As a little girl, Fatima Mernissi was often puzzled by the idea of the harem: even if you accepted that men and women needed to be kept apart, she asked, why couldn't it be the women who walked freely in the streets, while the men stayed locked behind the harem gate? In a story as exotic as anything found in 'The Thousand and One Nights', she weaves an evocative tale of her childhood in a Fez harem in the 1940s, a period of social transition in Morocco.
