Egypt’s pioneering writer Nawal El Saadawi died on Sunday at the age of 89, after a lifetime of fighting for women’s rights and equality.
The feminist author of more than 55 books first highlighted the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) with The Hidden Face of Eve in 1980. A trained doctor, El Saadawi also campaigned against women who wear the veil, polygamy and inequality Islamic inheritance rights between men and women.
She died in a Cairo hospital after a long battle with the disease.
Born in October 1931 in a village in the Nile Delta, north of Cairo, El Saadawi studied medicine at Cairo University and Columbia University in New York. The novelist, who regularly wrote for Egyptian newspapers, also worked as a psychiatrist and university professor.
One of the leading feminists of her generation, the 1972 book El Saadawi, Women and Sex, sparked a critical and condemning reaction from Egypt’s political and religious establishment, resulting in the loss of the activist’s job in the health ministry.
She was arrested for two months in 1981 by the late President Anwar Sadat during a wide-ranging political repression in which several intellectuals were detained. While in prison, El Saadawi wrote about her experience in Memoirs of the Female Prison, writing on a roll of toilet paper with an eyebrow pencil smuggled by another prisoner.
The writer became the target of Islamic militants, named after her on death lists that included the Egyptian Nobel Literature winner Naguib Mahfouz, who was stabbed in 1994 in an attempt on his life.
“This refusal to criticize religion … This is not liberalism. This is censorship, ”she said.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2009, she said: “I don’t regret any of my 47 books. If I started my life over, I would write the same books. They are all very relevant to this day: issues of gender, class, colonialism (although this was British and now American), female genital mutilation, male genital mutilation, capitalism, sexual rape and economic rape. “
After undergoing female genital mutilation at the age of six and seeing the damage it could do during her work as a village doctor, she campaigned against the practice.
“Since I was a child, that deep wound left in my body has never healed,” she wrote in an autobiography.
El Saadawi also founded and led the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, in addition to founding the Arab Association for Human Rights.
El Saadawi moved to Duke University in North Carolina in 1993 due to death threats. After returning to Egypt, she ran for president in 2005, but abandoned her campaign after accusing security forces of not allowing her to hold rallies.
In 2007, she was condemned by Egypt’s highest Sunni Muslim authority, Al-Azhar, for her play God resigns at the summit – at which God is questioned by Jewish, Muslim and Christian prophets and finally gives up.
His views resulted in several legal challenges, including allegations of apostasy from Islamists.
Despite the challenges of the authorities, the writer said in 2010 that she was motivated to continue with the daily letters she received from people who said their lives had changed with their writing. “A young man came to me in Cairo with his new bride. He said, I want to introduce my wife to you and thank you. Your books have made me a better man. Because of them, I didn’t want to marry a slave, but a free woman. “
In 2005, El Saadawi received the International Inana Award in Belgium, a year after receiving the North-South award from the Council of Europe. In 2020, Time magazine named her on its list of 100 women of the year.
Egypt’s Minister of Culture, Inas Abdel-Dayem, mourned the death of El Saadawi, saying his writings had given rise to a great intellectual movement.
El Saadawi married three times and left a daughter and son.