Nawal El Saadawi facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Nawal El Saadawi
نوال السعداوي
Saadawi in 2008
Born	(1931-10-22)22 October 1931 Kafr Tahla, Egypt
Died	21 March 2021(2021-03-21) (aged 89) Cairo, Egypt
Other names	Nawal Zeinab el Sayed
Alma mater	Cairo University Columbia University
Occupation	Physician, psychiatrist, author
Spouse(s)	Ahmed Helmi ​ ​ (m. 1955; div. 1957)​ Rashad Bey ​ (divorced)​ Sherif Hatata ​ ​ (m. 1964; div. 2010)​
Children	2

Nawal Elsaadawi (Egyptian Arabic: نوال السعداوى, ALA-LC: Nawāl Elsaʻdāwī, 22 October 1931 – 21 March 2021) was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician. She wrote numerous books on the subject of women in Islam. She was described as "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab World", and as "Egypt's most radical woman".

She was founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. She was awarded honorary degrees on three continents. In 2004, she won the North–South Prize from the Council of Europe. In 2005, she won the Inana International Prize in Belgium, and in 2012, the International Peace Bureau awarded her the 2012 Seán MacBride Peace Prize.

Early life

The second-eldest of nine children, Saadawi was born on 22 October 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla, Egypt. She had described her mother and father as being relatively liberal when growing up.

Her Upper Egyptian father was a government official in the Ministry of Education, who had campaigned against the British occupation of Egypt during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. As a result, he was exiled to a small town in the Nile Delta, and the government refrained from promoting him for 10 years. He was relatively progressive and taught his daughter self-respect and to speak her mind. He also encouraged her to study the Arabic language. However, when El Saadawi was 10 years old, her family tried to make her marry, but her mother supported her in resisting. Both her parents died at a young age, leaving Saadawi with the sole burden of providing for a large family. Her mother, Zaynab, was partially descendant from a wealthy Ottoman family; Saadawi described both her maternal grandfather, Shoukry, and her maternal grandmother as having Ottoman origin. Even as a child she objected to the male-dominated society she lived in, with sons valued far more highly than daughters, reacting angrily to her grandmother who said that "a boy is worth 15 girls at least... Girls are a blight". She described herself proudly as a dark-skinned Egyptian woman since she was young.

Career

Saadawi graduated as a medical doctor in 1955 from Cairo University. That year, she married Ahmed Helmi, whom she met as a fellow student in medical school. They have a daughter, Mona Helmi. The marriage ended after two years. Through her medical practice, she observed women's physical and psychological problems and connected them with oppressive cultural practices, patriarchal oppression, class oppression and imperialist oppression. Her second husband was a colleague, Rashad Bey.

While working as a doctor in her birthplace of Kafr Tahla, she observed the hardships and inequalities faced by rural women. After attempting to protect one of her patients from domestic violence, Saadawi was summoned back to Cairo. She eventually became the Director of the Ministry of Public Health and met her third husband, Sherif Hatata, while sharing an office in the Ministry of Health. Hatata, also a medical doctor and writer, had been a political prisoner for 13 years. They married in 1964 and have a son. Saadawi and Hatata lived together for 43 years and divorced in 2010.

Saadawi attended Columbia University, earning a master's degree in public health in 1966. In 1972, she published Woman and ... (المرأة والجنس), confronting and contextualising various aggressions perpetrated against women's bodies. The book became a foundational text of second-wave feminism. As a consequence of the book and her political activities, Saadawi was dismissed from her position at the Ministry of Health. She also lost her positions as chief editor of a health journal, and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt. From 1973 to 1976, Saadawi worked on researching women and neurosis in Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine. From 1979 to 1980, she was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa (ECA) and the Middle East (ECWA).

Court cases against her

In 2002 a legal attempt was made by Nabih el-Wahsh in an Egyptian Court to legally divorce el-Saadwai from her husband on account of hesba, a 9th-century principle of shariah law, that allows for the conviction of Muslims who are seen to be harming Islam. The evidence used against her was a March interview in which el-Wahsh claims was proof she had abandoned Islam. The legal attempt was unsuccessful.

In 2008, a similar attempt was made to strip el-Saadawi of her Egyptian nationality due to her radical opinions and writing, this attempt was also unsuccessful.

Imprisonment

Long viewed as controversial and dangerous by the Egyptian government, Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine in 1981 called Confrontation. She was imprisoned in September by President of Egypt Anwar Sadat. Saadawi stated once in an interview, "I was arrested because I believed Sadat. He said there is democracy and we have a multi-party system and you can criticize. So I started criticizing his policy and I landed in jail." Sadat claimed that the established government was a democracy for the people and that democracy as always was open for constructive criticism. According to Saadawi, Sadat imprisoned her because of her criticism of his purported democracy. Even in prison she still found a way to fight against the oppression of women. While in prison she formed the Arab Women's Solidarity Association. This was the first legal and independent feminist group in Egypt. In prison, she was denied pen and paper, however, that did not stop her from continuing to write. She used a "stubby black eyebrow pencil" and "a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper" to record her thoughts. She was released later that year, one month after the President's assassination. Of her experience she wrote: "Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies."

