Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi (Kafr Tahla, 1931 – Cairo, 2021) was an Egyptian physician, psychiatrist, novelist and activist, and one of the best-known voices of radical feminism in the Arab world. She wrote about sexuality, patriarchal oppression and the legacy of colonialism, and her work made her a reference for readers across much of the Global South.

She was born in a village in the Nile Delta, the second of nine children, in a family that valued educating daughters as well as sons. She later recalled that she underwent female genital mutilation at the age of six, an experience that shaped much of her later work. Her father, a civil servant who had opposed the British occupation, was exiled for his activism, and the family spent years in another province.

She studied medicine at Cairo University, graduating in 1955, and first practised in her home village, where she saw at close range the inequalities faced by rural women. That experience became the basis of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. She then trained in public health at Columbia University and, during the 1960s, held senior posts in Egypt's Ministry of Health.

In 1972 she published Women and Sex, an essay denouncing circumcision and other forms of control over women's bodies. The book cost her her ministry post and the editorship of a health journal. After years of pressure she went into exile, first in Lebanon and later in other countries. She remained active, founding associations for Arab and African women, and in 1981 she was imprisoned for several months with other activists for opposing the peace agreements with Israel. That ordeal produced Memoirs from the Women's Prison.

Her writing moves easily between memoir, novel and essay, in a direct style that joins clinical experience with social criticism. Certain themes recur: the female body, religion used as a tool of domination, class and the inheritance of colonialism. Woman at Point Zero, inspired by a woman prisoner she had met, brought her work to a wider international readership.

In later decades she faced accusations of apostasy and an attempt to strip her of her nationality, neither of which succeeded. She received awards and honorary degrees on several continents and taught at universities in the United States and Europe. Her legacy lies in her defence of women's autonomy in societies where that idea is still contested, and in the example of a writer who, by her own account, kept writing in prison without paper or pen.