, global world of politics has impacted Arab women’s rights.

This volume collects some of the best lectures at the African Literature Association's 25th annual conference held in 1999. The conference brought together for the first time a large number of scholars, creative writers and artists from Northern Africa and their counterparts from Sub- Saharan Africa. The conference and this collection highlight the inspiring and stimulating dialogue between two literary and cultural areas that have often been artificially compartmentalised. The essays draw suprising connections and illustrate the breadth and dynamism of African literature.

The chapters in Feminist Politics contest some of the prevailing conceptualizations of identity and difference, as well as the functions of these concepts in feminist political discourse and praxis. Doing so, they amply demonstrate that issues of identity and difference have a central place in contemporary feminist scholarship. The authors of these chapters have worked to develop new ways of understanding and living out differences that will both preserve and celebrate them while also fostering the necessary conditions for opening dialogue and forming new coalitions. These efforts intend to engender imaginative new Strategies for the personal, spiritual, and sociopolitical changes that will enable human growth, well-being, and flourishing. While the focus of the work represented here is understandably on women, the issues that are raised are given additional urgency-explicitly in some of the chapters and implicitly in others-by the situation of their concerns in the context of the world created by the Bush administration. Because that administration has foregrounded issues of identity and difference in ways that are not only inhumane and often inaccurate, but also dangerous for all of us, the new ways of thinking and acting that are proposed here have a much broader application. Thus, these chapters truly invite not only feminists but all people to move in new directions. Taken as a whole, this volume represents cutting-edge thinking from an international perspective in these important and pressing areas for feminist research and praxis. Book jacket.