Keeping The Faith

Egypt’s feminist warrior Nawal el-Saadawi has survived prison and outlived her enemies. But at 86, she’s still fighting the patriarchy, religious oppression and genital mutilation

- Orlando Crowcroft

THE FIRST LETTER NAWAL EL-SAYED EL-SAADAWI ever wrote was to God. In it, the 7-year-old Nawal asked why—if God was just and fair—he had not made her mother and father equal. Since she had first learned to write, she had always written her mother’s name, Zaynab, next to her own. But her father said it was his name, Sayed, that she must use, along with that of his father, Saadawi.

Saadawi never got an answer, and when her mother died—at just 45, having raised nine children—her name died with her. Unlike Saadawi’s father, who could expect 72 virgins upon arriving in heaven, her mother was due no rewards, according to Islam, the faith of her parents. “A woman is without worth,” she wrote in the first part of her autobiography, A Daughter of Isis, “on earth or in the heavens.”

Saadawi, now 86, was not convinced by God then, and she isn’t now. “The first letter in my life, I told God: If you are not fair, I am not ready to believe in you,” she says during a trip to London to promote the reissue of her two- volume autobiography. It is views like this that have ensured that Saadawi’s life has been—in the words of her friend Margaret Atwood, the author of A Handmaid’s Tale—“one long death threat.”

Born in 1931 in the village of Kafr Tahla, Egypt, north of Cairo, Saadawi trained as a medical doctor before beginning her career as a writer in her 20s. She was fired from her job as director-general of Egypt’s public health authority for her opposition to the practice of female genital mutilation. Her 1977 book, The Hidden Face of Eve, included a harrowing account of her own circumcision at the age of 6 as her mother and aunts watched.