The Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad (CCME) organised, on Saturday, April 19, 2025, at the International Book and Publishing Fair (SIEL) in Rabat, a presentation of the book “Fatema Mernissi for Our Times”, compiling the works of an international group of researchers and edited by Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Took part to the event: Rabéa Naciri, Moroccan feminist activist and expert on gender and women’s rights, Layla Chaouni, a Moroccan publisher and feminist, and Zakia Salime, a professor at Rutgers University in the United States.The participants, shared their relationship with the author, while examining her thought in light of contemporary challenges .
“Fatema Mernissi for Our Times” pays tribute to the sociologist’s works, which profoundly influenced feminist and civic activism in Muslim and Arab societies and even beyond. Moderating this roundtable, Ms Hayat Zirari, Professor of Social Anthropology at Hassan II University in Casablanca, stated that the book “is merely a pretext to recall the journey of this committed intellectual and cultural mediator with multiple voices, who knew how to combine knowledge, reflection, and action.”
Having known her for over 35 years, Layla Chaouni, like Fatema Mernissi, was always concerned with making writing and reading accessible to all, as these forms of expression “must not be a privilege but a common good.” As she knew her, “she overflowed with ideas and energy and knew how to rally others around her, with a deep conviction that the book is a tool of emancipation, especially for women.”
She was also dedicated to transmitting the power of writing, “a peaceful weapon of power capable of changing the world,” and brought together mothers, teachers, former prisoners, and unsung activists in workshops to tell their stories. After September 11, we created the “Islam and Humanism” collection in order to give voice to an enlightened and humanist Islam, as “Fatema Mernissi always wanted to look at events from a different angle than what made the news.”
Rabéa Naciri, for her part, talked about Fatema Mernissi’s strength “knowing how to position herself between two worlds, a scholarly world and an activist world, without one overshadowing the other.” As an academic, “she was a pioneer in deconstructing patriarchal interpretations of Muslim sources and heritage,” and this “greatly helped us as feminist activists and gave us courage.”
Ms Naciri added, she (Fatima Mernssi) wanted “all these women she encouraged to write, to emerge from invisibility and know that everything they experience matters.”
Zakia Salime, one of the co-authors of “Fatema Mernissi for Our Times”, also author of “Between Feminism and Islam” published in 2011 and several works on women’s rights, says she “still draws inspiration from Fatema Mernissi’s thought” and “owes a great deal to the spaces she created.” She read “orientalists from the perspective of Islamic rationality and embraced the fact that a feminist reading can also be done within the framework of Islam.”
Her books were an answer to specific “contexts”, such as “the rise of conservatism, the Iraq War,” she “wrote in all circumstances and pushes us to write as well,” she concluded.
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