Nawal El Saadawi: Egyptian author and activist who challenged taboos

When her grandmother told her that “girls are a blight”, the young Nawal El Saadawi stamped her foot, furious that a member of her own family would believe “a boy is worth 15 girls at least”. Around the same time, as a 10-year-old in Egypt, she successfully rebelled when her parents tried to marry her, by blackening her teeth and pouring coffee on to a suitor.

El Saadawi ultimately graduated from high school at the top of her class, won a scholarship to study medicine, and rose to become Egypt’s public health director, all while immersing herself in Marxist politics and feminist thought. In 1972, she lost her job at the health ministry after publishing the nonfiction book Women and Sex, which linked violence against women’s bodies with political and economic oppression.

Defying taboos, El Saadawi wrote about rape, sexual abuse, the fixation on women’s virginity, and the ritual of female genital mutilation, a common practice in parts of Africa and the Middle East. At the age of six, she recalls in her later book The Hidden Face of Eve, she was plucked from her bed in the middle of the night and carried to the bathroom, where her genitals were slashed as she wept and called for help.

Opening her eyes, she was stunned to see her mother standing nearby, smiling among the strangers who had wounded her with a knife. As she watched her sister being dragged into the same bathroom, El Saadawi wrote, she was struck by a revelation: “We were born of a special sex, the female sex. We are destined in advance to taste of misery, and to have a part of our body torn away by cold, unfeeling cruel hands.”

El Saadawi, who died aged 89 on 21 March at a hospital in Cairo, spent decades championing women’s equality, emerging as one of the Arab world’s foremost feminists while publishing more than 50 novels, story collections, plays and nonfiction books. She continued writing in the face of censorship, death threats from Muslim extremists, and – after being jailed in September 1981 for “crimes against the state” – imprisonment.

Using an eyeliner pencil that a fellow prisoner smuggled behind bars, she scrawled her thoughts on a roll of toilet paper, having been denied paper or a pen. With another forbidden luxury, a transistor radio, she listened one night in October to reports that president Anwar Sadat had been assassinated, paving the way for her release weeks later under his successor Hosni Mubarak.

“If you imagine Margaret Sanger in Brooklyn in 1916 – her birth control clinic smashed by the police, her books and pamphlets confiscated, herself dragged off and held for trial on charges of immorality – you have something of the position of Nawal El Saadawi today in Egypt,” author Vivian Gornick wrote in 1982, reviewing The Hidden Face of Eve for The New York Times.

El Saadawi’s death was confirmed by her friend Menna Elabiad, an Egyptian journalist. She said El Saadawi had had difficulty swallowing food, and had been recovering from a fall.

In a 2018 interview with Channel 4 News, El Saadawi spoke of liberating women “economically, socially, psychologically, physically, religiously” – not just in Egypt but across the planet. “Feminism was not invented by American women, as many people think,” she added. “No, feminism is embedded in the culture, and in the struggle of all women all over the world.”

El Saadawi condemned the double standard which demanded that women be chaste while men were expected to be promiscuous, with multiple wives permitted under Islamic law. Angering some feminists, she urged women not to wear make-up – which she considered another way in which they were reduced to “sex objects” – and campaigned against the hijab and other head-coverings for Muslim women.

She also proudly declared that she was “not really fit for the role of a wife”, noting that she had divorced three men: the first, in her telling, after he turned to drugs and tried to kill her; the second after he became too “patriarchal”; and the third after he cheated on her.

British writer and publisher Kadija Sesay, who acted as her agent in the west, recalled that El Saadawi extended her fight for equality even to the dining room, where she believed that no one should sit at the head of a table, and to the lecture hall, where she sometimes invited audience members to join her on the stage to ask questions.

“She did not believe she was above anyone else,” Sesay said, “but neither was anyone above her.”

The second of nine children, Nawal El Saadawi was born in Kafr Tahla, a village outside Cairo, on 27 October 1931. She later told The Observer that she had been lucky to be born a girl: “It was a handicap that pushed me.” Her father was a government education official, her mother a housewife.

El Saadawi received a medical degree from Cairo University in 1955, specialising in psychiatry, and returned to her village to work as a doctor, often treating the damage from female genital mutilation. The procedure was criminalised by a 2008 law, though she later said it would take years to eradicate the practice.

In 1966 she earned a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University. She later practised psychiatry and worked for the United Nations, including as director of a women’s training and research programme in Ethiopia. Mainly she focused on her writing, publishing novels including Woman at Point Zero (1975), about a sex worker who was sentenced to death for killing her pimp.

“Her central themes revolved around the trinity of creativity, dissidence and revolution,” says Omnia Amin, who translated some of her books into English. “All three fed into one another as creativity involves dissidence and dissidence leads to revolution. This made all her books revolve around the need to remove the blindfolds placed around the mind.”

After receiving death threats for her critiques of Islam, El Saadawi went into exile in the United States, lecturing at universities for several years before returning to Egypt in 1996. She faced persistent criticism for works including God Resigns in the Summit Meeting, a play in which God is questioned by Jews, Christians and Muslims; in her telling, police pressured her Arabic publishers to destroy the play.

Her marriages to Ahmed Helmy, Rashad Bey, and Sherif Hetata, a former political prisoner who translated many of her books, ended in divorce. Survivors include a daughter from her first marriage, writer Mona Helmy; a son from her third marriage, filmmaker Atef Hetata; and a grandson.

El Saadawi briefly ran for Egyptian president in 2005, ending her campaign after she said she was prevented from holding public events or appearing on state radio or television. She later joined the 2011 protests at Tahrir Square in Cairo, which culminated in Mubarak’s resignation, and remained active in Egyptian politics into her eighties.

“I am becoming more radical with age,” she told The Guardian with a laugh, months before the protests began. “I have noticed that writers, when they are old, become milder. But for me it is the opposite. Age makes me more angry.”

Nawal El Saadawi, author, physician and feminist activist, born 27 October 1931, died 21 March 2021

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