Eroticism, Mysticism, And Liberation in Tahar Ben Jelloun's La Nuit De L'erreur, Or the Case for Active Female Sexuality (Critical Essay‪)‬

In her very influential work entitled Beyond the Veil, the Moroccan feminist, sociologist, author, and intellectual, Fatima Mernissi, presents the notion that Muslim society is characterized by a double theory of sexual dynamics. There is an "explicit theory" of female sexuality with its belief that men are aggressive in their interaction with women, and women are passive. According to Mernissi, "the machismo theory casts the man as the hunter and the woman as his prey. This vision is widely shared and deeply ingrained in both men's and women's vision of themselves" (33). Mernissi however argues that there exists a contradictory "implicit theory" of female sexuality, as epitomized in Imam Ghazali's The Revivification of Religious Sciences, an eleventh century classical work. The implicit theory involves an interpretation of the Koran and is driven, Mernissi claims, "far further into the Muslim unconsciousness" (32). This conception of female sexuality casts the woman as the hunter and the man as the passive victim. While both theories acknowledge women's qaid power, that is their power to deceive and defeat men not by force but by cunning and intrigue, in the implicit theory, this power of the female, associated in particular with her active sexuality, is seen as an element that is the most destructive to Muslim social order in which the feminine is regarded as synonymous with the satanic (33). Comparing Freudian and Ghazalian theories of sexuality as two different cultures' conceptions of sexuality, one based on a model in which female sexuality is passive, the other on one in which it is active, Mernissi further argues that theories of women's sexuality have a direct influence on perceptions of female aggression. Thus, for Freud, she contends, the female's aggression, in accordance with her sexual passivity, is turned inward and favors the development of masochistic impulses. Mernissi writes that