Beyond the veil book fatima mernissi biography

Fatema Mernissi was born into a middle-class family in the Moroccan city of Fez in 1940. She attended Quranic school where she received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the French Protectorate.

As Mernissi pointed out herself, she belonged to the generation of women in Morocco who benefited from the educational policies of the post-independence Moroccan nationalist government.

Mernissi received a degree in political science from Muhammad V University in Rabat, Morocco, in 1965; she continued her education at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she also worked for some time as a journalist.

In 1973, she received a Ph.D. in sociology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, USA, for her dissertation The Effects of Modernization on the Male-Female Dynamics in a Muslim Society. She returned to work at the Muhammad V Universityand taught at its Faculté des Lettresbetween 1974 and 1