Nawal El Saadawi was born in Kafr Tahla, Egypt, the second of nine children. Unusual at the time, she and her sister received the same education as her brothers. Despite her parents’ progressive views, she underwent female genital mutilation (FGM) at the age of six, and when she reached ten, she was about to marry, but she avoided it with the help of her mother. Those traumatic experiences, in addition to the sexist remarks she constantly heard from her grandmother (“a boy is worth 15 girls at least”), shaped her views on the male-dominated misogynist society. After completing secondary school, she attended medical school at Cairo University. In 1955, at 24, she received her medical degree and married a fellow student named Ahmed Helmi. The couple divorced two years later, and El Saadawi returned to Kafr Tahla and worked as the village’s physician. There, she was overwhelmed by the unhygienic practices of basic medical procedures performed by barbers and midwives and connected between women’s physical and psychological problems and oppressive cultural and class practices as FGM. Her efforts to educate the population and protect her patients from domestic violence angered the leading men of the village, who pushed her to leave. At the time, El Saadawi, who had been writing from an early age, published her first short-stories collection, I Learned Love (1957), followed by her first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958). She worked at the University Hospital of Cairo, the Medical Association of Egypt, and the Ministry of Health. She traveled to the US to study public health at Columbia University, and on her return in 1966, 35 years old El Saadawi was appointed director-general of the health education department. In this position, she had founded Health magazine and served as its Chief Editor. In 1972, at 42, she published her first non-fiction work, Woman and Sex, in which she discussed and criticized violent acts made against women’s bodies, especially FGM. Both political and religious authorities condemned her book, which led to her dismissal from all her positions. El Saadawi took this as an opportunity to inquire about a new field of medicine and conducted research on women and neurosis at Ain Shams University. Her finding inspired her to write the novel Woman at Point Zero (1976), following the life of a woman who suffered abuse from childhood to marriage and ended up in prostitution. In 1981, at the age of 50, El Saadawi was imprisoned by President Anwar Sadat for conspiring with Bulgaria to overthrow the Egyptian regime, though there was no basis for this allegation. According to her, the real reason for her arrest was criticizing the government in an alleged democracy. Because she was not permitted to use writing materials in prison, she used toilet paper and an eyebrow pencil to jot down her thoughts. On her release, she published her notes in the book Memoirs from the Women’s Prison. In 1982, while still incarcerated, she founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, the first legal feminist organization in Egypt, later serving as the editor of its magazine Al-Nūn. Within a few years, the government closed the organization and the publication. In the early 1990s, El Saadawi was placed under police protection, supposedly to protect her from threats after her name was listed on an Islamic fundamentalists’ death list. In 1993, she decided to leave the country and accepted an academic position at Duke University, North Carolina. Over the next few years, she taught in various academic institutes, including Yale, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, and wrote and published her work in Arabic and English. In 1996, at 65, she returned to Egypt, still threatened by politicians and religious opponents who took legal matters to accuse her of heresy. But this did not hold her back, and she continued her activism against FGM and other causes, such as abolishing religious instruction in schools. In 2009 she founded the Egyptian chapter of the Global Solidarity for Secular Society, a movement that works to end the status of Islam as the state religion. Over the years, El Saadawi published more than 50 books, including novels, novellas, short-story collections, plays, memoirs, and non-fiction, all dealing with various aspects of patriarchy, poverty, and the status of Arab women. She was recognized for her contribution to second-wave feminism and introducing Arab women’s point of view to the western world. She died at the age of 89. Read more...