Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

This “wonderful and enchanting” memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl’s life in her family’s French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review).

“I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco . . . ”

So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth — women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination.

A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.