God’s Feminine Shadow: Fatema Mernissi’s Political Teology of Territory Samuel B. Kigar * ABSTRACT At the close of the Cold War, the Moroccan feminist Fatema Mernissi joined intellectuals from around the world in analyzing the place of religion, culture, and civilization in the “new world order.” Tis article analyzes how Mernissi developed psychoanalytic, sexual diference feminism from within Muslim sources to critique this emergent form of territoriality. It shows how she atacked Muslim states, particularly Morocco, for appropriating premodern Muslim political the- ology to narrate their sovereignties in a world dominated by US-led militarism and neoliberalism. Ten, it demonstrates how she used female fgures, including the pre-Islamic goddess al-ʿUzza and the Moroccan spirit Haguza, to reveal how sexual diference would undermine exclusive claims to territorial sovereignty. Finally, it turns to Jonathan Z. Smith’s rejoinder to Mircea Eliade. Mernissi’s theory helps us to understand that Smith identifed an important relationship between religion and territory but in a way that was androcentric and culturally specifc. THE MOROCCAN feminist Fatema Mernissi opened her bildungsroman, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994), with a description of her childhood home. 1 She described siting at the threshold of her family’s salon as a girl, looking out onto the “square and rigid courtyard, where symmetry ruled everything” (Mernissi 1995, 3). Te life of the household was organized by the courtyard and the rooms that radiated out from it. Tese spaces regulated relationships between diferent parts of the extended family, between men and women, and © Te Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. * Samuel B. Kigar, Department of Religion, Spirituality, and Society, University of Puget Sound, 1500 N. Warner St. #1028, Tacoma, WA 98416-1028, USA. Email: skigar@pugetsound.edu. My deepest thanks are due to Professor Ebrahim Moosa, under whose caring tutelage I frst began writing about the ideas in this article, and to Professor Winnifred Sullivan, who has also been a kind and patient teacher since those days. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues, Drs. Ali Altaf Mian, Ameera Nimjee, and Hunter Bandy, for their comments on drafs of this article and to my student Eliana Goldberg for her insightful reading. Dr. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri not only ofered several rounds of invaluable feedback but, in the process, also provided succor and intel- lectual community during the long, isolating months of the early COVID-19 pandemic. I am profoundly indebted to him. Finally, I ofer sincere thanks to the two anonymous reviewers at the Journal of the American Academy of Religion for their thoughtful suggestions. Tis article is dedicated to Mariam Alafranji, Quinn Shaer, Devlyn Habib, and Deniz Kelemet, leaders of the Middle Eastern and North African Student Association at the University of Puget Sound, who helped me to imagine a diferent sort of politics over the last three years. 1 Te genre of Dreams of Trespass has been a mater of some debate. As the scholar of francophone literature Carine Bourget points out, the original English publication presents itself as an autobiography, whereas the subsequent French translation calls the truth of the book into question (Bourget 2013). I am indebted to the political scientist Norma Claire Moruzzi, who rightly points out that the book is a bildungsroman and who calls atention to the symbolic play between symmetry and asymmetry in this description of Mernissi’s childhood home (Moruzzi 2016, 456–57). Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2023, XX, 1–23 htps://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad079 Article Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfad079/7504778 by University of Puget Sound user on 31 December 2023