Fearless author and campaigner became ‘Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world’
Nawal El Saadawi was six years old when she was circumcised. She cried for her mother until she saw her standing with her aunts, watching and smiling. ‘‘Since I was a child that deep wound left in my body never healed,’’ she wrote long after the traumatic event.
Other episodes in her childhood outraged her too. She was furious when her grandmother declared that ‘‘a boy is worth 15 girls at least . . . girls are a blight’’. Aged 7, she wrote a letter to God in which she stated: ‘‘If you are not fair, I’m not ready to believe in you.’’ When she was 10 she narrowly avoided being married off. ‘‘I wept over my femininity before I even knew what it was,’’ she wrote.
Writing became a means of expressing her anger. It was ‘‘an act of rebellion against injustice exercised in the name of religion, or morals or love’’, she said. Over the next eight decades El Saadawi, who has died aged 89, published more than 50 works of fiction and non-fiction, as well as plays, memoirs and short stories. She campaigned against female genital mutilation, forced marriages, polygamy, and social and religious restrictions on women. She became ‘‘the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world’’, a leading feminist and figurehead for women’s rights in a deeply conservative region, but at a price.
She was imprisoned, censored, subjected to death threats, forced into exile and compelled to abandon a quixotic presidential campaign. But El Saadawi was never silenced. In 2011, aged 79, she joined the young revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square who ended the dictatorial regime of President Mubarak during the so-called Arab Spring.
She told the BBC in 2018 that she regretted only that she had not fought even harder for the causes she believed in. ‘‘I should be more outspoken. I should be more aggressive, because the world is becoming more aggressive, and we need people to speak loudly against injustices,’’ she said. ‘‘I speak loudly because I am angry.’’
Nawal El Saadawi was born in the Nile delta north of Cairo, the second of nine siblings. Her father was an official in the education ministry, her mother the daughter of a wealthy Ottoman Turkish family.
Though they circumcised their daughter, her parents were relatively liberal by the standards of the time and believed all their children should be educated, regardless of gender. Her mother supported her when she resisted marriage at 10. El Saadawi allegedly deterred other suitors by smearing aubergine on her teeth to make them black.
She excelled academically, winning a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Cairo. There she met the first of her three husbands, Ahmed Helmi, with whom she had a daughter, Mona, but he was an addict and she left him after two years when he became abusive.
After graduating in 1955, she returned to her home village to work as a doctor, turning her experiences into a novel, Memoirs of a
Woman Doctor. She married Rashad Bey, a lawyer, but swiftly divorced him when he proved too ‘‘patriarchal’’. He threw the manuscript of one of her novels out of the window, tore up her Medical Association card and once tried to throttle her.
She returned to Cairo in 1963 to become a senior official in the Ministry of Health. A year later she married Sherif Hatata, a fellow activist who helped to translate her books into English and with whom she had a son, Atef. That marriage lasted 43 years until she divorced him for being unfaithful. ‘‘Oh, the complexity of the patriarchal character,’’ she observed. ‘‘He wrote books about gender equality, then he betrayed his wife.’’
In 1972 she published Women and Sex, which described female genital mutilation,
virginity testing and other forms of assault on women’s bodies, and was subsequently banned. It aroused such anger in Egypt’s political and religious establishments that she was dismissed from her government post.
In 1975 she published Woman at Point Zero, a novel about a death row inmate she met in Cairo’s Qanatir women’s prison. It began, ‘‘Let me speak. Do not interrupt me. I have no time to listen to you,’’ before proceeding to tell the story of a woman who was born poor, genitally mutilated, raped by male relatives, beaten and married off to an old man before turning to prostitution and killing her pimp. Two years later she published The Hidden
Face of Eve, in which she described in graphic detail her own circumcision, and the child marriages, honour killings and other abuses she had witnessed as a village doctor.
In 1981, aged 50, she was one of hundreds of dissidents rounded up by President Sadat. She was detained in Qanatir for three months, sharing a cell with a dozen other women and using a smuggled eye pencil to record her experiences on toilet paper. After Sadat was assassinated that October, she was freed and published Memoirs from the Women’s Prison.
Mubarak’s new regime censored her writings and banned her from the national media. She received death threats from Islamic fundamentalist groups, and appeared on a list of targets published in a Saudi newspaper. Police guards were posted outside her home, ostensibly to protect her, but she did not trust them. In the late 1980s she and her husband fled to the United States.
El Saadawi’s anger was not just directed at Egypt, Islam and the Arab world. She was also a harsh critic of Western hypocrisy, colonialism, militarism, capitalism and US support for Israel. She considered the Islamic veil to be a ‘‘tool of oppression’’ but also condemned the makeup and clothes worn by women in the West.
She returned to Egypt after almost two decades, and stood against Mubarak in the 2004 presidential elections. She withdrew when the authorities began threatening her supporters and banned her rallies.
After her third divorce, she lived in a tiny apartment in Cairo. She was honoured around the world, but never in Egypt. She did not appear to mind. ‘‘Exile, prison, death threats, three divorces and all that, it was difficult but it was rich, and I would live it exactly the same again.’’ –
‘‘Oh, the complexity of the patriarchal character. He wrote books about gender equality, then he betrayed his wife.’’
Nawal El Saadawi on her third husband