Nawal El Saadawi


Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist. She has written many books on the subject of women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation in her society. She has been described as "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab World".
She is founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. She has been awarded honorary degrees on three continents. In 2004, she won the North–South Prize from the Council of Europe. In 2005, she won the Inana International Prize in Belgium, and in 2012, the International Peace Bureau awarded her the 2012 Seán MacBride Peace Prize.
Nawal el Saadawi has held the positions of Author for the Supreme Council for Arts and Social Sciences, Cairo; Director General of the Health Education Department, Ministry of Health, Cairo, Secretary General of the Medical Association, Cairo, Egypt, and medical doctor at the University Hospital and Ministry of Health. She is the founder of the Health Education Association and the Egyptian Women Writers' Association; she was Chief Editor of Health Magazine in Cairo, and Editor of Medical Association Magazine.

Early life

The second-eldest of nine children, Saadawi was born in 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla. Her family was at once traditional and progressive: Saadawi was "circumcised" at the age of six, yet her father insisted that all his children be educated.
Her father was a government official in the Ministry of Education, who had campaigned against the rule of the British occupation of Egypt and Sudan during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. As a result, he was exiled to a small town in the Nile Delta, and the government punished him by not promoting him for 10 years. He was relatively progressive and taught his daughter self-respect and to speak her mind. He also encouraged her to study the Arabic language. Both her parents died at a young age, leaving Saadawi with the sole burden of providing for a large family.
Her mother was from a family of Turkish origin; Saadawi has described her grandfather, Shoukry Bey, and his family as "all of whom had the fair skin of the Turks". Her maternal grandmother was also of Turkish origin.

Career

Saadawi graduated as a medical doctor in 1955 from Cairo University. That year, she married Ahmed Helmi, whom she met as a fellow student in medical school. They have a daughter, Mona Helmi. The marriage ended after two years. Through her medical practice, she observed women's physical and psychological problems and connected them with oppressive cultural practices, patriarchal oppression, class oppression and imperialist oppression. Her second husband was a colleague, Rashad Bey.
While working as a doctor in her birthplace of Kafr Tahla, she observed the hardships and inequalities faced by rural women. After attempting to protect one of her patients from domestic violence, Saadawi was summoned back to Cairo. She eventually became the Director of the Ministry of Public Health and met her third husband, Sherif Hatata, while sharing an office in the Ministry of Health. Hatata, also a medical doctor and writer, had been a political prisoner for 13 years. They married in 1964 and have a son. Saadawi and Hatata lived together for 43 years and divorced in 2010.
In 1972, she published Woman and Sex, confronting and contextualising various aggressions perpetrated against women's bodies, including female circumcision. The book became a foundational text of second-wave feminism. As a consequence of the book and her political activities, Saadawi was dismissed from her position at the Ministry of Health. She also lost her positions as chief editor of a health journal, and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt. From 1973 to 1976, Saadawi worked on researching women and neurosis in Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine. From 1979 to 1980, she was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa and the Middle East.

Imprisonment

Long viewed as controversial and dangerous by the Egyptian government, Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine in 1981 called Confrontation. She was imprisoned in September by President of Egypt Anwar Sadat. Saadawi stated once in an interview, "I was arrested because I believed Sadat. He said there is democracy and we have a multi-party system and you can criticize. So I started criticizing his policy and I landed in jail". Sadat claimed that the established government was a democracy for the people and that democracy as always was open for constructive criticism. According to el Saadawi, Sadat imprisoned her because of her criticism of his purported democracy. Even in prison she still found a way to fight against the oppression of women. While in prison she formed the Arab Women's Solidarity Association. This was the first legal and independent feminist group of Egypt. In prison she was denied pen and paper, However that did not stop her from continuing to write. She used a "stubby black eyebrow pencil" and "a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper" to record her thoughts. She was released later that year, one month after the President's assassination. Of her experience she wrote: "Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies." In 1982, she founded the Arab Women Solidarity Association.
Saadawi was one of the women held at Qanatir Women's Prison. Her incarceration formed the basis for her memoir, Memoirs from the Women's Prison. Her contact with a prisoner at Qanatir, nine years before she was imprisoned there, served as inspiration for an earlier work, a novel titled Woman at Point Zero.

