[In the following review, Kanawati alleges that there are flaws in several of Mernissi's arguments in The Veil and the Male Elite, but overall provides a favorable evaluation of the book.]

After moving toward emancipation for most of the 20th century, many women in the Islamic countries are returning to the veil and are being sent back to the home. Whether this trend is part of a general Islamic revival or part of the so-called fundamentalist movement, the revival of these two customs has become the subject of debate in the media and among both secular and religious groups. Feminists, aware of the earlier struggle that led to education and the rights of women to work and vote, have become very concerned about this reactionary trend and have been trying to grapple with it. However, most feminists usually limit their efforts to asserting that Islam has always given women the right to a public life, and has never meant to impose the veil. Now their assertions are being attacked as counter to Islamic injunctions, and Muslims, both women and men, are anxious to find the “truth.”

Fatima Mernissi, a Muslim, Moroccan sociologist, and a well-known committed feminist has written a book [The Veil and the Male Elite] that is both relevant and timely; it seeks to clarify the ambiguities that appear to shroud women's right in Islam. Through her analysis she tries to understand what lies behind the effort to veil women and send them back to the private realm. Her theory is that Islam is going through an “identity crisis” and that the veil is a symbol of protection; the female body is a “symbolic representation of the community” and therefore “protecting women from change by veiling them and shutting them out of the world has echoes of closing the community to protect it from the West” (p. 99). The obvious response is, why should women be deprived of their hard-earned freedom to satisfy this notion? Is it really the only solution to this “identity crisis”? In the preface she says that “Muslim women can walk in the modern world with pride, knowing that the quest for dignity, democracy, and human rights, for full participation in the political and social affairs of our country, stems from no imported Western values, but is a true part of the Muslim tradition” (p. viii).

But what is this “Muslim tradition”? This is the question she sets out to answer, drawing on Islamic religious sources, and in the process she claims to discover that “it is neither because of the Koran, nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite” (p. ix) that these customs are being revived. This male elite has manipulated the “sacred texts” to fabricate “false traditions.” particularly whenever there has been a need to “legitimate” certain actions or attitudes. “Not only have the sacred texts always been manipulated, but manipulation of them is a structural characteristic of the practice of power in Muslim societies” (pp. 8-9). Mernissi shows how this tradition was distorted to support an image of inequality that had no basis in Islamic law since the Prophet's time, “women had their place as unquestioned partners” in the Islamic “revolution” (p. 11).

The evidence Mernissi uses to convince her readers was analyzed with the help of two Moroccan religious scholars, one a 'alim to guide her readings and explain to her the complexities of Islamic texts, the other a university colleague in Islamic philosophy. She combed through the Qur'an, the hadith, the tafsir, treatises on the causes of the revelations, biographies of the Prophet and his companions, Islamic history, and recent books by Islamic scholars and Western and Arab scholars of Islam. She then placed the religious data she collected in the sociohistorical context of the Prophet's time and analyzed the main concepts and terms as they were then used. She then reinterpreted both the Qur'anic verses and the relevant religious texts, showing how they have been misinterpreted and indicating how meaning is limited in time.

Mernissi builds up a case in favor of women's rights and against the veil, though she acknowledges that some Qur'anic verses argue the other way. These verses she explains away as appearing to protect the Prophet and his wives from the violence of a city in a state of civil war, and then asks if verses proper to times of strife should continue to rule the lives of Muslims today. She points to the dissatisfactions of a Prophet who realizes with regret that the ideal society he envisioned based on equality between the sexes is an impossible ideal, because the society of his time was not yet ripe for the kind of Islam that he had hoped to achieve. To Mernissi, this ideal vision was a sort of plan for the future which it is now time for Islam to realize. To make the point, she claims that the Prophet continued to practice his idealistic notions within his own household, in spite of the verses he wrote against them to appease Islam's early supporters. These included the Prophet's companions, whom the author calls the Muslim “male elite.” It was their attitude, she claims, and not the Prophet's, that Muslim men adopted forever after. Mernissi describes Arab women following their warrior husbands to war and encouraging them in battle, participating in political debates, taking initiatives, leading battles, arguing for their rights, asking the Prophet why God did not mention them in the revealed verses until new verses came down to answer their questions. God heeds women, the Prophet loves and respects them, and even jahiliyya society allows them a remarkable amount of freedom. Mernissi wants to show contemporary Muslim women what they have lost and how restricted the Muslim women of today have become, and what interesting companions and advisers men have lost by reducing their lives in this way.

There are some weaknesses in her arguments. Women did make gains through Islam, including property and inheritance rights and the right to accept or reject a marriage offer; but there is also evidence that Islam imposed restrictions on women's public behavior, including the veil, that had not existed earlier. Early Qur'anic verses give women equality, but later verses undeniably impose male domination. The author argues that the latter are God's way of calming the anger of the male elite, but since Muslims have to follow the Qur'an as God's revelation to his Prophet, verses like these have also to be respected, so the dilemma remains. Though she attacks many hadiths as being misreported, which is acceptable in Islam, Qur'anic verses are God's own words and cannot be doubted. She also opens herself up to criticism by implying that the Prophet ignored God's dicta when she claims that he did not apply them in his own life.

Mernissi conceptualizes the hijab, or veil, as having visual, spatial and ethical aspects. To Mernissi, the imposition of the private—public dichotomy symbolized by the hijab represents male resistance to those demands, an official retreat from the principle of equality (p. 174). Using a sacred-profane dichotomy, the hijab becomes a point of separation between Islam and the West. Using this kind of symbolism. Mernissi creates a unity in her conceptualization of the present and the past, which involves both rejection and an acceptance of the hijab and leads to yet another inconsistency that is rooted in a problem not specific to Mernissi. That problem is the dilemma of the Arab Muslim in the modern world where a world market and communications are imposing a Western model that is not always compatible with Islamic culture. Reflecting the dilemma, Mernissi both attacks the West and admires it, defends Islam and attacks it. She wants to take what is best in the West and inject it into Islam, yet realizes the inconsistency in this and tries to solve it by finding these same Western virtues—democracy, human rights, and freedom of opinion—in an Islamic past. She reproves Muslim men for ignoring them and practicing a hardly hidden dictatorship after the Prophet's death.

This perspective is liberal and even radical in its view. It is reminiscent of Sheikh Mohammad Abdou's views, which accept Islam as a creed but reject much of what Islam says about certain institutions, seeing them as appropriate only to the time to which they belonged. The feminism is also modern, but it is a very Middle Eastern kind of feminism.

Mernissi has not only contributed a “feminist interpretation of women's rights in Islam” but has grouped together critical issues in the Middle East and Islamic world that have long remained in the background to generate the particular conflicts, perplexities, and problems peculiar to modern Islam and which have made actions and policies difficult. One of her contributions is to clarify why creed remains so intermeshed with politics, sexuality, and the values that bridge the public—private, and sacred—profane dichotomies. Reading Mernissi is quite an education, especially for the uninitiated. She relates the past with the present, the subjective with the objective, concepts with everyday living, and the dream with the reality in a lively, refreshing, novel way. The book would be useful in courses on women, contemporary issues in Islam or the Middle East, and on relations between religion, politics, and sexuality in that part of the world.