5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

This panel is inspired by the location of the Forum in Morocco, and Fatema Mernissi’s (1940-2015) work as a Moroccan feminist sociologist. We bear witness to the erasure of the meaning of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ – an erasure Mernissi was particularly concerned about, in societies across the world and in territories subjugated, and occupied, imposing profound harms, on entire peoples, of which gender persecution has been a core aspect. There are several threads in her work that criss-cross: her engagements with Islamic theology and Quranic interpretation in order to reinstate women into an imaginary that affirms their fundamental freedoms and dignity; excavating a feminist Islamic hagiography for the present – ‘rais[ing] the sails and lif[ting] the veils...of the memory-ship’; building collaborations with artisanal and other collectives on the ground that supported the self-development and self-reliance of women in Morocco; and across it all, resisting through her work the erasure of all other civilizations by western civilization, and the imposition of western notions of time (the ‘arrow of time’) – ‘chronopolitics’ – that fuses time, power and constructions of femaleness in creating a dominant discourse on identity. Every aspect of her work raises concerns that sit at the centre of an idea of justice rooted in feminist practice in the Anthropocene. The journey back to Mernissi’s work therefore is an attempt to raise the sails of the feminist memory-ship for our times.