Fatema Mernissi Quotes About Harem

• 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.

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  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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  Fatema Mernissi

  "Remembering Islamic Feminist Fatema Mernissi". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. December 10, 2015.

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• 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.

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  Fatema Mernissi

  Fatema Mernissi (2001). “Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems”, p.219, Simon and Schuster

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