Biography

Egyptian writer and feminist Nawal el Saadawi was born in 1931 in the village of Kafir Tahla. Her father, an official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education, provided all nine of his children with a University education. El Saadawi qualified as a doctor in 1955 in Cairo. She has published at least twenty-four books in Arabic and is popular among English speaking audiences. Despite her literary success, El Saadawi has been repeatedly punished by the Egyptian government because her experiences as a medical doctor lead her to write about the taboo issue of womanhood and sexuality.

El Saadawi was dismissed from her position of Director of Public Health in the Ministry of Health with the publication of Woman and Sex, published in 1972, which angered political and theological authorities. She also lost her positions as the Chief Editor of a health journal, and as the Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt. From 1973 to 1976 she researched women and neurosis in the Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine, and from 1979 to 1980 she was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa and Middle East.

In 1981, she was arrested and imprisoned along with other Egyptian intellectuals under Anwar Sadat's regime. She was released upon Sadat's death in 1982, and shortly thereafter founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA), an international organization dedicated to "lifting the veil from the mind" of Arab women. In 1985, AWSA was granted consultant status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations as an Arab non-governmental association. Despite the association's obvious success, the Egyptian government closed AWSA down in 1991 and diverted its funds to a religious women's association. Using twelve lawyers who volunteered to help her, El Saadawi took the Egyptian government to court, but did not win the case.

English Translations of El Saadawi's works include:

Woman at Point Zero. London: Zed Books, 1983. (Original pub. date: 1973)
Two Women in One. (1975)
The Hidden Face of Eve. London: Zed Books, 1980.
God Dies by the Nile. (1985)

The Fall of the Imam. London: Minerva, 1988.
Searching. (1991)
The Innocence of the Devil. (1994)
 

Biographical information obtained from:

Al-Ali, Nadje Sadig. Gender Writing: Writing Gender. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1994.
Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Men, Women, and God(s). Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.

Author: Nicola Graves, Spring 1996
 

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