Nawal El Saadawi the voice of mutilated women, including her
The
Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World is a powerful account of the
brutality against women in the Muslim world. It remains as shocking today as
when it was first published more than a quarter of a century ago. Nawal El
Saadawi suffered the horrible female genital mutilation when she was just six
years old and that first awakened in her the sense of violence and injustice
present in Egyptian society.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) refers to procedures that involve the partial or total
removal of the female external genitalia or any other injury to the female
genitals without medical justification. Traditionally circumcision is done with
a blade and without any anesthesia.
Feminist,
writer, physician and political activist, Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931 in
the village of Kafr Tahla, in Egypt's Nile Delta, to a family of high-ranking
state officials. Her father, an official in Egypt's Ministry of Education, had
been exiled there along with his wife and nine children for rebelling against
the British occupation.
Despite her father being relatively progressive, he authorized the clipping of his six-year-old daughter's clitoris and tried to marry her off at age 10, without her mother's opposition. The same mother who allowed her daughter to be mutilated.
Her
experiences working as a doctor in villages around Egypt, witnessing
prostitution, honor killings and sexual abuse, inspired her to write to voice
that suffering.
Until
her death in 2021, she explored the causes of the situation through a
discussion of the historical role of Arab women in religion and literature. For
her, the veil, polygamy and legal inequality were incompatible with the just
and peaceful Islam she imagined.
A voice that has never been silenced
That, however, did not silence her voice. Her books have been translated
into many languages, and she has received several honorary awards and
doctorates in recognition of her activism and her work. She has been invited as
a visiting professor at various academic institutions in the United States and
Europe.
Woman at point zero
Firdaus, the novel's protagonist, is
in prison for murdering her pimp. She also refused to sign a document addressed
to Egypt's president asking for her life. She rejects everything that can free
her from the penalty because she is not afraid of death.
The novel begins in the voice
of a visiting researcher (El Saadawi) who is instantly obsessed with the
prisoner. "Compared to her, I was just a small insect crawling on the
earth among millions of other insects."
Firdaus lives constantly in search of knowledge and
compassion, but because she is poor and a woman, she receives almost nothing
from either. Her desire to continue studying is ignored by her family. Instead,
they arrange a marriage with a man in his sixties, mean, pig and violent. She
was not yet nineteen.
Marriage and other violent relationships are left
behind when she meets Shafira, a woman who leads her into a life of
prostitution. At twenty-five, she also gets rid of Shafira and leads her life
on her own. She will get everything she never had. Firdaus' rage against
society, men, and the treatment of women grows and gets worse every day, until
she is arrested and sentenced to death.
Woman at point zero has inspired women around the
world and offers readers an honest look at the brutal treatment of women, which
continues to this day.
Political consequences
In the late 1970s, she became head of the United
Nations Women's Program in Africa and gained international renown as a feminist
after the publication of The Hidden Face of Eve in 1977.
Her involvement in the feminist cause led her to publish dozens of fiction and non-fiction books and to participate in the founding of Confront magazine. This infuriated the country's religious authorities and she ended up ordering her arrest in 1980, at the orders of President Anwar Al Sadat.
In prison, she was forbidden to write, but she managed
to secretly write her prison memoirs on sheets of toilet paper. She was
released in late 1981, a month after the assassination of Anwar Al Sadat. Time
magazine named her one of the 100 women of the year.
In 1982, she founded the Arab Women's Solidarity
Association and her intense activity in favor of women's liberation made her
the target of death threats from radical Islamists.
In 1992, she was placed under government “protection”
against her will, which forced her to flee the country in 1993 and settle in
the United States, where she taught at Duke, Washington, Harvard, Yale,
Georgetown, Columbia, Berkeley and Florida State. She was also a teacher at the
Sorbonne in Paris.
Return to Egypt
In 1996, she returned to Cairo, where she taught at
the university and continued the fight against Egyptian conservatism, being
accused of insulting Islam and threatened with prison in 2001, 2007 and 2008.
She saw herself primarily as a novelist, but remained politically active. She
used her candidacy in the 2005 presidential election to expose the shallowness
of Egypt's democracy. In 2011, she joined the demonstrations against President
Hosni Mubarak's government in Cairo's Tahrir Square.
