Fatima Mernissi grew up in a family harem in the medina of Fez in the 1940s — not the exotic harem of Western imagination, but a large extended household in which the women's movements were controlled, the gates were locked, and the inside was a world unto itself. Her memoir of that childhood is warm, funny, and quietly devastating: she describes the women who raised her not as victims but as full human beings with their own politics, strategies, and joys, living within a confinement they questioned but could not escape.
The book is the best single guide to understanding what the blank-walled riads of Fes el-Bali actually contained — the interior life of the medina that visitors walking the alleys cannot see. Mernissi went on to become one of the most important Islamic feminist scholars of the twentieth century. Reading Dreams of Trespass before arriving in Fez changes what you see when you walk through the medina.