SOURCE: Booth, Marilyn. Review of Dreams of Trespass, by Fatima Mernissi. World Literature Today 69, no. 2 (spring 1995): 419.

In the following review, Booth praises Mernissi's stark honesty and unique perspective in Dreams of Trespass.

The word harem—like veil—has long served to enclose Arab and other predominantly Muslim societies in Euro-American stereotyping. Although recent scholarship has attempted the dispassionate analysis of “the harem” within specific historical and discursive contexts, popularly the word still connotes a vision of “the East” as exotica and erotica. Now the Moroccan feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi offers a re-vision of the harem that is both passionate and analytical, and wonderful to read.

As autobiography, Dreams of Trespass could be subtitled “The Making of a Feminist,” for its prescient young narrator, growing up in an aristocratic urban traditional household, is weaned on the desires of her female elders to overcome and subvert the barriers of...