Nawal el Saadawi : Egyptian feminist, author, and acitivist.

 

 

 

“ I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes. It was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few minutes ago.”
 The Hidden Face of Eve, Nawal el Saadawi. 

Nawal el Saadawi is a medical doctor, Egyptian feminist, campaigner against Female Genital Mutilation, she has written fifty books in her lifetime and she was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature. she contributed a great deal in the revolution that took place in Egypt, she was surrounded by thousands of young revolutionaries, she shared her knowledge and wisdom with them. Her major characters are ordinary women, through her books she shock, question, and provoke. Nawal el Saadawi has liberated generations of women from the oppression or brainwash they were subjected to, not only in Egypt but throughout the Arab world.

Nawal el Saadawi was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1931, back in the days she was lucky enough to get educated, although her parents wanted to wed her at the age of ten but her mother stood out for her when she refused to get married, she was as all young girls back then circumcised, it is a very painful childhood memory for her. Nawal el Saadawi was good at school, she was acing her classes which allowed her to get into med school unlike her older brother who was lazy and spoiled. Nawal el Saadawi worked for the Egyptian Government as director General for Public Health Education, she also founded a magazine, “Health”, but she lost both of them in 1972 after her public statements and criticism of social norms, and the political regime of the president Sadat.

Nawal el Saadawi’s first book “Women and Sex” was censured, and attacked by fundamentalists and Egyptian society in general. The book brings to light two main topics, female genital mutilation, and   virginity. In the rural areas of Egypt FGM was performed in unsafe conditions which put thousands of young girl’s lives at risk,  in general Nawal el Saadawi expressed her anger and rage toward these inhumane and patriarchal traditions that women pay the price for every day, she cited scientific references concerning clitoris and condemned stripping women of their sexuality with the removal of the clitoris. Moreover, the book also discusses in great length the topic of virginity, which is in the East the thermometer of purity of girls, in Egypt and other Arab countries, girls can get killed if they were not virgins at their wedding night, it is considered to be  disgraceful to the honor of the family. Nawal el Saadawi challenged these traditions on a scientific basis, she shows in her books all kinds of hymns, and how some girls are born without virginity, while some of the others lose it not necessarily through sex since hymns are very fragile in nature, she also attacks these norms. Women And Sex was censured in Egypt, but students and intellectuals specially women found a way to smuggle it and read it secretly, it was a revolution or a turning point on how women perceive themselves, and how they reacted to patriarchal oppression in their environments.

  Nawal el Saadawi is very engaged politically. She was imprisoned,  exiled, and received death threats. She was imprisoned for three months for crimes against the state based on her outspoken political views and criticism, in these months she wrote a book on  a roll of toilet paper with a eyebrow pencil smuggled by a prostitute, the book was titled “Memoirs from the women’s prison”, in 1993 she fled to the US after series of death threats, and during the Arab spring she lived her dream, she said she had dreams of revolution since she was a kid and in 2011 she made the revolution happen along many many other intellectuals, a lot of young Egyptians used to gather around her to learn and debate with her; after the Arab spring a group of young women, most of them are big fans of her writings, founded sort of a book club in which they organize meetings to talk about her books in great length, and she never missed a meeting.

Nawal el Saadawi is called the “ the white demon” amongst fundamentalists. Nawal el Saadawi advocates secularism, specially in her book, “God Resigns in the Summit Meeting”. She believes that all religions, specially monotheistic religions, oppress women, and she considers the revival of Political Islam as a threat to what feminist has fought for in the middle east.

Regarding veil, she said that women don’t chose, it is imposed on them through a process of socialization, she believes that veil is offensive to women. “"What do we mean by choice? It is pressure, but it is hidden pressure – she is not aware of it. I was exposed to different pressures from my sisters. We are all the products of our economic, social and political life and our education. Young people today are living in the era of the fundamentalist groups."

Nawal el Saadawi was married three times, and she lives alone in an apartment in Cairo, not near from Maydan Tahrir. Regarding her first husband she said, “No, no, that’s the problem. My first husband was a great man, my colleague in the medical college. He was fascinating, and he was the father of my daughter. My father didn’t want me to marry him because he had gone to Suez to fight the British. But then [after Suez] the guerrilla fighters were betrayed, many of them imprisoned. This crisis broke him, and he became an addict. I was told that if I married him, he might stop his addictions, but he didn’t. He tried to kill me, so I left him.”.
about her second husband, “He was a man of law, very patriarchal.
I am not really fit for the role of a wife, you must be sure of that.”
Regarding her third husband whom she loved and lived with for long she wrote, “My third husband [Sherif Hatata], the father of my son, was a very free man, a Marxist who’d been imprisoned. I lived with him for 43 years, and I told everyone: this is the only feminist man on earth. And then I had to divorce him, too. He was a liar. He was having relations with other women. oh, the complexity of the patriarchal character. He wrote books about gender equality, and then he betrayed his wife. Ninety-five per cent of men are like that, I’m sure.”

Nawal el Saadawi was at the center of international attention last year after she was nominated for a Nobel Prize In Literature, but she had been invited to lecture in the US, England and Germany as well as other European and Arab countries, she was even offered asylum, but she refused. She insists on fulfilling her role as an intellectual in her beloved country, Egypt. She is a fighter, a brave women, and a radical activist.

The following article is an introductory insight on Nawal el Saadawi, and it is the beginning of a series of readings of Middle Eastern, North African and Arab Feminists and writers, next one is an analysis of Nawal el Saadawi’ s book “Women At Point Zero. Stay tuned.

Constructive criticism is highly welcomed.