Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems

Fatema Mernissi's "Scheherezade Goes West" is an incredible book. I could not put it down once I began reading it. I highly recommend it......I keep talking about it to everyone I know. I think that her observations have quite a bit of truth behind them, even with regards to her ideas of the Western world. A few critics of the book mentioned how if Fatema had truly observed women in the U.S. she would see that we came in all sizes. That is true! But still, don't we all feel the pressure put on us to be a size 6? To wear makeup? To look like a supermodel? Why are eating disorders more prevalent? A friend of mine told me she was anorexic in high school, but that having an eating disorder was "normal", since it appeared almost every girl in her high school had some sort of eating disorder. How sad! In high school I took sanctuary in athletics---and most athletic women could never fit into the American standard ideals of beauty. So we pride ourselves in being fit and strong. When are we going to learn to appreciate ourselves for what we are worth? Mernissi's book is one that makes you think. I think it is magnificent. Read it with an open mind, and use her observations to challenge and question what you know. I also enjoyed having some sort of insight into the Islamic world. I feel we really misunderstand Islam. We base most of our views on the actions and beliefs of the extremists. I hope that because of the events in our world today, us westerners and non-muslims will try to educated ourselves and learn about Islam with an open mind and an un-biased heart.

I am neither American nor Arab but this book is a must-read for every woman in the twenty-first century, a true teaching text. For all single women out there, gift yourself this book before next Valentine's Day and read it with an open mind. You might learn more than a dozen dating manuals. By refusing to discuss her own life in reference to the men who passed through it, Mernissi shows the way to liberation. Reviewers who think Mernissi needs to travel, please try to hang out more with Muslim women.

After reading a few other critiques on this title, a few reviewers may need to reconsider the intent of the text. Mernissi is hardly deliniating a definitive narrative on the sexual mentality of men/women or East/West; however, she provides a series of impressions that can create a complex, intriguing innerdialogue as well as spark useful discussion among adults interested in the related topic dynamics. Overall a wonderfully written book intermingling Mernissi's personal experiences, history, literature, and art. I highly endorse this book.

Fatima Mernissi's book, Scheherazade Goes West, is one of those rare books that you start reading and simply can not put down, not wanting it to end. It is witty and delightfull book but more important, it touches upon some fundemental questions about the meeting of East and West, in art, fiction, as well as in every day life, questions that have never been addressed like this before. Mernissi does something which is both rare and refreshing: she dares ask questions and her quest for answers takes her (and the reader) to a journey which ultimatly touches upon the universal questions concerninig not only the complicated, mystifaying relations between East and West, but also, and far more intersting, between Men and Women, and how they see each other from both sides of the geographical, cultural distance.

This book gives the Western woman a completely new context to view ourselves in/through. To quote Mernissi, "travel is not about fun but about learning, about crossing boundaries and mastering the fear of strangers, about making the effort to understand other cultures and thereby empowering yourself." In a patrarchial society (whether Christian or Muslim) male erotic needs,and their need for control and "safty" in male-female relationships dictates how women are taught to think about themselves. "Travel (mentally widening your horizons) helps you figure out who you are and how your own culture controls you." This book is about claiming freedom, the freedom for women to think about who they are and about the courage it takes to push through the unexamined female prisons of Western insularity (just as Muslim women push through the insularity of the Harem and the veil) to view ourselves in a wider place and choose who we will be and who our daughters will be. As the book says, "then who are we if we don't control our own images?" The author is delightful, feminine and funny and wonderfully astute.