Best quotes by Fatema Mernissi on Women

Checkout quotes by Fatema Mernissi on Women

• ‟ If women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Quran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ If there is one thing that the women and men of the late 20th century who have an awareness and enjoyment of history can be sure of, it is that Islam was not sent from Heaven to foster egotism and mediocrity.

  - 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
  

• ‟ There has been a terrible hemorrhage of educated women to the West where they can flourish. I understand, but it is terrible. We must stay home.

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ You find in the Koran hundreds of verses to support women's rights, and perhaps four or five that do not.

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ Educated women armed with computers have defeated extremists by denying them a monopoly to define cultural identity and interpret religious texts. No extremist can say that women are inferior to men without being made a laughingstock on Al Jazeera. Islam insisted on equality between everyone.

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ Growing up, I was taught that a woman should lower her gaze so that men could never know her thoughts. The so-called modesty of Arab women is, in fact, a war tactic.

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ While Muslim men describe themselves as insecure in their harems, real or imagined, Westerners describe themselves as self-assured heroes with no fears of women. The tragic dimension so present in Muslim harems - fear of women and male self-doubt - is missing in the Western harem.

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ The waves of religion based on terrorism in the 1990s are based on the tormented response of a mutilated Muslim society whose progressive forces have been savagely emasculated. Why on earth is the Arab world so hostile to women? Why can it not see women as a force for development?

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ Now that Arab women are pouring into the streets by the million, men discover with dismay that they, not women, were the captives of the harem dream.

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ Women are builders of civil society. We are the ones who are going to build it. You know why? We have no choice. Either you shut up, and you are humiliated, or you do what I'm doing. You scream.

  - Fatema Mernissi
  

• ‟ To understand the fanatic rejection of women's liberation in the Muslim world, one has to take into account the time factor. Most of us educated women have illiterate mothers. The conservative wave against women in the Muslim world is a defense mechanism against profound changes in both sex roles and the touchy subject of sexual identity.

  - Fatema Mernissi