Dr. Saadawi was among some 1,500 activists arrested by President Sadat shortly before his assassination in October 1981. She was released three months later and published, in Arabic, “Memoirs of the Women’s Prison” in 1983.
His message and manner have generated equivocal assessments in the West.
After Dr. Saadawi’s first book to be translated into English, “The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World”, was published in the United States in 1982 by Beacon Press, Vivian Gornick, revising it in The New York The Times Book Review wrote: “For an American feminist, it is a curious job.”
“Written by a Marxist who read Freud,” she continued, “in a country and for a people who demand a polite introduction to the idea of equality for women, the book seems disoriented by the inorganic nature of its understanding.”
Four years later, reviewing Dr. Saadawi’s novel “God dies on the Nile”, Indian-born American writer Bharati Mukherjee wrote that the author “addresses social issues frankly and passionately, turning the systematic brutalization of peasants and women into powerful allegory. ”
She added: “This openness can alienate American readers.”
Under President Mubarak, Sadat’s successor, Dr. Saadawi was placed under police guard, allegedly to protect her from Islamic threats. His name was included in the so-called list of dead published in Saudi Arabia.
After fleeing to Duke, where she taught from 1993 to 1996, Dr. Saadawi wrote two more volumes of autobiography. When she returned to Egypt, she continued to face fundamentalist charges of apostasy and heresy. She announced plans to run for president against Mubarak in 2004, but decided to boycott the election when her followers were threatened.
In her 80s, she seemed to suggest that her fight was far from over.
“Do you feel like you’re released?” she asked a writer for The Guardian, a woman, in an interview in 2015. When the writer nodded, Dr. Saadawi said, “Well, I feel like I’m not.”