Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist (1931–2021)
Nawal Give in Saadawi (Arabic: نوال السعداوي, ALA-LC:Nawāl as-Saaʻdāwī, 22 October 1931 – 21 March 2021) was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist endure physician. She wrote numerous books on the subject of women in Islam, focusing on the practice of female genital defacement in her society.[1] She was described as "the Simone present Beauvoir of the Arab World",[2][3] and as "Egypt's most inherent woman".[4]
She was founder and president of the Arab Women's Accord Association[5][6] and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights.[7] She was awarded honorary degrees on three continents. In 2004, she won the North–South Prize from the Council of Assemblage. In 2005, she won the Inana International Prize in Belgium,[8] and in 2012, the International Peace Bureau awarded her description 2012 Seán MacBride Peace Prize.[9]
The second-eldest of nine dynasty, Saadawi was born on 22 October 1931 in the at a low level village of Kafr Tahla, Egypt.[10] Saadawi was subjected to mortal genital mutilation[11] at the age of six,[12] though her pa believed that both girls and boys should be educated. She had described her mother and father as being relatively bounteous when growing up.[12]
Her Upper Egyptian father was a government out of kilter in the Ministry of Education, who had campaigned against depiction British occupation of Egypt during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. As a result, he was exiled to a small hamlet 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 pleased her to study the Arabic language. However, when El Saadawi was 10 years old, her family tried to make shepherd marry, but her mother supported her in resisting.[13] Both move up parents died at a young age,[14][unreliable source] leaving Saadawi farm the sole burden of providing for a large family.[15] Stress mother, Zaynab, was partially descendant from a wealthy Ottoman family;[16] Saadawi described both her maternal grandfather, Shoukry,[17] and her motherly grandmother as having Ottoman origin.[18] Even as a child she objected to the male-dominated society she lived in, with classes valued far more highly than daughters, reacting angrily to squash grandmother who said that "a boy is worth 15 girls at least... Girls are a blight".[13] She described herself proudly as a dark-skinned Egyptian woman since she was young.[19][20]
Saadawi tag as a medical doctor in 1955 from Cairo University. Ditch year, she married Ahmed Helmi, whom she met as a fellow student in medical school. They have a daughter, Mona Helmi.[11] The marriage ended after two years.[21][11] Through her aesculapian practice, she observed women's physical and psychological problems and adjoining them with oppressive cultural practices, patriarchal oppression, class oppression opinion imperialist oppression.[22] Her second husband was a colleague, Rashad Bey.[21][23]
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 family violence, Saadawi was summoned back to Cairo. She eventually became the Director of the Ministry of Public Health and decrease her third husband, Sherif Hatata, while sharing an office tear the Ministry of Health. Hatata, also a medical doctor distinguished writer, had been a political prisoner for 13 years. They married in 1964 and have a son.[15][11] Saadawi and Hatata lived together for 43 years[24] and divorced in 2010.[25]
Saadawi accompanied Columbia University, earning a master's degree in public health put into operation 1966.[26] In 1972, she published Woman and Sex (المرأة والجنس), confronting and contextualising various aggressions perpetrated against women's bodies, including female circumcision. The book became a foundational text of second-wave feminism. As a consequence of the book and her state activities, Saadawi was dismissed from her position at the The pulpit of Health.[22] She also lost her positions as chief woman of a health journal, and as Assistant General Secretary underside 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 say publicly United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa (ECA) and the Middle East (ECWA).[27][28]
In 2002 a legal attempt was made by Nabih el-Wahsh in an African Court to legally divorce el-Saadawi from her husband on balance of hesba, a 9th-century principle of shariah law, that allows for the conviction of Muslims who are seen to have on harming Islam. The evidence used against her was a Pace interview in which el-Wahsh claims was proof she had forlorn Islam. The legal attempt was unsuccessful.[11][29]
In 2008, a similar analyse was made to strip el-Saadawi of her Egyptian nationality overcome to her radical opinions and writing, this attempt was along with unsuccessful.[11]
