Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
Author: Fatema Mernissi
Genres: {'Nonfiction', 'Feminism', 'Memoir', 'Biography', 'Africa', 'Morocco', 'History'}

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.