Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi (27 October 1931 – 21 March 2021) was an Egyptian physician, psychiatrist and writer, described by Encyclopaedia Britannica as sometimes called "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world", whose writings and professional career were dedicated to the political and sexual rights of women. ^{1 2}

Across some forty books she joined medicine to literature in a single campaign: against female genital mutilation, which she had herself undergone as a child; against the patriarchal order she documented as a rural doctor; and against the political and religious authorities who repeatedly tried to silence her — by dismissal, by imprisonment under President Sadat, and by court cases that followed her into old age. ²

She founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, the first legal and independent feminist organisation in Egypt, and her best-known work, Woman at Point Zero (1975), has been translated around the world. ²

Saadawi was born on 27 October 1931 in the small Nile Delta village of Kafr Tahla, the second-eldest of nine children. ^{2 1}

At the age of six she was subjected to female genital mutilation, the experience at the root of her lifelong campaign against the practice. ²

Her father, an official in the Ministry of Education, had campaigned against the British occupation during the Egyptian revolution of 1919 and was punished with exile to a small Delta town and ten years without promotion; relatively progressive, he taught his daughter self-respect and to speak her mind, and encouraged her study of Arabic. ²

Her mother, Zaynab, was partly descended from a wealthy Ottoman family; when the family tried to marry Nawal off at ten, her mother supported her in resisting. Both parents died young, leaving her with the burden of providing for a large family. ²

She graduated as a medical doctor from Cairo University in 1955, marrying that year a fellow student, Ahmed Helmi; they had a daughter, Mona, and divorced after two years. ²

Working as a doctor in her birthplace of Kafr Tahla, she observed at first hand the hardships and inequalities faced by rural women; after she tried to protect one of her patients from domestic violence she was summoned back to Cairo. ²

She rose to direct public-health education at the Ministry of Health, where she met her third husband, Sherif Hatata, a doctor and writer who had been a political prisoner for thirteen years; they married in 1964, had a son, Atef, and divorced in 2010. She earned a master's degree in public health at Columbia University in 1966. ^{2 1}

In 1969 she published Women and Sex, confronting the aggressions perpetrated against women's bodies, including female circumcision; the book became a foundational text of second-wave feminism, and it cost her her ministry post — Britannica dates her expulsion from the ministry to 1972 — together with her positions as chief editor of a health journal and as assistant general secretary of the Egyptian Medical Association. ^{2 1}

From 1973 to 1976 she researched women and neurosis at Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine, and in 1979–1980 she served as a United Nations adviser for the women's programme in Africa and the Middle East. ²

In 1981 she helped publish a feminist magazine called Confrontation, and in September of that year President Anwar Sadat had her imprisoned in Qanatir Women's Prison. Denied pen and paper, she wrote with a "stubby black eyebrow pencil" on "a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper"; she was released later that year, a month after Sadat's assassination, and the experience became her Memoirs from the Women's Prison (1983). ^{2 1}

Of that period 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." ²

In prison she formed the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, founded formally in 1982 — the first legal and independent feminist group in Egypt, which she described as "historical, socialist, and feminist"; in 1991 the government closed its publication and then the association itself. ^{2 1}

In 1993, with her life threatened by Islamists and political persecution mounting, Saadawi left Egypt and taught at Duke University and the University of Washington; she later held positions at universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Sorbonne, Georgetown and the University of California, Berkeley. She returned to Egypt in 1996. ²

The legal attacks continued: in 2002 a lawyer sought, under the hisba principle, to have her forcibly divorced from her husband on the claim that she had abandoned Islam, and in 2008 another attempt sought to strip her of her Egyptian nationality; both attempts failed, and Britannica records that in May 2008 she won a case brought against her that included charges of apostasy and heresy. ^{2 1}

She considered standing in the 2005 presidential election before the candidacy requirements stopped her, and in 2011 she was among the protesters in Tahrir Square. ²

Saadawi wrote in Arabic, and her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her fiction begins with the short stories of I Learned Love (1957) and the novel Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958), and includes God Dies by the Nile, The Circling Song, The Fall of the Imam (1987), The Innocence of the Devil (1992), Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993) and Zeina (2009). ²

Woman at Point Zero (1975), her most famous novel, grew from her meeting, nine years before her own imprisonment, with a woman prisoner at Qanatir awaiting execution. ²

Her non-fiction includes Woman Is the Origin (1971), Men and Sex (1973), Women and Neurosis (1975) and The Hidden Face of Eve (1977), which established her internationally for its discussion of female genital cutting and its commentary on the patriarchy of religious fundamentalism. ^{2 1}

She saw translation itself as a political problem, writing that she remained "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 mindset of the super-powers". ²

This section sets out her positions exactly as the sources report them, in her own terms. It is not a verdict by the museum.

