Minoo Moallem and Paola Bacchetta, eds., Fatema Mernissi for Our Times (Syracuse University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Minoo Moallem and Paola Bacchetta (MM & PB): We began working together on projects related to Fatema Mernissi after her passing in November 2015. We wanted to ensure that Mernissi’s many contributions would not be forgotten. The first step was an international feminist conference on Mernissi, which we co-organized at UC Berkeley, titled “Fatema Mernissi for Our Times.” The conference aimed to pay homage to Mernissi and to bring her numerous contributions in Arabic, English, and French into conversation with feminist politics at this particular juncture. Most chapters in the book were based on the author’s presentations at the conference. However, we decided to invite a few more scholars to join us and contribute to the anthology. The primary motivation was to bring together an international, multidisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on Fatema Mernissi’s legacy and to demonstrate how relevant her work, from the earliest to her death, remains for us today.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MM & PB: The chapters address a broad array of political, literary, epistemic, cultural, filmic, social, and economic questions. They reflect the interdisciplinarity of the authors. They are arranged under the following four rubrics: Epistemic Interventions; Family and Kinship; Feminism and Islam; and Mernissian Critiques of Coloniality, Orientalism, and Capitalism.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MM & PB: Both of us met Mernissi during out graduate studies.
MM: I first encountered her in Montreal, where Mernissi invited me to join her for an interview at Harvard University. Since then, I continued to engage with Mernissi’s work in my scholarship, focusing on Islam, the Middle East, and Iran, as well as a course I designed in 1994, which I still teaches today.
PB: I first encountered Mernissi’s work as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris and as an activist in feminist, anti-racism, and pro-immigration movements. For me, Mernissi’s writing came to constitute an essential part of an early intellectual foundation for critiquing what today could be called colonial-racialized-sexist epistemic violence and annihilation. I have continued to engage with Mernissi’s work to present.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MM & PB: We hope that Fatema Mernissi For Our Times will be read and mobilized across all generations, but especially by a younger and future generation of scholars and activists. As the book is interdisciplinary and the chapter authors, situated in various international locations, write from within a range of distinct intellectual formations, we hope readers can learn from the book as we did in the process of bringing these scholars together and listening to them. We also hope that the book can inspire future generations to pursue the kinds of questions that Mernissi raised and engaged with, regardless of whether they agree with her or not, and that her work will continue to incite yet further questions for our times and times to come.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MM: For a decade, I have been working on a book manuscript that I provisionally call Filmic Archive, National Memory, and the Iran-Iraq War Movies. Thus far, I have published one chapter in the Handbook on Asian Cinema and a second new chapter in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. I am also working on another project, titled “Tactility, Cathartic Rhythms, and Wandering Imagination in Carpet-inspired Art,” which focuses on the legacies of weaving and carpet-inspired art by engaging with artists from various parts of the world. I ask how and in what ways these artists decolonize the field of art and modernist art by bringing other venues into the art world. I have also begun collecting data on “Gender and the Politics of Petroleum,” employing a feminist cultural studies approach to examine the colonial and postcolonial history of petroleum in the Middle East.
PB: I am working on a book tentatively titled Colonialisms and Sexualities. Across its four chapters it engages, respectively, with sexualities in colonial discourse, colonial praxis, their effects today, and finally, feminist and queer modes of oppositional and nonoppositional resistance to the effects of colonial sexualities, and practices of what I call freedom-exigent transformation. The geopolitical contexts for this book project are the United States; France and some of its ex-colonies (Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, Cameroon); Italy and east Africa; Britain and India; Brazil and its internal relations to Amazonia and Bahia, and to some extent Belgium and what is now called the Republic of Congo. I am especially interested in transnational alignments of colonizers beyond what otherwise can look like a particular binary situation of colonizer and colonized. I am also interested in re-thinking how we might redefine both sexualities and colonialisms. Of course, Mernissi’s writing is extremely relevant here. She shows up quite clearly, for example, in my book project’s last chapter on oppositional and nonoppositional forms of resistance, and transformation. In rereading her work, I became acutely aware of how she articulates or infers her reflections on these important areas across her many studies of rural women and of Moroccan society. For example, I think that what we now call nonoppositional resistance was already a main feature of her co-authored film script (with Jalil Bennani and Hamid Benani) about rural women’s spirit possession, which Minoo and I included in our co-edited book.
Excerpts from the book
From the Introduction
Mernissi consistently critiques the Moroccan modernist and male literary elite and their depiction of women's bodies. Yet she also challenges Western democracies for continuing to invest in modern forms of patriarchy and the stereotypical and Orientalist ideas of Arab men and women. To challenge both currents and Muslim patriarchal systems, she crosses the boundaries of the public and the private as well as the global and local to show how both individual and collective forms of violence are exercised against women. As a feminist, Mernissi did not limit herself to an analytical approach to patriarchy but sought to uncover how women could liberate themselves from the disciplinary forces of colonialism and patriarchal orders and borders. […]
Mernissi's critique of Western democracies and Arabo-Islamic patriarchies provides a framework for thinking about feminist politics that brings the geopolitical into conversation with feminist theory and practice in everyday life.
[…] From Zakia Salime (page 23):
How to condense the many lives of Fatema Mernissi in one single narrative about her intellectual legacy? How to do justice to her incredibly inspiring and rich theoretical and methodological contributions without recalling the moments, the spaces, and the lives she profoundly shaped and touched? By "Many Lives" in my title I point to the plural ways in which Fatema Mernissi affected not only feminist knowledge production and feminist practice. I would need to recall the counterspaces she created at the fringes of public academia and informal politics. I would need to rethink her work and commitment to feminist epistemology at the interstice of scholarly work and activist involvement. The many lives of Fatema Mernissi are also about long-lasting friendships, numerous communities of work, research collectivities, food, humor, happiness, and hope.
[…] From Fatima Ait Ben Lmamdani (page 167):
As a sociologist, a novelist, a fervent activist, and a woman, across all her writing, talks, and interviews, Fatema Mernissi tried to trespass borders imposed by the majority and to blur established disciplinary lines. Whether in her research on working-class Moroccan women (Mernissi 1966) or her novels that highlight Moroccan women's resistance strategies (Mernissi 1994, 1996) or her courageous questioning of the sacred texts of Muslim canonical law (Mernissi [1992] 2010), or her activism on behalf of women, Fatema Mernissi deeply influenced contemporary and future feminist research and women's struggles.