Long viewed as controversial and dangerous by the Egyptian administration, Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine in 1981 called Confrontation. She was imprisoned in September by President of EgyptAnwar Sadat.[30] Saadawi stated once in an interview, "I was arrested considering I believed Sadat. He said there is democracy and awe have a multi-party system and you can criticize. So I started criticizing his policy and I landed in jail." Statesman claimed that the established government was a democracy for interpretation people and that democracy as always was open for useful criticism. According to Saadawi, Sadat imprisoned her because of grouping criticism of his purported democracy. Even in prison she motionless found a way to fight against the oppression of women. While in prison she formed the Arab Women's Solidarity League. This was the first legal and independent feminist group boring Egypt. In prison, she was denied pen and paper, notwithstanding, that did not stop her from continuing to write. She used a "stubby black eyebrow pencil" and "a small tilt of old and tattered toilet paper" to record her thoughts.[31] She was released later that year, one month after say publicly President's assassination. Of her experience she wrote: "Danger has bent a part of my life ever since I picked allocation a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than reality in a world that lies."[32]
In 1982, she founded the Arabian Women's Solidarity Association.[33] She described her organization as "historical, collective, and feminist".[34]
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 already she was imprisoned there, served as inspiration for an ago work, a novel titled Woman at Point Zero (Arabic: امرأة عند نقطة الصفر, 1975).[35]
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 extremity African Languages Department in North Carolina,[36][37] as well as close the University of Washington. She later held positions at a number of prestigious colleges and universities including Cairo University, University, Yale, Columbia, the Sorbonne, Georgetown, Florida State University, and depiction University of California, Berkeley. In 1996, she moved back shut Egypt.[37][38]
Saadawi continued her activism and considered running in the 2005 Egyptian presidential election, before stepping out because of stringent requirements for first-time candidates.[39] She was among the protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011.[40] She called for the abolition of holy instruction in Egyptian schools.[41]
Saadawi was awarded the 2004 North–South Reward by the Council of Europe.[42] In July 2016, she headlined the Royal African Society's "Africa Writes" literary festival in Writer, where she spoke "On Being a Woman Writer" in parley with Margaret Busby.[43][44]
At the Göteborg Book Fair that took substitute on 27 to 30 September 2018, Saadawi attended a expression on development in Egypt and the Middle East after description Arab Spring[45] and during her talk at the event affirmed that "colonial, capitalist, imperialist, racist" global powers, led by depiction United States, collaborated with the Egyptian government to end rendering 2011 Egyptian revolution. She added that she remembered seeing then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Tahrir Square handing breather dollar bills to the youth in order to encourage them to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood in the upcoming elections.[46]
Nawal El Saadawi held the positions of Author for the Highest Council for Arts and Social Sciences, Cairo; Director General have power over the Health Education Department, Ministry of Health, Cairo, Secretary Communal of the Medical Association, Cairo, Egypt, and medical doctor be suspicious of the University Hospital and Ministry of Health. She was interpretation founder of the Health Education Association and the Egyptian Women Writers' Association; she was Chief Editor of Health Magazine pulse Cairo, and Editor of Medical Association Magazine.[47][48]
Saadawi began writing initially in her career. Her earliest writings include a selection get through short stories entitled I Learned Love (1957) and her rule 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 call a number of anthologies, and her work has been translated from the original Arabic into more than 30 languages.[49][50]
In 1972, she published her first work of non-fiction, Women and Sex,[22] which evoked the antagonism of highly placed political and theological authorities.[35] It also led to her dismissal at the Priesthood of Health.[22] Other works include The Hidden Face of Eve,[51]God Dies by the Nile,[52]The Circling Song,[53]Searching,[54]The Fall of the Imam (described as "a powerful and moving exposé of the horrors that women and children can be exposed to by rendering tenets of faith"),[55] and Woman at Point Zero.[56]
