Fatema Mernissi's Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems PDF

By Fatema Mernissi

ISBN-10: 0743422538

ISBN-13: 9780743422536

Throughout my youth, my grandmother Yasmina, who used to be illiterate and grew up in a harem, repeated that to go back and forth is the way to research and to empower your self. "When a lady comes to a decision to exploit her wings, she takes large risks," she might inform me, yet she used to be confident that should you didn't use them, it hurt....

So recollects Fatema Mernissi on the outset of her enthralling new e-book. Of the entire classes she discovered from her grandmother — whose domestic was once, finally, one of those criminal — the main crucial used to be that the chance to go obstacles was once a sacred privilege. certainly, in trips either actual and psychological, Mernissi has spent nearly all of her existence touring — made up our minds to "use her wings" and to give up her gender's alleged legacy of powerlessness.

Bursting with the energy of Mernissi's character and of her wealthy history, Scheherazade is going West finds the author's special stories as a liberated, self reliant Moroccan lady confronted with the peculiarities and unforeseen encroachments of Western tradition. Her frequently excellent discoveries concerning the stipulations of and attitudes towards ladies around the globe — and the exquisitely embroidered amalgam of clear-eyed autobiography and spectacular meta-fiction through which she relates these diverse discoveries — upload as much as a deliciously wry, engagingly cosmopolitan, and deeply penetrating narrative.
In her earlier bestselling works, Mernissi — well known because the world's maximum dwelling Koranic student and Islamic sociologist — has shed extraordinary mild at the lives of ladies within the center East. Now, as a author and scholarly veteran of the high-wire act of straddling disparate societies, she trains her eyes at the lady tradition of the West.

For her book's encouraged relevant metaphor, Mernissi turns to the traditional Islamic culture of oral storytelling, illuminating her grandmother's feminized, subversive, and hugely erotic tackle Scheherazade's wife-preserving stories from The Arabian Nights — after which ingeniously employing them to her personal lyrically adorned own narrative. Interwoven with bright ruminations on her youth, her schooling, and her numerous foreign travels are the author's piquant musings on more than a few deeply embedded societal stipulations that upload up, Mernissi argues, to a veritable "Western harem."

A provocative and energetic problem to the typical assumption that girls have it lots greater within the West than anyplace else on this planet, Mernissi's booklet is an entrancing and well timed examine the way in which we are living right here and now. via inspiring us to reassess even the main usual points of our tradition with clean eyes and a hearty dose of suspicion, Scheherazade is going West deals an invigorating, candid, and wonderful new point of view at the subject matters and concepts to which Betty Friedan first became us on approximately 40 years in the past.