Mernissi Women Quotes & Sayings

By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces Immanuel Kant's nineteenth-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a woman looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity. — Fatema Mernissi

Please sign up for my e-newsletter at my blogs or web sites. Thank you. — Cynthianna

12This is what our Scriptures come to teach: in everything, in every circumstance, do to others as you would have them do to you. — Anonymous

The Islam of Muhammad banished the idea of supervision, of a police system of control. This explains the absence of clergy in Islam and the encouraging of all Muslims to get involved in understanding the written word. Individual responsibility came into play to balance the weight of aristocratic control, finally making it ineffective in an umma of believers whose behavior followed precise, internalized rules. Recognizing in women an inalienable will fitted into this scheme of making everyone individually responsible. — Fatema Mernissi

Nature is woman's best friend,' she [Yasmina] often said. 'If you're having troubles, you just swim in the water, stretch out in a field, or look up at the stars. That's how a woman cures her fears'. — Fatema Mernissi

I want to show another side of Middle Easterners. My hope is that I would be able to play a variety of parts, and not always be the guy with the accent. — Maz Jobrani

Yes," sighed Anne, "we shall, indeed, be known to be related to them!" then — Jane Austen

The real mistake of women was to let the memoir, the collective, the history, space of producing history - to let it in the hands of men. — Fatema Mernissi

What a strange fate for Muslim memory, to be called upon in order to censure and punish! What a strange memory, where even dead men and women do not escape attempts at assassination, if by chance they threaten to raise the hijab that covers the mediocrity and servility that is presented to us as tradition. How did the tradition succeed in transforming the Muslim woman into that submissive, marginal creature who buries herself and only goes out into the world timidly and huddled in her veils? Why does the Muslim man need such a mutilated companion? — Fatema Mernissi

If you would know Christ at all, you must go to Him as a sinful man, or you are shut out from Him altogether. — Alexander MacLaren

Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eye of its beholder turn the educated modern Western women into a harem slave. — Fatema Mernissi

The next morning, for the first time, Jonas did not take his pill. Something within him, something that had grown there through the memories, told him to throw the pill away. — Lois Lowry

Give us being and feeling over having any day. — Mireille Guiliano

There are many ways to be beautiful. Fighting, swearing, and ignoring tradition could make a women irresistible. — Fatema Mernissi

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. — Fatema Mernissi

Once I asked Mina why she danced so smoothly while most of the other women made abrupt, jerky movements, and she said that many of the women confused liberation with agitation. 'Some ladies are angry with their lives,' she said 'and so even their dance becomes an expression of that.' Angry women are hostages of their anger. They cannot escape it and set themselves free, which is indeed a sad fate. The worst of prisons is a self-created one. (p.162) — Fatema Mernissi