campusaraujo
- Feb 6, 2023
- 7 min read

Razor in the flesh, cut in the soul

Updated: Jul 11, 2023

The voice of mutilated women, including her

The hidden face of Eve: Women in the Arab world is a powerful account of the brutality against women in the Muslim world. It remains as shocking today as when it was first published more than a quarter of a century ago. Nawal El Saadawi suffered the horrible female genital mutilation when she was just six years old and that first awakened in her the sense of violence and injustice present in Egyptian society.

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) refers to procedures that involve the partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or any other injury to the female genitals without medical justification. Traditionally circumcision is done with a blade and without any anesthesia.

Feminist, writer, physician, and political activist, Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931 in the village of Kafr Tahla, in Egypt's Nile Delta, to a family of high-ranking state officials. Her father, an official in Egypt's Ministry of Education, had been exiled there along with his wife and nine children for rebelling against the British occupation.

Despite her father being progressive, he authorized the clipping of his six-year-old daughter's clitoris and tried to marry her off at age 10, without her mother's opposition. The same mother who allowed her daughter to be mutilated.

Her experiences working as a doctor in villages around Egypt, witnessing prostitution, honor killings and sexual abuse, inspired her to write to voice that suffering.

Until her death in 2021, she explored the causes of the situation through a discussion of the historical role of Arab women in religion and Literature. For her, the veil, polygamy, and legal inequality were incompatible with the just and peaceful Islam she imagined.

A voice that has never been silenced

In 1972, she published Women and Sex, a courageous denunciation of female genital mutilation and spousal abuse suffered by Egyptian women. As a result, she was immediately sacked as director general of health, editor of Health magazine and deputy secretary general of the Medical Association of Egypt.

That, however, did not silence her voice. Her books have been translated into many languages, and she has received several honorary awards and doctorates in recognition of her activism and her work. She has been invited as a visiting professor at various academic institutions in the United States and Europe.

Woman at point zero

Her 1973 novel Woman at Point Zero was inspired by the story of a prisoner sentenced to death in the infamous Al Qanatir prison. Nawal met her during a research project.

Firdaus, the novel's protagonist, is in prison for murdering her pimp. She also refused to sign a document addressed to Egypt's president asking for her life. She rejects everything that can free her from the penalty because she is not afraid of death.

The novel begins in the voice of a visiting researcher (El Saadawi) who is instantly obsessed with the prisoner. "Compared to her, I was just a small insect crawling on the earth among millions of other insects."

Firdaus lives constantly in search of knowledge and compassion, but because she is poor and a woman, she receives almost nothing from either. Her desire to continue studying is ignored by her family. Instead, they arrange a marriage with a man in his sixties, mean, pig and violent. She was not yet nineteen.

Marriage and other violent relationships are left behind when she meets Shafira, a woman who leads her into a life of prostitution. At twenty-five, she also gets rid of Shafira and leads her life on her own. She will get everything she never had. Firdaus' rage against society, men, and the treatment of women grows and gets worse every day, until she is arrested and sentenced to death.

Woman at point zero has inspired women around the world and offers readers an honest look at the brutal treatment of women, which continues to this day. Few Arabic books are released in Portuguese because of the difficulty in finding translators. An interesting experience is listening to the audio book Firdaus, the woman with the eyes of fire. At the end of the page there is a link on YouTube. I recommend listening to it.

Political consequences

Her involvement in the feminist cause led her to publish dozens of fiction and non-fiction books and to participate in the founding of Confront magazine. This infuriated the country's religious authorities, and she ended up ordering her arrest in 1980, at the orders of President Anwar Al Sadat.

In prison, she was forbidden to write, but she managed to secretly write her prison memoirs on sheets of toilet paper. She was released in late 1981, a month after the assassination of Anwar Al Sadat. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred women of the year.

In 1982, she founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and her intense activity in favor of women's liberation made her the target of death threats from radical Islamists.

