SOURCE: Brata, Sasthi. “The Veiled Mind.” New Statesman and Society 8, no. 341 (24 February 1995): 54.

In the following excerpt, Brata praises The Harem Within, but expresses misgivings over Mernissi's privileged perspective.

The two women who cry their hearts out in these books do not belong to the proletariat, nor to the bourgeoisie as the Marxists understood it. Both come from the upper crust of their respective Islamic societies, Moroccan and Pakistani. Their greatest childhood deprivations were in the realms of diamonds, pearls, chiffons and silks; not food, clothing and shelter.

Mernissi is a respected feminist academic; [Tehmina] Durrani an erstwhile housewife who has launched a crusade, with this first autobiographical excursion, on behalf of Islamic women [My Feudal Lord]. But there is something cloying in their pleas for the three great words of the French revolution, coming as they do from hugely privileged mouthpieces. Tugged on the one hand (Mernissi) by...