El Saadawi, Nawal (1931—)

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El Saadawi, Nawal (1931—)

Leading radical Egyptian feminist, physician, journalist and novelist, forceful and outspoken critic of women's oppression in the Middle East and globally, whose writings address the impact of misogynist social structures on Egyptian women, especially the sexual abuse Egyptian women undergo, such as the practice of female genital mutilation. Name variations: el Sad'adawi, el-Saadawi, al-Saadawi. Pronunciation: Na-WAA-l el SA-a-da-we. Born in Kafr Tahla, Egypt, in 1931 (some sources cite 1930); her father graduated from Cairo University in 1937 and worked as a civil servant in one of the provinces; her mother was educated in French schools; graduated from School of Medicine, Cairo University, M.D., 1955; married three times; her third husband is Sherif Hetata (a physician); children: daughter Mona Helmi (a writer); son Atef Hetata (a film director).

Practiced medicine in rural and urban areas; promoted to director of Health Education and editor-in-chief of the magazine Health; dismissed from her positions (August 1971) and blacklisted by the Egyptian government because of her controversial book, Women and Sex (1972); practiced medicine part-time and wrote novels depicting the universe of Egyptian women; researched women's neuroses while on the Faculty of Medicine at Ain Shams University (1973–76); served as United Nations' advisor for the Women's Program in Africa (ECA) and the Middle East (ECWA, 1979–80); imprisoned for three months (1981) by President Sadat; established the Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA, 1982); fought the banning of AWSA (early 1990s); accepted a visiting professorship at Duke University (1993); currently resides in Egypt. President of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association.

Selected nonfiction works (translated):

The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (trans. by Sherif Hetata, London: Zed, 1980); Memoirs from the Women's Prison (trans. by Marilyn Booth, 1983, London: The Women's Press, 1991); My Travels Around the World (trans. by Shirley Eber, London: Methuen, 1991). Selected fiction (translated): The Circling Song (London: Zed, 1989); Death of an Ex-Minister (trans. by Shirley Eber, London: Methuen, 1987); The Fall of the Imam (trans. by Sherif Hetata, Minerva, 1989); God Dies by the Nile (trans. by Hetata, Zed, 1985); The Innocence of the Devil (trans. by Hetata, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Memoirs of a Woman Doctor: A Novel (trans. by Catherine Cobham, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989); Searching (trans. by Shirley Eber, London: Zed, 1991); She Has No Place in Paradise (trans. by Shirley Eber, 1987, London: Minerva, 1989); Two Women in One (trans. by Osman Nusairi and Jana Gough, 1975; Seattle: The Seal Press, 1986); The Well of Life (trans. by Hetata, London: Lime Tree, 1993); Woman at Point Zero (trans. by Hetata, London: Zed, 1983).

Nawal el Saadawi, a leading contemporary Egyptian feminist who came of age as an activist after Egypt wrested its independence from Great Britain in 1952, began her work as a doctor and writer within an already existing tradition of Egyptian women struggling for national independence and gender justice. The Egyptian women's movement began in the early 20th century and was intimately linked with the Egyptian nationalist movement for independence. Great Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 and in the next seven decades an unequal economic and political relationship characterized the link between the two nations. One of the earliest Egyptian women to become active in the political arena was Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947), who galvanized other upper-class Egyptian women to combat both British colonialism and national social and legal structures oppressive to women. Few people outside the Middle East are aware that veiled Egyptian women left their homes to demonstrate on the streets in Cairo in the 1919 uprising against the British. The activities of these women established a respected tradition of women's activism which focused on changing women's unequal legal status as well as women's welfare in the areas of health, work, political participation, and education.

Nawal el Saadawi is one of many women actively engaged in working to improve women's rights and lives. No other Egyptian feminist has spoken out so forcefully and critically about the impact of misogynist social structures on Egyptian women, the specific nature of sexual oppression, and its links to capitalism and imperialism. Partially because of the topics she broaches, el Saadawi occupies a contentious place within the Egyptian women's movement. Her voice is heard by a number of audiences in the Middle East and globally, and she is well-connected with the international women's movement. She is the best-known Egyptian feminist in the West, with many of her works available in English.

