Lifting the Lid on Hypocrisy and Injustice: Fatima Mernissi and the Paradoxes and Predicaments of Muslim Women

In the 1980s reading Fatima Mernissi in Türkiye ,a secular country with Muslim majority, was like a lifting a lid on the hypocrisy over the representation of Muslim women which was created not only in the Western but also in the Middle Eastern world. It continued to be so throughout the 1990s at a time when the disenchantment of grand-narratives created great expectations to reach better interpretations of both old and new forms of inequality, injustice and
exploitation over women, nature and labor particularly through the post-colonial critique and feminist/gender movements. This paper discusses how the pioneering work of a modernist-yet-non-orientalist feminist like Fatima Mernissi,. Her work was dedicated to explore, in her own words “women and their space boundaries” in the Islamic world and beyond shed light to understand the paradoxes and hypocrisies embedded in the rising fundamentalist Islamic movements’ discourses of freedom, empowerment and development. She was also deeply engaged in the political discourses of both right and left wing illiberal-yet modernist political forces all of whom were and are unable to see how a harmful role they play in the Anthropocene.