Further persecution, teaching in the US, and on-going activism

In 1988, when her life was threatened by Islamists and political persecution, Saadawi was forced to flee Egypt. She accepted an offer to teach at Duke University's Asian and African Languages Department in North Carolina, as well as at the University of Washington. She has since held positions at a number of prestigious colleges and universities including Cairo University, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Sorbonne, Georgetown, Florida State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1996, she moved back to Egypt.
Saadawi has continued her activism and considered running in the 2005 Egyptian presidential election, before stepping out because of stringent requirements for first-time candidates. She was among the protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011. She has called for the abolition of religious instruction in the Egyptian schools.
Saadawi was awarded the 2004 North–South Prize by the Council of Europe. In July 2016, she headlined the Royal African Society's "Africa Writes" literary festival in London, where she spoke "On Being A Woman Writer" in conversation with Margaret Busby.
She was in Göteborg Book Fair, which took place on 27 to 30 September 2018, where she attended a seminar on development in Egypt and the Middle East after the Arab Spring and stated, during her talk, in the event that "colonial, capitalist, imperialist, racist" global powers, led by the United States, collaborated with the Egyptian government to end the 2011 Egyptian revolution. She added that she remembered seeing then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Tahrir Square handing out dollar bills to the youth in order to encourage them to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood in the upcoming elections.

Writing

Saadawi began writing early in her career. Her earliest writings include a selection of short stories entitled I Learned Love and her first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. She has since written numerous novels and short stories and a personal memoir, Memoir from the Women's Prison. Saadawi has been published in a number of anthologies, and her work has been translated from the original Arabic into more than 30 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and others.
In 1972, she published her first work of non-fiction, Women and Sex, which evoked the antagonism of highly placed political and theological authorities. It also led to her dismissal at the Ministry of Health. Other works include The Hidden Face of Eve, God Dies by the Nile, The Circling Song, Searching, The Fall of the Imam and Woman at Point Zero.
She contributed the piece "When a woman rebels" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global, edited by Robin Morgan, and is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Saadawi's novel Zeina was published in Lebanon in 2009. The French translation was published under the pseudonym Nawal Zeinab el Sayed, using her mother's maiden name.
Saadawi speaks fluent English in addition to her native Egyptian Arabic. As she writes in Arabic, she sees the question of translation into English or French as "a big problem" linked to the fact that
"the colonial capitalist powers are mainly English- or French-speaking.... I am still ignored by big literary powers in the world, because I write in Arabic, and also because I am critical of the colonial, capitalist, racist, patriarchal mind set of the super-powers."

Her book Mufakirat Tifla fi Al-Khamisa wa Al-Thamaneen, based on excerpts from her journal, was published in 2017.

Views

Advocacy against genital mutilation

At a young age, Saadawi underwent the process of female genital mutilation. As an adult, she has written about and criticized this practice. She responded to the death of a 12-year-old girl, Bedour Shaker, during a genital circumcision operation in 2007 by writing: "Bedour, did you have to die for some light to shine in the dark minds? Did you have to pay with your dear life a price... for doctors and clerics to learn that the right religion doesn't cut children's organs." As a doctor and human rights activist, Saadawi is also opposed to male circumcision. She believes that both male and female children deserve protection from genital mutilation.

Religion

In a 2014 interview, Saadawi said that "the root of the oppression of women lies in the global post-modern capitalist system, which is supported by religious fundamentalism".
When hundreds of people were killed in what has been called a "stampede" during the 2015 pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, she said:
"They talk about changing the way the Hajj is administered, about making people travel in smaller groups. What they don’t say is that the crush happened because these people were fighting to stone the devil. Why do they need to stone the devil? Why do they need to kiss that black stone? But no one will say this. The media will not print it. What is it about, this reluctance to criticize religion?... This refusal to criticize religion... is not liberalism. This is censorship."

She has said that elements of the Hajj, such as kissing the Black Stone, had pre-Islamic pagan roots. Saadawi has been involved in the academic exploration of Arab identity throughout her writing career.

Veiling

Saadawi describes the Islamic veil as "a tool of oppression of women". She is also critical about the objectification of women and female bodies without male bodies in patriarchal social structures common in Europe and the US.

United States

In a 2002 lecture at the University of California, Saadawi described the US-led war on Afghanistan as "a war to exploit the oil in the region", and US foreign policy and its support of Israel as "real terrorism". Saadawi has opined that Egyptians are forced into poverty by US aid.

Film

Saadawi is the subject of the film She Spoke the Unspeakable, directed by Jill Nicholls, broadcast in February 2017 in the BBC One television series Imagine.

Selected awards and honors

The following is a complete list of her books.
Novels
Short-story collections
Plays
Memoirs
Non-fiction
Novels translated into English
Short stories translated into English
Non-fiction translated into English