SOURCE: Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “Ructions in the Seraglio.” London Review of Books 16, no. 23 (8 December 1994): 16-17.

In the following excerpt, Yeazell offers a positive assessment of Mernissi's memoir The Harem Within, published as Dreams of Trespass in the United States.

In a little-known film of 1985 called Harem, a yuppie female stockbroker (Natassja Kinski) is drugged and kidnapped on the streets of New York, only to wake up in the harem of an enigmatic oil tycoon (Ben Kingsley) in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Given its wildly implausible plot and clumsy editing—not to mention Kinski's permanently drugged performance—the movie more than deserves its present obscurity. But as a testament to the shifting status of the harem in the Western imagination, this particular work of fantasy has much to recommend it. Harem begins with a shameless exploitation of all the old clichés of the menacing and lustful East...