Dreams of trespass
Subtitle: tales of a harem girlhood
By: Fatima Mernissi ; photographs by Ruth V. Ward.
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Reading, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
Subjects: Mernissi, Fatima -- Childhood and youth; Muslim women -- Morocco -- Biography; Morocco -- Social life and customs
Description: "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich narrative. With a magical tale-spinner's words, this world-renowned scholar, one of the most eloquent voices of feminism in the Muslim world, weaves her own memories with dreams and fantasies of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her childhood.

It is the magic of recreating a world of one's own, navigating beyond the frontiers, that Mernissi describes with great wit and color. In a book as evocative as anything found in A Thousand and One Nights, she writes of the politics of seduction and the harem as metaphor. Peopled with marvelous, wise, and funny women - all individualists - Dreams of Trespass is a provocative book whose rewards go far.