Born in a Moroccan harem in 1940, Fatima Mernissi grows up staring at the small square of sky visible above the family courtyard. Like all the women in the harem, Fatima finds joy in family life but chafes at traditional restrictions. None of the family's women are allowed outside the heavy wooden gates of the courtyard without special permission. Journeys beyond the end of the street are categorically prohibited, alogn with dozens of other mundane privileges like wearing lipstick and smoking cigarettes. But this is not the typical downtrodden Muslim woman tale. Each of the Mernissi women radiate wisdom, intellect and creativity as they throw themselves into staging household theater productions, devising new beauty treatments and preparing their daughters for life in a new, liberated Morocco.

Mernissi excels at descriptive writing but falters at re-creating her childhood self. Young Fatima is almost too intellectual to be believed, posing problems of religious freedom and women's rights in unusually precise academic language. It often seemed that the adult Mernissi, a professor of sociology at Morocco's top university, allowed her older self to overwhelm the younger one. Luckily, she makes up for this flaw with rich, detailed writing that creates vivid mental pictures of a vanished world. Each chapter, which seems to focus on description rather than narration, brings to life a dozen small worlds, like the precious family terrace and the peaceful public bath houses. This occasionally makes the book feel unfocused, but never to the point that I wanted to stop reading. This would be a good choice for people interested in women, Islam or Morocco, or simply for people who enjoy beautiful writing about far-off places. ( )

This book is superb. It's a vivid, complex portrait of a "harem," which, unlike the exoticized Western stereoptype, is chiefly a family-compound with an intricately organized way of life. Highly readable, highly recommended. ( )