Born in 1931, el Saadawi grew up in a loving household. She recalls with great affection the soft voice of her father who sacrificed his needs for those of his children. Her parents had what she considered an ideal relationship, characterized by tenderness and civility, and el Saadawi points to their relationship as being a critical factor in giving her an ability to recognize and terminate her first two marriages which were less than ideal. Her childhood also allowed her to understand the lack of personal and political freedom she encountered as an adult Egyptian woman. She notes in an essay published in Woman Against Her Sex that her childhood freedom "sparked off the rebellion against my first husband, against the head of state and against any dictator at work who failed to provide me with the freedom to which I had been accustomed by my mother and father." Notwithstanding this freedom, el Saadawi and her sister were subjected to female genital mutilation, a practice that she was to fight against as an adult. She describes her experiences in her book The Hidden Face of Eve:

I was six years old that night when I lay in my bed, warm and peaceful in that pleasurable state which lies half way between wakefulness and sleep, with the rosy dreams of childhood flitting by….
They carried me to the bathroom.…All I remember is that I was frightened and that there were many of them, and that something like an iron grasp caught hold of my hand and my arms and my thighs, so that I became unable to resist or even to move….
I realized that my thighs had been pulled wide apart, and that each of my lower limbs was being held as far away from the other as possible, gripped by steel fingers that never relinquished their pressure. I felt that the rasping knife or blade was heading straight down towards my throat. Then suddenly the sharp metallic edge seemed to drop between my thighs and there cut off a piece of flesh from my body.
I screamed with pain despite the tight hand held over my mouth, for the pain was not just a pain, it was like a searing flame that went through my whole body. After a few moments, I saw a red pool of blood around my hips.
I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and I did not try to find out. 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 moments ago.

El Saadawi had many other opportunities to notice how girls and women within her family were treated differently from boys and men. Growing up in a large family of six daughters and three sons, she proved to be more intelligent and successful than her brothers, and yet had to work harder at domestic chores. In response to pressure from her mother, her father agreed to delay her marriage, and el Saadawi attended medical school where she participated briefly in student demonstrations against the British occupation of Egypt. She married her first husband, a physician, against the wishes of her family and soon realized that she could not continue in the relationship when he asked her to stop practicing medicine. Her marriage and subsequent divorce led her to ask more questions about the social system established for women. El Saadawi left her second husband, a lawyer, because he insisted she stop writing. Thus, el Saadawi's philosophy of women's liberation is deeply rooted in her experiences in the home and in her activities as a nationalist, committed to Egyptian independence and welfare.

Her career as a doctor received a set-back when she was dismissed as the director-general of the Ministry of Health in 1972. At that time, she was also editor of a magazine Health and had founded the Health Association. She had used the magazine and association to promote her idea that women's health and sexuality were harmed by female genital mutilation. Furthermore, el Saadawi proposed that politics and health were intimately linked to one another. As a result of her beliefs, el Saadawi lost her positions, and her books were censored for the next 11 years. She continued to write novels and to publish her fiction in Lebanon. El Saadawi characterizes this part of her life as a conflict any creative woman faces as she challenges her society's entrenched values. She notes in an essay in Ergo!The Bumbershoot Literary Magazine: "I could feel the silent struggle going on between me and these forces, a struggle which increased in intensity as time passed, and I became more mature as my activities grew in extent and depth, whether in the medical or the literary field. Now it was no longer hidden or silent but open and declared, characterized by the variety of weapons used, which ranged from neglect to a complete lack of attention, disapproval, criticism and vilification, to different warnings and threats."

El Saadawi accepted a position in the United Nations, working as an advisor on Women's Programs for Africa, and then as a Senior Program Officer in charge of the Women's Voluntary Fund. After two years, she realized that the structure of the United Nations was no different from the bureaucracy she had left in Egypt: it was another organization run by a patriarchy, this time of Western, upper-class men who cared more for their material comforts than in allowing for creative work to be done in the area of development. She resigned from her UN position in 1980.

On September 6, 1981, el Saadawi was alone in her Cairo apartment when she was arrested for her criticisms of President Anwar Sadat and his Open Door Policy, which aimed at dismantling the socialist policies of his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser. To quell the voices of his critics, Sadat issued a decree that allowed him to incarcerate over 1,000 Egyptian women activists and intellectuals, including el Saadawi. She describes her arrest in her autobiography Memoirs from the Women's Prison:

I heard a knock at the door.…I ignored the knock. Perhaps it was the concierge.…The fourth rapping, and the fifth, and the knocking on the door went on and on.…I heard the sound—like an explosion—of the door breaking. Their metallic boots pounded the floor in quick rhythm like army troops bursting forth in the direction of battle. They attacked the flat like savage locusts, their open mouths panting and their rifles pointed.…For a moment, they stood fixed, as if pinned to the ground before me. I must have appeared frightening to them, and I spoke in a voice which was also terrifying, 'You broke down the door. This is a crime.'
I don't know what happened then; perhaps my voice confirmed to them that I was a woman and not a devil. Maybe they were surprised that I was still in the flat and had not escaped.

