THE FACE AND VOICE OF FEMINISM IN EGYPT
▶ Hamza Hendawi and Kamal Tabikha look back at Nawal El Saadawi’s lifelong campaign for gender equality in her homeland
Nawal El Saadawi, renowned author, physician and the face of Egypt’s feminist movement, died in hospital in Cairo on Sunday, Egyptian state media reported. She was 89. Her daughter, Mona Helmy, said El Saadawi was taken to hospital after her health deteriorated while she was recovering from an accident in which she broke her left thigh.
Internationally recognised with coveted prizes, El Saadawi wrote about 50 books in Arabic, including novels, short stories and memoirs. Many of her works were also translated to other languages.
She made her campaign for women’s equality in Egypt her life’s mission. But her views were considered too radical for many in a patriarchal and conservative Egypt, where the vast majority of its 100 million people are Muslim.
El Saadawi’s liberal critiques of religious matters, tradition and customs earned her scathing criticism, and sometimes retaliation.
“Her legacy is particularly admired by those who already are revolutionary or liberal,” Azza Heikal, a prominent feminist writer and professor of English and comparative literature, tells The National.
“But I think that for many more her ideas were not applicable, which made her a truly controversial figure. In my view, she might have benefited from a little more diplomacy in her work.
“I think her attacks on religion were a little bit misguided, as I and many other feminists think that religion can be beneficial and respectful towards women.”
But such criticism never forced El Saadawi to tone down her lifelong views on society, or her criticism of male domination and a system that left qualified women inferior to men in most professions.
Her main battleground was female genital mutilation, a common practice in the Middle East and Africa that researchers trace back to Pharaonic times. It is ostensibly meant to curtail women’s physical desire, consequently reinforcing their virtue.
El Saadawi was a victim of the practice at the age of 6. It is now a crime, but continues to be practised. That she raised the issue and campaigned against female genital mutilation at a time when no one in Egypt could publicly speak against it is a testament to her courage and integrity.
She also long held the belief that the Muslim veil was not prescribed by Islam and that it was another method of shackling women.
Female genital mutilation and the veil continue to be debated in Egypt along the lines of El Saadawi’s argument.
She was born in 1931, the second of nine children to a couple living in the Nile Delta just north of Cairo. Her father was a government official. “I was brought up in two different classes: the poor peasant class of my father and the upper bourgeois class of my mother, who went to French schools, and wanted to ride horses and play the piano,” El Saadawi told The Guardian in 2015.
“He was 30, she was 15. Of course, my parents preferred my older brother. But he was spoilt, and he didn’t study, and was always failing, while I was good in school.
“So they began to support me. They wanted to marry me off when I was 10, but when I rebelled, my mother stood with me.” Her disenchantment and dismay with patriarchy endured for the rest of her days.
El Saadawi was married and divorced three times. The third marriage ended with what she took to be a confirmation of the hypocrisy of many men in a patriarchal society.
“I lived with him for 43 years and I told everyone: this is the only feminist man on Earth,” she said. “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.”
El Saadawi’s views were not restricted to women’s rights. She was a sharp critic of Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s president of 11 years, who is widely blamed for tolerating extremist groups. Sadat was shot dead by radical Islamists in 1981.
She was among about 1,500 dissidents rounded-up and jailed by Sadat shortly before his assassination, and was released shortly after Hosni Mubarak took office in October 1981.
But things were not any easier for her under Mubarak, who was forced to step down by a popular uprising in which she took part 10 years ago.
El Saadawi received death threats because of her radical views on religion and she was generally censored.
Fearing for her life and isolated at the behest of the government, she left the country to live in exile, lecturing or going on speaking tours at universities in Europe and the US. She returned home in 1996.
In 2004, she considered running against Mubarak in the first presidential election that allowed for more than one candidate. El Saadawi said she dropped out of the race, however, because of a campaign of intimidation by the authorities against residents of her home village in the Nile Delta.
El Saadawi is survived by her daughter, Helmy, and her son, Atef Hetata.
El Saadawi wrote about 50 books in Arabic, including novels, short stories, autobiographies and memoirs