In 1982, she founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association. She described her organization as "historical, socialist, and feminist".

Saadawi was one of the women held at Qanatir Women's Prison. Her incarceration formed the basis for her 1983 Memoirs from the Women's Prison (Arabic: مذكرات في سجن النساء). Her contact with a prisoner at Qanatir, nine years before she was imprisoned there, served as inspiration for an earlier work, a novel titled Woman at Point Zero (Arabic: امرأة عند نقطة الصفر, 1975).

Further persecution, teaching in the US, and later activism

In 1993, when her life was threatened by Islamists and political persecution, Saadawi was forced to flee Egypt. She accepted an offer to teach at Duke University's Asian and African Languages Department in North Carolina, as well as at the University of Washington. She later 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, she moved back to Egypt.

Saadawi continued her activism and considered running in the 2005 Egyptian presidential election, before stepping out because of stringent requirements for first-time candidates. She was among the protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011. She called for the abolition of religious instruction in Egyptian schools.

Saadawi was awarded the 2004 North–South Prize by the Council of Europe. In July 2016, she headlined the Royal African Society's "Africa Writes" literary festival in London, where she spoke "On Being a Woman Writer" in conversation with Margaret Busby.

At the Göteborg Book Fair that took place on 27 to 30 September 2018, Saadawi attended a seminar on development in Egypt and the Middle East after the Arab Spring and during her talk at the event stated that "colonial, capitalist, imperialist, racist" global powers, led by the United States, collaborated with the Egyptian government to end the 2011 Egyptian revolution. She added that she remembered seeing then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Tahrir Square handing out dollar bills to the youth in order to encourage them to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood in the upcoming elections.

Nawal El Saadawi held the positions of Author for the Supreme Council for Arts and Social Sciences, Cairo; Director General of the Health Education Department, Ministry of Health, Cairo, Secretary General of the Medical Association, Cairo, Egypt, and medical doctor at the University Hospital and Ministry of Health. She was the founder of the Health Education Association and the Egyptian Women Writers' Association; she was Chief Editor of Health Magazine in Cairo, and Editor of Medical Association Magazine.

Writing

Saadawi at the Göteborg Book Fair in 2010

Saadawi began writing early in her career. Her earliest writings include a selection of short stories entitled I Learned Love (1957) and her first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958). She subsequently wrote numerous novels and short stories and a personal memoir, Memoir from the Women's Prison (1986). Saadawi has been published in a number of anthologies, and her work has been translated from the original Arabic into more than 30 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and others.

In 1972, she published her first work of non-fiction, Women and ..., which evoked the antagonism of highly placed political and theological authorities. It also led to her dismissal at the Ministry of Health. Other works include The Hidden Face of Eve, God Dies by the Nile, The Circling Song, Searching, The Fall of the Imam (described as "a powerful and moving exposé of the horrors that women and children can be exposed to by the tenets of faith"), and Woman at Point Zero.

Many have criticised her work The Hidden Face of Eve on claims that she was writing for the "critical foreigner". The original title of the book, directly translated into English was "The Naked Face of the Arab Woman" and many chapters have been removed from the English edition of the book, when compared to the Arabic original.

She contributed the piece "When a woman rebels" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global, edited by Robin Morgan, and was a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby, which included her essay "About Me in Africa—Politics and Religion in my Childhood".

Saadawi's novel Zeina was published in Lebanon in 2009. The French translation was published under the pseudonym Nawal Zeinab el Sayed, using her mother's maiden name.

Saadawi spoke fluent English in addition to her native Egyptian Arabic. As she wrote in Arabic, she saw the question of translation into English or French as "a big problem" linked to the fact that

"the colonial capitalist powers are mainly English- or French-speaking.... I am still ignored by big literary powers in the world, because I write in Arabic, and also because I am critical of the colonial, capitalist, racist, patriarchal mindset of the super-powers."

Her book Mufakirat Tifla fi Al-Khamisa wa Al-Thamaneen (A Notebook of an 85-year-old Girl), based on excerpts from her journal, was published in 2017.

Film

Saadawi is the subject of the film She Spoke the Unspeakable, directed by Jill Nicholls, broadcast in February 2017 in the BBC One television series Imagine.

Death

Saadawi died on 21 March 2021, aged 89, at a hospital in Cairo. Her life was commemorated on BBC Radio 4's obituary programme Last Word.

Selected awards and honours

• 2004: North–South Prize from the Council of Europe
• 2005: Inana International Prize, Belgium
• 2007: Honorary Doctorate, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• 2007: Honorary Doctorate, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
• 2010: Honorary Doctorate, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
• 2011: Stig Dagerman Prize
• 2012: Seán MacBride Peace Prize
• 2015: BBC's 100 Women
• 2020: Time's 100 Women of the Year (1981)

Selected works

Saadawi wrote prolifically, placing some of her works online.

