Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist.
El Saadawi was born in 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla. Her family were a mix of traditional and progressive. At the age of six El Saadawi was pinned down by four women in her home in Egypt and was subjected to female genital mutilation with a sharpened razor blade. El Saadawi’s father insisted that all his children were educated and also taught her self-respect and to be able to speak her mind.
In 1955, El Saadawi graduated as a medical doctor from Cairo University. While at University her radical views were formed, she said that when she dissected a body it opened her eyes, she also believes that her desire to fight comes from her grandmother who was a rebel. While working as a physician at Cairo University she came face to face with women’s physical and psychological problems and how they were connected with oppressive cultural practices, patriarchal oppression, class oppression and imperialist oppression.
She spent time working in her birthplace of Kafr Tahla but after attempting to protect a patient from domestic violence she was summoned back to Cairo. In 1966 she became the director-general of the health education department within the ministry and two years later she founded Health magazine. The magazine lasted several years before being shut down by the Minister of Health due to the fact it covered issues like female circumcision, women’s problems and the issue of virginity.
In 1957 a selection of short stories entitled I Learned Love (written by El Saadawi were published followed a year later by her first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. In 1972 her book, Women and Sex was published, she had written the book in the 50s but had previously been unable to find a publisher, she had to resort to having it published in Lebanaon as it was banned in Egypt. The book confronted and contextualised the various aggressions perpetrated against women’s bodies, including female circumcision. It became a foundational text of second-wave feminism and was condemned by religious and political authorities. El Saadawi lost her job at the Ministry of Health as a result of the book’s publication.
From 1973 to 1976 she researched women and neurosis in the Ain Shams University’s Faculty of Medicine and from 1979 to 1980 she was the United Nations Advisor for the Women’s Programme in Africa (ECA) and Middle East (ECWA).
In 1981 El Saadawi helped to publish a feminist magazine called Confrontation which, coupled with her long fight for Egyptian women’s social and intellectual freedom – a campaign that had caused her to be denied all avenues of official jobs lead to her being charged with committing crimes against the state. She was sentenced to Qanatir Women’s Prison by President Anwar al-Sadat. Her time in prison formed the basis for her later book, ‘Memoirs from the Women’s Prison’ and the beginnings of it were written on a roll of toilet paper using a smuggled cosmetic pencil while still imprisoned.
In 1982, following her release from prison, El Saadawi founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA). She later served as editor of the organisation’s publication, Noon which was closed in 1991 by the government shortly before they forced the AWSA to cease its activities. From 1988 to 1993 El Saadawi’s name was on death lists issued by fanatical religious political organisations. In 1993 she was forced to flee Egypt due to her life being threatened. She became a professor at Duke University’s Asian and African Languages Department in North Carolina. She has since held positions at a number of prestigious colleges and universities including Cairo University, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Sorbonne, Georgetown, Florida State University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1996, El Saadawi moved back to Egypt where she has continued her activism, going so far as to consider running in the 2005 Egyptian presidential election. She has faced frequent legal challenges from political and religious opponents, including accusations of apostasy when an Islamist lawyer attempted to forcibly divorce her from her husband. In May 2008 she was accused of apostasy and heresy by al-Azhar University, the major centre of Islamic learning but she won.
El Saadawi was among the protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011 and believes that the large patriarchal religions are the biggest threat to women’s liberation and are simply a vehicle to oppress women. In an attempt to address this, she founded the Egyptian chapter of the Global Solidarity for Secular society and has called for the abolition of religious instruction in the Egyptian schools.
El Saadawi is also an advocate against female genital mutilation, she has written about and criticised this practice which she herself had to endure at a young age. In 2008, following the death of 12-year-old Badour Shaker in June 2007, during an operation El Saadawi wrote an open letter to her parents urging them to speak out so that the world could hear their pain and use it to educate others. The pressure following the event lead to the Egyptian government passed a law banning FGM. El Saadawi believes that about 90 per cent of women are still circumcised in Egypt due to a lack of education of mothers and fathers to try and fight the tradition and inform them that it is dangerous for both physical and mental health. She is still censored on Egyptian television from talking about the issue.
El Saadawi has been awarded honorary degrees on three continents and won various prizes including: the North-South prize from the Council of Europe (2004); the Inana International Prize in Belgium and in 2012 she was awarded with the Séan MacBride Peace Prize by the International Peace Bureau.