El Saadawi was to remain in prison for three months, and while there, secretly wrote a book about her prison experiences on toilet paper. She and the other political prisoners were released only when Sadat was assassinated. One year after her release, in 1982, she founded and presided over the Tadamun al-Ma'at al 'Arabiyya, the Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA). The AWSA and its magazine Noon were banned in 1991, and her activities and house were monitored by government security guards, ostensibly for her security. She was informed death threats had been made against her person. Feeling increasingly insecure, she left Egypt in 1993 with her husband to take a position as visiting professor at Duke University in North Carolina. Her third husband Sherif Hetata, also a physician and novelist, had spent 13 years in Egyptian prisons. He has translated many of el Saadawi's novels into English.

Half of our society is women. They should start to speak for themselves, to write for themselves, to think for themselves, and to correct laws that oppress them.…We also need to create union among women, to create political power. We have two slogans: UNVEILING OF THE MIND, creating awareness among women, and UNION AND SOLIDARITY to bring political power for women.
—Nawal el Saadawi

El Saadawi has had a greater impact through her fiction and nonfiction writings than by her organizing activities. Her works have been translated into a number of languages and are read in many Muslim communities around the world. Her philosophy on politics, religion, and sexual justice is unique in that she combines a socialist, materialist view of the world that draws heavily on her personal experiences, as well as on the history of women in the Middle East and in Islam. She calls herself a "historical socialist feminist," and while she acknowledges her debt to Western feminist writings on the topic of patriarchy, she is quick to state that her feminism is indigenous to the Third World. El Saadawi points to the fact that she began writing about women's oppression before she could read English. As el Saadawi notes in an interview "A Feminist in the Arab World":

We call ourselves historical socialist feminists. We depend on our history in our analysis of our ideas. We are inspired by those great women in our history. We say we are socialist because we are against class oppression and colonialism. We call ourselves feminists because we are against patriarchy and male oppression.…And we believe and say that we have a feminism that is original and not copied from the West.

El Saadawi's writings are concerned with the impact of poverty and powerlessness on women in their daily lives; with how religion and cultures perpetuate women's powerlessness in a variety of subtle and overt ways; and with how men and women, suffering from a lack of political and economic strength, are compelled to subordinate themselves to local, national and international elites. In a vivid and dramatic way, she demonstrates how the universal institution of patriarchy which oppresses women is linked to the economic and political forces of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism. Her solution to these devastating social problems lies in women becoming aware of these interconnections, and in women uniting and creating a universal philosophy which allows them to free themselves as individuals and build bases of power in their countries. Ultimately, she hopes women will organize internationally and wrest political and economic power for themselves and use it to end the exploitation of women. El Saadawi's works are an important step in this struggle to end exploitation and bring about sexual justice. As she writes in her short essay "Toward Women's Power, Nationally and Internationally": "I think that we women are ourselves responsible for war, for massacres, if we ourselves do not fight for our rights. We should fight. We should not compromise with our rights. We should not turn away from our own power."

sources:

el Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. Translated and edited by Sherif Hetata. London: Zed: 1980.

——. "Creative Women in Changing Societies, an excerpt," in Ergo! The Bumbershoot Literary Magazine. (City of Seattle, 1993), pp. 18–26.

——. "A Feminist in the Arab World," in Feminist Foremothers in Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health. Interview by Mary E. Willmuth. Edited by Phyllis Chester, Esther D. Rothblum, and Ellen Cole. The Haworth Press, 1995, pp. 435–42.

——. Memoirs from the Women's Prison. Translated by Marilyn Booth. London: The Women's Press, 1991.

——. "Toward Women's Power, Nationally and Internationally," in Speaking of Faith: Global Perspectives on Women, Religion and Social Change. Edited by Diana L. Eck and Devaki Jain. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1987, pp. 266–74.

Tarabishi, Georges. "Nawal el-Saadawi's Reply," in Woman Against Her Sex: A Critique of Nawal el-Saadawi with a Reply by Nawal el-Saadawi. Translated by Basil Hatim and Elisabeth Orsini. London: Saqi Books, 1988, pp. 189–211.