1931 -

Egyptian feminist, writer, and doctor.

Nawal al-Saadawi (also spelled Nawal al-Saʿdawi or Nawal el-Saadawi) was born in the village of Kafar Tahla in Egypt. She graduated from the faculty of medicine at Cairo University in 1955 and practiced medicine for ten years, becoming a vigorous opponent of the exploitation of women in Egypt and the Arab world. She was dismissed from her position as Egypt's general director of health education for having written Woman and Sex (1972), which discussed the sexual exploitation of women, including prostitution, clitoridectomy, incest, and sexually transmitted diseases. For instance, she discussed in detail the female sexual anatomy, especially the variation in hymen types. She also discussed the epistemology of psychological, physical, and social epidemics affecting sexual roles and relationships. She openly discussed taboos such as rape, women's submissive roles in the family and society, sexual repression, and inconsistent social and religious values. Between 1979 and 1980, she became the United Nations advisor for the Women's Program in Africa and the Middle East. Her literary and scientific writings resulted in her imprisonment in 1981. Upon her release in 1982, she founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association International, which was closed down in 1991 by the Egyptian government. She and Dr. Sherif Hetata, her second husband, were members of the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal (1992), which investigated war crimes against Iraq. She also served on a mission to bring medical aid to Iraq in defiance of U.S. sanctions. In 2001, an Egyptian court dismissed a lawsuit filed against her by a religious extremist for having "scorned Islam."

The candor with which she has approached health, economic, political, and social problems has made her a radical and progressive activist, working against social injustice exercised in the name of religion, morals, and love. She has written more than thirty books, which have been translated into thirty languages and have reached both a popular and an academic audience worldwide. Her books in English include Searching (1991), My Travels around the World (1992), Memoirs from the Women's Prison (1994), Woman at Point Zero (1997), The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (1997), Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (1997), The Innocence of the Devil (1998), Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi (1999), and Walking through Fire: A Life of Nawal al Saadawi (2002).

Bibliography

Al-Ali, Nadje Sadig. Gender Writing/Writing Gender: The Representation of Women in a Selection of Modern Egyptian Literature. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1994.

Badran, Margot, and Cooke, Miriam, eds. Opening theGates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Men, Women, and God(s): Nawal ElSaadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

"Nawal El Saadawi, Sherif Hetata." Available from http://www.nawalsaadawi.net/.

— DAVID WALDNER
UPDATED BY RITA STEPHAN

Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.