SOURCE: Porter, Venetia. “Buried in the Sand.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4738 (21 January 1994): 21.

In the following review, Porter commends Mernissi's passionate and forceful arguments in The Forgotten Queens of Islam and Islam and Democracy, but finds flaws, notably errors of omission and overemphasis, in both books.

Forgotten Queens of Islam is inspired, partly, by the condemnation by Muslim clerics of Benazir Bhutto's election in Pakistan on the grounds that she is a woman. It also seeks to take issue with the surprisingly ignorant statement by the historian Bernard Lewis that “there are no queens in Islam, and the word queen where it occurs, is only used of foreign rulers”. Fatima Mernissi—a prominent Moroccan sociologist—brings to our attention an array of women throughout Islamic history who ruled in a number of ways. Only a small proportion were fully legitimate monarchs (with their names mentioned in the khutba or...