Moroccan - Activist | September 27, 1940 - November 30, 2015
If there is one thing that the women and men of the late 20th century who have an awareness and enjoyment of history can be sure of, it is that Islam was not sent from Heaven to foster egotism and mediocrity.
Fatema Mernissi
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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.
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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. I am intelligent enough to be critical towards the West and take what I need and reject what is bad for me.
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Sharia law does not exist in the Koran. It was created by man.
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You find in the Koran hundreds of verses to support women's rights, and perhaps four or five that do not.
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So much of Islam is Judeo-Christianity. It's impossible to divorce them. Islam is 600 years after Christ. Thousands of years after Judaism. Christ, Moses, Abraham - they are all in the Koran.
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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?'
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No man could have accepted me because I am too rebellious. It would have been catastrophe. I am too into my own thing.
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I go to the hamam and put henna on my skin and hair. Even when I go to New York, I let the shower run hot to create a steam hamam at my hotel. But when I finish with the bath, I put on expensive French creams.
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In Morocco, for a woman to earn her own living is the essential concern.
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The modern Muslim state has never presented itself as secular. Muslim nationalist forces, trapped by a militant and colonialist West unable to share or export its humanism, were driven to build up a rampart, to entrench themselves within the past.
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Growing up, I was taught that a woman should lower her gaze so that men could never know her thoughts. The so-called modesty of Arab women is, in fact, a war tactic.
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