Islamic women between tradition and new lifestyles

Abstract

Muslim women are not a homogenous and the same universe in space and time. Talking about them generically raises the risk of stereotyping a group of people. In this paper we present the thought of two Muslim women of the second half of the twentieth century through the reading of two of their works: the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero (1983) and the Moroccan Fatema Mernissi, Le Harem politique. Le Prophète et les femmes (1987). El Saadawi describes in the novel the painful journey taken by an Egyptian woman to regain possession of her dignity. Mernissi’s book, however, shows how the promotion of new lifestyles for the woman must go through a critical reinterpretation of sacred Islamic scriptures.