In 1992, she was placed under government “protection” against her will, which forced her to flee the country in 1993 and settle in the United States, where she taught at Duke, Washington, Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Columbia, Berkeley, and Florida State. She was also a teacher at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Return to Egypt

In 1996, she returned to Cairo, where she taught at the university and continued the fight against Egyptian conservatism, being accused of insulting Islam and threatened with prison in 2001, 2007 and 2008. She saw herself primarily as a novelist but remained politically active. She used her candidacy in the 2005 presidential election to expose the shallowness of Egypt's democracy. In 2011, she joined the demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak's government in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

One of her plays, God Renounces at the Summits, 2006, brought her to trial for apostasy (the act of denying something, usually related to renouncing one's religion or religious faith) and heresy by the highest religious authorities at the Al Azhar University (2008). The work remains banned in Egypt.

Nawal El Saadawi's Feminism

Flávia Abud Luz, PhD in Human and Social Sciences at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) authored an important essay on Nawal El Saadawi's feminism. I summarized it below. At the end of the page, I leave the link to the full text.

Careful observations throughout her childhood and adolescence allowed her to question the notion of gender hierarchy through the social distinctions made between girls and boys, and later women and men.

The fact that El Saadawi was part of a middle-class and well-educated family did not exempt her from having in her youth the projection of the ideals regarding the role that the Egyptian woman would occupy in society: the role of the wife.

The discomfort that her texts caused, these “sharp words", was precisely in this work of focusing on what for the author was an important wound of Egyptian society: violence (physical, psychological and sexual) inflicted on women because of a moral rigidity that appropriates religion as a form of legitimation.

El Saadawi (2002) argues that FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) is not a religious custom, but a practice prior to the insertion of Islam (in the seventh century) that accommodated itself to the patriarchal and capitalist structures of Arab societies over time.

In this sense, the practice became an aspect linked to family honor and the chastity of women, as it met the “patriarchal dilemma” of guaranteeing the family’s heredity and the succession of property (or assets), preventing them from being handed over to children. Generated in a relationship with a male of another family or lineage.

El Saadawi vehemently questions the gender inequality present in the right of inheritance (women inherit half of what men do), as well as the idea present in some legal schools that a woman needed her father's consent to marry, even if he had already reached the age of majority.

The censorship promoted to El Saadawi's work in the 1980s was the result of religious pressure. The author describes it this way: “My life was caught in the crossfire of state security forces and terrorist movements that concealed their goals behind a religious facade."

The relevance of El Saadawi's work can be seen in the relevance of the issues addressed by her, such as female genital mutilation (FGM), domestic violence (in its physical, psychological, and sexual forms), and family laws (which guide topics such as the rights of women and men in marriage, divorce and child custody). These claims inspired scholars in Egypt and the Middle East to reflect on the status of women.

Among the various female voices that El Saadawi inspired, I highlight here the Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy, who in her work highlights the importance of women's role in fighting for their family, social and economic rights in a political context marked by authoritarian governments such as Egypt.

Academic education

El Saadawi completed his studies at Nabeweya Moussa Girls' Secondary School and became a boarder at Helwan Girls' Secondary School, where he majored in science (1945). He studied as a fellow at Cairo University's renowned Kasr Alainy School of Medicine (1949-1954). He graduated in psychiatry in 1955.

Professional qualification

Nawal worked as a resident physician at Kasr Alainy University Hospital, in health centers. In 1958, she joined the Department of Thoracic Diseases at the Ministry of Health in Cairo and Giza.

She completed a master's degree in public health at Columbia University in New York. In 1966, she was appointed director general of health for Egypt. She served as Deputy Secretary General of the Medical Association of Egypt and was editor of the journal Health (1968-1974).

From 1973 to 1976, she worked at the Faculty of Medicine at Ain Shams University in Cairo, investigating female neuroses. From 1979 to 1980, she was a consultant for the UN Women in Africa and Middle East program.

Awards

In 2004, she received the North-South Prize from the Council of Europe and the Sean MacBride Prize from the International Office for Peace in 2012. She became known as “the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world” for her positions against female genital mutilation (male too) and the Islamic veil.

Warrior's Rest

Nawal El Saadawi died in a Cairo hospital on March 21, 2021. Three times divorced, she was the mother of two daughters who, unlike her, but thanks to her, never felt the cold of a razor cutting into their flesh and to lacerate their spirits, until the end of days.