This wonderful and enchanting memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl s life in her family s French Moroccan harem set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review). I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez Morocco . . . So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth -- women who without access to the world outside recreated it from sheer imagination. A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place gender and sex Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.