Nawal El Salaawi
There are hundreds of definitions about ‘Life,’ but none gives me its true meaning than this quote by author Nawal El Salaawi, “Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.” But who is this woman?
Nawal El
Saadawi has
been pilloried, censored, imprisoned, and exiled for her refusal to accept the
oppression imposed on women by gender and class. In her life
and in her writings, this struggle against sexual discrimination has always
been linked to a struggle against all forms of oppression: religious, racial,
colonial, and neo-colonial.
In 1969,
she published her first work of non-fiction, Women and Sex;
in 1972, her writings and her struggles led to her dismissal from her job.
From then on, there was no respite; imprisonment under Sadat in 1981 was the culmination of the long war she had fought for Egyptian women’s social and intellectual freedom. A Daughter of Isis is the autobiography of this extraordinary woman.
Saadawi also spelled Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī
(born Oct. 27, 1931, Kafr Ṭaḥlah, Egypt), Egyptian public
health physician, psychiatrist, author, and advocate of women’s rights.
Sometimes described as “the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world.”
El Saadawi was a feminist whose writings and professional
career were dedicated to political and sexual rights for women. El Saadawi was
educated at Cairo University (M.D., 1955), Columbia University in New
York (M.P.H., 1966), and ʿAyn Shams University in Cairo (where she
performed psychiatric research in 1972–74).
In 1955–65, she worked as a
physician at Cairo University and in the Egyptian Ministry of Health, and in
1966, she became the director-general of the health education department within
the ministry.
In 1968, she founded Health magazine, which
was shut down by Egyptian authorities several years later, and in 1972, she was
expelled from her professional position in the Ministry of Health because of
her book Al-marʾah wa al-jins (1969; Women and Sex),
which was condemned by religious and political authorities.
El Saadawi was jailed in September 1981, and during the two
months of her imprisonment, she wrote Mudhakkirāt fī sijn al-nisāʾ (1984; Memoirs
from the Women’s Prison) on a roll of toilet paper using a smuggled
cosmetic pencil.
In 1982, El Saadawi founded the Arab
Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA) and later served as editor of the
organization’s publication, Al-nūn.
In 1991, the government closed
down Al-nūn and then, several months later, AWSA itself. Due
to her outspoken views, El Saadawi continued to face frequent legal challenges
from political and religious opponents, including accusations of apostasy.
In 2002, a legal attempt was made by an Islamist lawyer to
forcibly divorce her from her husband, and in May 2008, she won a case that had
been brought against her by al-Azhar University, the major center of
Islamic learning, that included charges of apostasy and heresy.
El Saadawi’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction deal
chiefly with the status of Arab women, as inMudhakkirāt tabībah (1960;
Memoirs
of a Woman Doctor), Al-khayt wa al-jidār (1972; The
Thread and the Wall), Al-wajh al-ʿarī lī al-marʾah al-arabiyyah (1977; The
Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World), Al-ḥubb fī zaman
al-nafṭ (1993; Love in the Kingdom of Oil), and Al-riwāyah (2004; The
Novel).
The oppression of women by men through religion is the underlying theme of El Saadawi’s novel set in a mental
institution, Jannāt wa Iblīs (1992; Jannāt
and Iblīs). The female protagonists are Jannāt, whose name is the plural of
the Arabic word for paradise, and Iblīs, whose name refers to the devil.
Her book page at Amazon. http://goo.gl/HrS2nD