One of her plays, God Resigns at Summits, from 2006, put her on trial
for apostasy (the act of denying something, usually related to the renunciation
of one's religion or religious faith) and heresy by the University's high
religious authorities. By Al Azhar (2008). The work remains banned in Egypt.
Nawal El Saadawi's Feminism
Flávia Abud Luz, PhD in Human and Social Sciences at the Federal
University of ABC (UFABC) wrote an important essay on Nawal El Saadawi's
feminism. I summarized it below. At the end of the page, I leave the link to
the full text.
Careful observations throughout her
childhood and adolescence allowed her to question the notion of gender
hierarchy through the social distinctions made between girls and boys, and
later women and men.
The fact that El Saadawi was part of a
middle-class and well-educated family did not exempt her from having in her
youth the projection of the aforementioned ideals regarding the role that the
Egyptian woman would occupy in society: the role of the wife.
The discomfort that her texts caused, these “sharp words”, was precisely in this work of focusing on what for the author was an important wound of Egyptian society: violence (physical, psychological and sexual) inflicted on women because of a moral rigidity that appropriates religion as a form of legitimation.
El Saadawi (2002) argues that FGM (Female Genital
Mutilation) is not a religious custom, but a practice prior to the insertion of
Islam (in the 7th century) that accommodated itself to the patriarchal and
capitalist structures of Arab societies over time. In this sense, the practice
became an aspect linked to family honor and the chastity of women, as it met
the “patriarchal dilemma” of guaranteeing the family’s heredity and the
succession of property (or assets), preventing them from being handed over to
children. Generated in a relationship with a male of another family or lineage.
El Saadawi vehemently questions the gender inequality
present in the right of inheritance (women inherit half of what men do), as
well as the idea present in some legal schools that a woman needed her father's
consent to marry, even if he had already reached the age of majority.
The censorship promoted to El Saadawi's work in the
1980s was, above all, the result of religious pressure. The author describes it
this way: “My life was caught in the crossfire of state security forces and
terrorist movements that concealed their goals behind a religious facade.
The relevance of El Saadawi's work can be seen in the
relevance of the issues addressed by her, such as female genital mutilation
(FGM), domestic violence (in its physical, psychological and sexual forms), and
family laws (which guide topics such as the rights of women and men in
marriage, divorce and child custody). These claims inspired scholars in Egypt
and the Middle East to reflect on the status of women.
Among the various female voices that El Saadawi
inspired, I highlight here the Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy, who in her work
highlights the importance of women's role in fighting for their family, social
and economic rights in a political context marked by authoritarian governments
such as the Egypt.
Academic education
El Saadawi completed his studies at
Nabeweya Moussa Girls' Secondary School and became a boarder at Helwan Girls'
Secondary School, where he majored in Science (1945). He studied as a fellow at
Cairo University's renowned Kasr Alainy School of Medicine (1949-1954). He
graduated in psychiatry in 1955.
Professional qualification
Nawal worked as a resident physician at
Kasr Alainy University Hospital, in health centers. In 1958, she joined the
Department of Thoracic Diseases at the Ministry of Health in Cairo and Giza.
She completed a master's degree in public
health at Columbia University in New York. In 1966, she was appointed director
general of health for Egypt. She served as Deputy Secretary General of the
Medical Association of Egypt and was editor of the journal Health (1968-1974).
From 1973 to 1976, she worked at the
Faculty of Medicine at Ain Shams University in Cairo, investigating female
neuroses. From 1979 to 1980, she was a consultant for the UN Women in Africa
and Middle East program.
Awards
In 2004, she received
the North-South Prize from the Council of Europe and the Sean MacBride Prize
from the International Office for Peace in 2012. She became known as “the
Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world” for her positions against female genital
mutilation. (and male) and the Islamic veil.
Warrior's Rest
Nawal El Saadawi died
in a Cairo hospital on March 21, 2021. Three times divorced, she was the mother
of two daughters who, unlike her, but thanks to her, never felt the cold of a
razor cutting into their flesh and above all, to lacerate their spirits, until
the end of days.