Saadawi described herself as a "socialist-feminist", holding that the feminist struggle cannot be won under capitalism; in a 2018 interview she clarified that she was not a Marxist. ²

On religion, she said in a 2014 interview that "the root of the oppression of women lies in the global post-modern capitalist system, which is supported by religious fundamentalism". ²

After hundreds were killed in the 2015 Hajj crowd disaster, she asked why pilgrims "need to stone the devil" and "need to kiss that black stone", said that elements of the Hajj such as kissing the Black Stone had pre-Islamic pagan roots, and called the refusal to criticise religion "not liberalism" but "censorship". ^{2 3}

She described the Islamic veil as "a tool of oppression of women", opposed polygamy, demanded equality between men and women in inheritance, and called for the abolition of religious instruction in Egyptian schools. ^{2 3}

As a doctor she opposed genital cutting of both sexes: responding in 2007 to the death of the twelve-year-old Bedour Shaker during a circumcision operation, she wrote that doctors and clerics must learn that "the right religion doesn't cut children's organs". ²

She was equally blunt about the United States, describing its war in Afghanistan in a 2002 Berkeley lecture as "a war to exploit the oil in the region" and its foreign policy and support of Israel as "real terrorism". ²

This section reports what the sources record of Saadawi's belief, without a verdict from the museum.

Wikidata records her religion as atheism, and the Arabic Wikipedia article's infobox says the same; but that infobox field is drawn from Wikidata, so the two are a single source family rather than two independent attestations. ^{4 3}

Neither the English article nor Encyclopaedia Britannica records any religious affiliation for her: what they document is a writer raised in a traditional Egyptian family who became one of the Arab world's most uncompromising critics of religious fundamentalism, whom opponents repeatedly accused of apostasy in court — accusations the courts rejected — and whose own statements, quoted above, attack religious authority and specific rituals while also appealing, at times, to what "the right religion" would or would not do. ^{2 1}

Because the atheism attestation rests on one source family, and the founder's rule is that doubt stays unclassified, the museum records her faith as unknown and carries her views here exactly as the sources state them — neither softened into a school attestation nor sharpened beyond what was sourced. ^{4 2}

Saadawi died on 21 March 2021, aged eighty-nine, at a hospital in Cairo; the Arabic article records her burial in the family cemetery at 6th of October City, with only her family present under pandemic restrictions. ^{2 3}

Her honours include the Council of Europe's North–South Prize (2004), the Inana International Prize in Belgium (2005), honorary doctorates from the two Brussels universities (2007) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (2010), the Stig Dagerman Prize (2011), the International Peace Bureau's Seán MacBride Peace Prize (2012), a place in the BBC's 100 Women (2015), and Time magazine's 100 Women of the Year list for 1981, published in 2020. ²

• English Wikipedia article "Nawal El Saadawi" (revision 1380913352); Arabic Wikipedia article «نوال السعداوي» (revision 76661130); Urdu Wikipedia article «نوال السعداوی» (revision 9653893 — used only for its biographical frame; its unsourced polemical "beliefs" section is not relied on anywhere); Wikidata item Q238514; Encyclopaedia Britannica entry "Nawal El Saadawi".
• Conflicts recorded, not resolved: Women and Sex is dated 1969 by Britannica and the English article's bibliography but 1972 in the English article's narrative; her Ain Shams research is dated 1973–1976 by the English article and 1972–1974 by Britannica; Memoirs of a Woman Doctor is dated 1958 by the English article's bibliography and 1960 by Britannica; her place of death is Cairo in the English article and Britannica, "South Giza" in the Arabic infobox.