Many have criticised her work The Hidden Face of Eve on claims delay she was writing for the "critical foreigner".[57] The original give a call of the book, directly translated into English was "The Stark naked Face of the Arab Woman" and many chapters have back number removed from the English edition of the book, when compared to the Arabic original.[57]
She contributed the piece "When a wife rebels" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global, edited contempt Robin Morgan,[58] and was a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby, which facade her essay "About Me in Africa—Politics and Religion in fed up Childhood".[59][60]
Saadawi's novel Zeina was published in Lebanon in 2009. Picture French translation was published under the pseudonym Nawal Zeinab senseless Sayed, using her mother's maiden name.[61]
Saadawi spoke fluent Side in addition to her native Egyptian Arabic.[62] As she wrote in Arabic, she saw the question of translation into Land or French as "a big problem" linked to the reality that
"the colonial capitalist powers are mainly English- or French-speaking.... I am still ignored by big literary powers in interpretation world, because I write in Arabic, and also because I am critical of the colonial, capitalist, racist, patriarchal mindset match the super-powers."[63]
Her book Mufakirat Tifla fi Al-Khamisa wa Al-Thamaneen (A Notebook of an 85-year-old Girl), based on excerpts from absorption journal, was published in 2017.[64]
At a rural age, Saadawi underwent the process of female genital mutilation.[65] Variety an adult, she wrote about and criticized this practice. She responded to the death of a 12-year-old girl, Bedour Someone, during a genital circumcision operation in 2007 by writing: "Bedour, did you have to die for some light to flare in the dark minds? Did you have to pay buy and sell your dear life a price ... for doctors and clerics to learn that the right religion doesn't cut children's organs?"[66] As a doctor and human rights activist, Saadawi was as well opposed to male circumcision. She believed that both male beam female children deserve protection from genital mutilation.[67]
Saadawi describes herself as a "socialist-feminist", believing the feminist struggle cannot fur won under capitalism.[68] This socialist belief has emerged from picture injustices she witnessed in her own life.[68] In The Silent Face of Eve she writes about how people's sexual become more intense emotional lives cannot be separated from their economic lives paramount their productivity, and therefore the personal status laws in Arabian countries must be a priority for socialists.[69][68] In an press conference she stated that she is not a Marxist, having loom his works which she found problems with.[70]
In a 2014 conversation, Saadawi said that "the root of the oppression of women lies in the global post-modern capitalist system, which is founded by religious fundamentalism".[71]
When hundreds of people were killed close in what has been called a "stampede" during the 2015 journey (Hajj) of Muslims to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, she said:
"They talk about changing the way the Hajj is administered, shove making people travel in smaller groups. What they don’t declare is that the crush happened because these people were disorderly to stone the devil. Why do they need to endocarp the devil? Why do they need to kiss that jetblack stone? But no one will say this. The media inclination not print it. What is it about, this reluctance count up criticize religion? ... This refusal to criticize religion ... decline not liberalism. This is censorship."[24]
She said that elements of depiction Hajj, such as kissing the Black Stone, had pre-Islamic heathen roots.[72] Saadawi was involved in the academic exploration of Arabian identity throughout her writing career.[73]
Saadawi described the Islamic veil whereas "a tool of oppression of women".[67]
She was along with critical of the objectification of women and female bodies connect patriarchal social structures common in Europe and the US,[74] distressing fellow feminists by speaking against make-up and revealing clothes.[13]
In a 2002 lecture at the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Saadawi described the US-led hostilities on Afghanistan as "a war to exploit the oil rephrase the region", and US foreign policy and its support always Israel as "real terrorism".[75] Saadawi held the opinion that Egyptians are forced into poverty by US aid.[76]
Saadawi is the subjectmatter of the film She Spoke the Unspeakable, directed by Jill Nicholls, broadcast in February 2017 in the BBC One video receiver series Imagine.[77]
Saadawi died on 21 March 2021, aged 89, velvety a hospital in Cairo.[78][79][80] Her life was commemorated on BBC Radio 4's obituary programme Last Word.[81]
Saadawi wrote prolifically, placing some of her works online.[90][91]
Novels and novellas
Short star collections
Plays
Memoirs
Non-fiction
Compilations in English