Fatima Mernissi
![Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World Fatima Mernissi]( "Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World Fatima Mernissi")
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
A Disorganized Rant 2 out of 5 stars.
15 of 20 people found this review helpful.
The Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi is frequently upheld as the Muslim world's leading feminist thinker. Her book 'Beyond the Veil' has become standard college-reading for most people investigating the subject of women's rights in the Islamic tradition. This book, however, 'Islam and Democracy,' is a disorganized rant.One suspects that many of these "chapters" were intended for individual essays, or perhaps were rushed into publication before they could take coherent shape as a book. Mernissi is all over the place. In the expanse of five or six pages she might make great sweeping claims about the Muslim sense of powerlessness, then claim that that powerlessness is not universal at all, but rather uniquely female, then blame Muslim despots for tyrannizing their people and preventing democracy, then blame the west for attacking and trying to overthrow Muslim despots (i.e., Saddam Hussein.) Then a few pages later she might drag out apocryphal stores of the assassination of medieval Caliphs, to demonstrate that Muslims leaders have never been strong enough!
Mernissi lavishes mythology upon fact, to the point where it is impossible to tell whether or not her use of examples is to be trusted. Despite the scientific-sounding nature of its title, 'Islam and Democracy' reads more like literary criticism: an argument about the meanings of fictions, which are then applied to the world and linked by some grand theory which - lo and behold - can be `proven' by using more fiction as examples. It should not be surprising to find that excerpts from the Arabian Nights recur over and over again in her text.
Equally troubling is the fact that her main critique of Islam centers upon what she sees as its lack of respect for individual creativity and freedom - its adhesion to a slavish and unquestioning belief in scripture, yet she samples liberally from the Hadith - stories about the life of Muhammad and the early Muslims that even many Imams are skeptical of. In other words, she expects the reader to believe that her selection of scripture disproves other peoples' selections of scripture. And she can't even get them all straight: relating the story of an early Muslim martyr, she claims in one sentence that he bore his torture "and didn't utter a word" (20), and two sentences later, claims he was chanting the whole time.
In spite of all this, reading this book is still an education, of sorts. Much of this is due to the translation skills of Mary Jo Lakeland, who gives us a tour de force of Arabic etymology, and does great justice to the complex layers of meaning of this language, whose root words are so flexible and susceptible to subtle manipulation. If you would like to get a sense - albeit a dreadfully confused sense - of where one pole of Muslim critical theory stood in the 1990s, then this could be a useful text. If, however, you were hoping to learn something substantial about Islam and Democracy, you will be disappointed.
Editorial Review:
Is Islam compatible with democracy? Must fundamentalists win out in the Middle East? The groundbreaking Islam and Democracy serves as a guide to the players—from feminists to fundamentalists—moving the pieces on the rather grim Muslim chessboard, and raises provocative questions about the possibilities for democracy and human rights in the Islamic world.
