SOURCE: Booth, Marilyn. “Back to Basics?” Women's Review of Books 9, no. 3 (December 1991): 21-2.

In the following review, Booth notes that Mernissi's historical interpretations are occasionally narrow-sighted and anachronistic in The Veil and the Male Elite, but still offers a generally positive evaluation of the book.

Over a century ago, there emerged a tradition of scholarship in the Arab Muslim capitals which came to be labeled “Islamic modernism.” In a context of nationalist and anti-colonialist struggle, scholar-activists sought to revive what they saw as their societies' historical strengths, grounded in the events of earliest Islam and the written sources to which they gave rise. The Islamic modernists founded their programs for the future on a return to “the basics” of the faith and its earthly community. Defining those “basics”—a process that continues heatedly today—has never been easy or uncontroversial, especially in the crucial matters of gender and...