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Fatima Mernissi. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. Reading, Ma. Addison-Wesley. 1994. 242 pages. $23. ISBN 0201626497.
The word harem--like veil--has long served to enclose Arab and other predominantly Muslim societies in Euro-American stereotyping. Although recent scholarship has attempted the dispassionate analysis of "the harem" within specific historical and discursive contexts, popularly the word still connotes a vision of "the East" as exotica and erotica. Now the Moroccan feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi offers a re-vision of the harem that is both passionate and analytical, and wonderful to read.
As autobiography, Dreams of Trespass could be subtitled The Making of a Feminist," for its prescient young narrator, growing up in an aristocratic urban traditional household, is weaned on the desires of her...