Novels and novellas

• Mudhakkirat tabiba (Cairo, 1958). Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, trans. Catherine Cobham (Saqi Books, 1988)
• Al ghayib (Cairo, 1965). Searching, trans. Shirley Eber (Zed Books, 1991)
• Imra'tani fi-Imra'a (Cairo, 1968). Two Women in One, trans. Osman Nusairi and Jana Gough (Saqi Books, 1985)
• Maut ar-raǧul al-waḥīd ʿala ‚l-arḍ (1974). God Dies by the Nile, trans. Sherif Hetata (Zed Books, 1985)
• Al-khait wa'ayn al-hayat (Cairo, 1976). The Well of Life and the Thread: Two Short Novels, trans. Sherif Hetata (Lime Tree, 1993)
• Ughniyat al-atfal al da iriyah (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1977). The Circling Song, trans. Marilyn Booth (Zed Books, 1989)
• Emra'a enda noktat el sifr (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1977). Woman at Point Zero, trans. Sherif Hetata (Zed Books, 1983)
• Mawt Ma'ali al-Wazir Sabiqan (1980). Death of an Ex-Minister, trans. Shirley Eber (Methuen, 1987)
• Suqūṭ al-imām (Cairo, 1987). The Fall of the Imam, trans. Sherif Hetata (Methuen, 1988)
• Jann āt wa-Iblīs (Beirut, 1992). The Innocence of the Devil, trans. Sherif Hetata (Methuen, 1994)
• Ḥubb fī zaman al-naf̣t (Cairo, 1993). Love in the Kingdom of Oil, trans. Basil Hatim and Malcolm Williams (Saqi Books, 2001)
• Al-Riwayah (Cairo: Dar El Hilal, 2004). The Novel, trans. Omnia Amin and Rick London (Interlink Books, 2009)
• Zeina (Beirut: Dar Al Saqi, 2009). Zeina, trans. Amira Nowaira (Saqi Books, 2011)

Short story collections

• Ta'allamt al-hubb (Cairo, 1957). I Learned Love
• Lahzat sidq (Cairo, 1959). Moment of Truth
• Little Tenderness (Cairo, 1960)
• al-Khayt wa-l-jidar (1972). The Thread and the Wall
• Ain El Hayat (Beirut, 1976)
• Kānat hiya al-aḍʻaf ["She Was the Weaker"] (1979). She Has No Place in Paradise, trans. Shirley Eber (Methuen, 1987). Includes three additional stories: "She Has No Place in Paradise", "Two Women Friends", and "'Beautiful'".
• Adab Am Kellet Abad (Cairo, 2000)

Plays

• Ithna 'ashar imra'a fi zinzana wahida (Cairo, 1984). Twelve Women in a Cell
• Isis (Cairo, 1985)
• God Resigns in the Summit Meeting (1996), published by Madbouli, and four other plays included in her Collected Works (45 books in Arabic), Cairo: Madbouli, 2007
• Twelve Women in a Cell: Plays by Mediterranean Women (Aurora Metro Books, 1994)

Memoirs

• Mudhakkirat fi Sijn al-Nisa (Cairo, 1983). Memoirs from the Women's Prison, trans. Marilyn Booth (The Women's Press, 1986)
• Rihlati hawla al-'alam (Cairo, 1986). My Travels Around the World, trans. Shirley Eber (Methuen, 1991)
• Memoirs of a Child Called Soad (Cairo, 1990)
• Awraqi hayati, first volume (Cairo, 1995). A Daughter of Isis, trans. Sherif Hetata (Zed Books, 1999)
• Awraqi hayati, second volume (Cairo, 1998). Walking Through Fire, trans. Sherif Hetata (Zed Books, 2002)
• My Life, Part III (Cairo, 2001)

Non-fiction

• Women and ... (Cairo, 1969)
• Woman Is the Origin (Cairo, 1971)
• Men and ... (Cairo, 1973)
• The Naked Face of Arab Women (Cairo, 1974)
• Women and Neurosis (Cairo, 1975)
• Al-Wajh al-'ari lil-mar'a al-'arabiyy (1977). The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, trans. Sherif Hetata (Zed Press, 1980)
• On Women (Cairo, 1986)
• A New Battle in Arab Women Liberation (Cairo, 1992)
• Collection of Essays (Cairo, 1998)
• Collection of Essays (Cairo, 2001)
• Breaking Down Barriers (Cairo, 2004)

Compilations in English

• North/South: The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (Zed Books, 1997)
• Off Limits: New Writings on Fear and Sin (Gingko Library, 2019, ISBN: 978-88-87847-16-1)

See also

• List of Egyptian authors
• Feminism in Egypt
• Islamic literature