[In the following review, Pakravan lauds the “compassionate and intelligent” writing in Mernissi's memoir Dreams of Trespass.]

The nonjudgmental, politically correct stance often adopted by some Westerners toward the Islamic fundamentalist resurgence calls for a respectful endorsement of the traditional veiling of women. Some benighted souls actually don the garb (imagine shackling your own feet), presumably out of the same romantic notion that made T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) wear long, loose robes as he trekked Arabian deserts. In Dreams of Trespass, more charmingly but just as forcefully as she did in The Veil and the Male Elite, Fatima Mernissi gives an incisive retort to anyone still harboring illusions about conservative Islam. Not only does it not represent a liberating force, but it enforces the veil, a symbol of oppression, and harem life, an abominable restriction.

The word harem generally evokes the part of a palace where in 9th-century Baghdad, for instance, a ruler such as the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid kept thousands of jaryas or slave girls for his pleasure. But in most Moslem countries, it is—or was until recently—simply the part of the house where women and children reside and no males except close relatives are allowed.

Mernissi grew up not in one but in two harems: a formal one in Fez, her home, and another one on a farm 100 kilometers away, where she visits Yasmina, her maternal grandmother. In both places, lives are defined by frontiers, physical as well as moral and sacred frontiers—the huddud.

To the child wondering about the life that she and her kinswomen lead, “a harem had to do with men and women—that was one fact. It also had to do with a house, walls, and the streets—that was another fact. All of this was quite simple and easy to visualize: put four walls in the midst of the streets, and you have a house. Then put the women in the house and let the men go out. You have a harem.”

Mernissi's grandmother also explains that: the word “harem” was a slight variation of the word haram, the forbidden, the proscribed. It was the opposite of halal, the permissible. Harem was the place where a man sheltered his family, his wife or wives, and children and relatives. … Mecca, the holy city, was also called Haram. Mecca was a space where behavior was strictly codified. The city belonged to Allah and you had to obey his shari'a or sacred law, if you entered his territory. The same thing applied to a harem when it was a house belonging to a man. … A harem was about private space and the rules regulating it. It did not need walls. Once you knew what was forbidden, you carried the harem within. You had it in your head.

To this view Mernissi's mother adds her own: “running around the planet is what makes the brain race, and to put our brains to sleep is the idea behind the locks and the walls.”

Harem life, strictly regulated by the invisible huddud, can also be extraordinarily festive. But whether celebrating weddings and births, staging plays about the life of the Lebanese singer Asmaha and the renowned Egyptian grande dame and feminist Huda Sharaoui, or going about their chores, the women remain keenly aware of the narrow confines of their lives, of how it feels to be “a woman intoxicated with dreams in a land that crushes both the dreams and the dreamer …,” of what it feels like to cry “over wasted opportunities, senseless captivities, smashed visions.”

Though Mernissi condemns the system she grew up in and escaped from, she does so in a gentle voice. She generously shares treasured moments from her childhood. Not least of the charms of Dreams of Trespass are the powerfully evocative photographs by Ruth Ward, a play of light in tiled inner courtyards where robed women glide by, their faces invisible, shadows among the living.

If the purpose of keeping women in harems was, as the author's mother puts it, “to prevent them from becoming too smart,” it does not always work, as Mernissi demonstrates in these compassionate and intelligent memoirs.