This is our tribute to her work, which has changed and continues to change the world.

Legendary Egyptian feminist activist, author, novelist, physician and psychiatrist Nawal El Saadawi has passed away. Dr. Nawal El Saadawi was a world-renowned writer, a novelist, a psychiatrist, and the author of more than forty books of fiction and nonfiction. She wrote in Arabic and lived in Egypt.

Her novels and her books on the situation of women have had a deep effect on successive generations of young women and men over the last five decades. As a result of her literary and scientific writings she had to face numerous difficulties and even dangers in her life.

In 1972, she lost her job in the Egyptian Ministry of Health because of her book “Women and Sex,” published in Arabic in Cairo (1969) and banned by the political and religious authorities. In some chapters she wrote against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and linked sexual problems to political and economic oppression. The magazine Health, which she founded and edited for more than three years, was closed down in 1973.

In September 1981 President Sadat put her in prison. She was released at the end of November 1981, two months after his assassination. She wrote her book Memoirs from the Women’s Prison on a roll of toilet paper and an eyebrow pencil smuggled to her cell by an imprisoned young woman in the prostitutes’ ward.

From 1988 to 1993 her name figured on death lists issued by fanatical religious political organizations. On 15 June 1991, the government issued a decree which closed down the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, over which she presided, and handed over its funds to the association Women in Islam. Six months earlier the government had shut down the magazine Noon, published by the association; she was its editor-in-chief.

During the summer of 2001, three of her books were banned at the Cairo International Book Fair. She was accused of apostasy in 2002 by a fundamentalist lawyer who raised a court case to have her forcibly divorced from her husband, Dr. Sherif Hetata. She won the case thanks to Egyptian, Arab and international solidarity.

On 28 January 2007, Nawal El Saadawi and her daughter Mona Helmy, a poet and writer, were accused of apostasy and interrogated by the General Prosecutor in Cairo because of their writings that aimed to honor the name of the mother. They won the case in 2008. Their efforts led to a new child law in Egypt in 2008, giving children born outside marriage the right to carry the mother’s name. FGM was also banned in Egypt by this law in 2008. Nawal El Saadawi had been writing and fighting against FGM for more than fifty years.

Her play “God Resigns at the Summit Meeting” was banned in Egypt during November 2006, and she faced a new trial in Cairo court raised against her by Al Azhar in February 2007, accusing her of apostasy and heresy because of the play. She won the case on 13 May 2008.

Nawal El Saadawi was awarded several national and international literary prizes, lectured at many universities, and participated in numerous international and national conferences. On 3 May 2009, in New York, she delivered the Arthur Miller Lecture at the Pen International Literary Festival. Her works have been translated into more than forty languages and are taught at universities in various countries.

Often described as the “Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world” and “the daughter of Isis,” Saadawi was a pioneering voice on women’s identity and role in society, gender equality, and women’s place in Islam. She was also an outspoken critic of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the human rights violations committed by his regime. Throughout her public life, she advocated for political and social reform and greater freedoms for all Egyptians, supporting numerous pro-democracy initiatives. Her activism for women’s rights and bodily autonomy was one of the main driving forces behind many reforms in Egypt, including the criminalization of female genital mutilation (FGM). She was also a prolific author and novelist whose body of work includes popular titles such as Women at Point Zero, The Hidden Face of Eve, The Fall of the Imam, and God Dies by the Nile.

Sources: https://worldjusticeproject.org/world-justice-forum-iv-speaker-nawal-el-saadawi https://egyptianstreets.com/2021/03/21/pioneering-egyptian-feminist-nawal-el-saadawi-dies-aged-89/