Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian feminist, writer, teacher and doctor
I imagine that Nawal must have sat in her prison cell thinking about what her life now was—reflecting on her life as a young girl, her mother's second oldest.
Born on 27 October 1931 in Kafr Tahla, north of Cairo, the second of nine children, Nawal was the daughter of Zaynab (nee Shoukry), from an Ottoman Turkish family, and Al-Sayed El Saadawi, a teacher.
Nawal had been resisting her whole life: Resisting an early marriage, resisting being objected to the male-dominated society she lived in, with sons valued far more highly than daughters.
As a child, she told her grandmother that she did not intend to marry. When attempts were made to arrange a wedding for her at 10, she ate raw aubergine to discolour her teeth,
Once, her grandmother said, "a boy is worth 15 girls at least…Girls are a blight".
The late Nawal El Saadawi was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician. She wrote multiple books on women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation in her society. She was described as "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab World", and as "Egypt's most radical woman".
The Hidden Face of Eve (1977), the most influential of the more than 50 books she wrote, argues that patriarchy and poverty – rather than Islam – oppress Arab women.
Woman at Point Zero (1975), gives a horrifying account of childhood and marital abuse leading to prostitution. Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993) examines a world in which, for a woman, husband and boss are substitutable, and for a man, female self-determination is unthinkable.
In 1949 she entered Cairo University’s medical school and qualified as a doctor in 1955. Then Nawal developed a passion for health education and came into conflict with the authorities. As a village doctor, she was shocked by the unhygienic practices of the local barbers and midwives responsible for basic medical procedures, including circumcision and Female Genital Mutilation.
Nasal frequently thought about Sadat Anwar, the then president of Egypt and how she was foolish to believe he would enforce a democracy. She would, later on, tell a journalist 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 criticise. So I started criticising his policy, and I landed in jail".
Under President Anwar Sadat, Nawal's criticism of female circumcision in her first non-fiction work, Women and Sex (1969), led to her losing the positions she had risen to as director general of public health and assistant general secretary to the Egyptian Medical Association. The Association for Health Education, which she had founded, was closed, and Health magazine, which she edited with her third husband, Sherif Hetata, was banned, as were her writings.
In 1981 she founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA), combining feminism with pan-Arabism, and with the translation of her work El Saadawi became well-known in the west.
Nawal continued to write while she was in prison at the Qanatir Women's prison scribbling her thoughts frequently using a stubby eye pencil and some old tissues. She kept in touch with a woman nine years before in the same jail who would later be the protagonist of her novel Woman at Point Zero, and the scribbles and thoughts she put down would go into Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1983).
You could easily say Nawal got her free spirit from her father. He was a freedom fighter who fought against the British occupation of Egypt. He would sit Nawal down and ask her to write and learn Arabic. He would also constantly tell her to believe in herself. Nawal could quickly credit her self-respect to him.
When he and her mother died, Nawal had to take care of 8 other siblings. This could easily be the reason why leadership came easy to her. She was never quiet while in that prison. She founded a women's movement. From her work as a doctor years before and her personal experiences, she knew women in Egypt were discriminated against.
She knew because she was cut as a young girl, and in her practice had seen many women who had complications from being cut.
Nawal didn't spend long in that prison cell. One morning a guard opened it up and told her she was free to go. Sadat had been assassinated, and she was no longer a threat.
In 1992, El Saadawi’s name appeared on a death list and, unable to face the armed guard that the Egyptian authorities provided for her, and she decided in January 1993 to leave.
At the end of 1996, She moved back to Egypt and continued criticising and protesting against oppressive governments and the religious indoctrination of Egyptian children.
The next period she spent teaching dissidence and creativity at Duke University, North Carolina, and writing her memoirs, published in two volumes in English as A Daughter of Isis (1999) and Walking Through Fire (2002).
She was founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. She was 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.
Saadawi died on 21 March 2021, aged 89, at a hospital in Cairo. Her life was commemorated on BBC Radio 4's obituary programme Last Word.