Trailblazer Nawal El Saadawi, a prolific author, tireless activist, entrenched feminist passed away on 21 March 2021. Here are some collections of articles that remember her. Obituaries at the start and reflections and memories after them.
But first a bit of meta, Her most recent mentions in Daily Kos was
24 Oct 2020 (officebss forThis Week in the War on Women) WOW2: Late October's Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History - 2020
October 27, 1931 – Nawal El Saadawi born, Egyptian feminist, physician, psychiatrist, and author; founder and first president of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association and co-founder of Arab Association for Human Rights; her 1972 book, Woman and Sex (المرأة والجنس), which confronted aggression against women, including female circumcision, became a foundational text of second-wave feminism, especially in the Middle East and Africa; after Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine in 1981 called Confrontation, she was imprisoned in September for her controversial and “dangerous” views, but released in November, after the assassination of Anwar Sadat.
Net Roots radio had a small segment on 22 March which mentioned her passing. Archive of the broadcast here, el Saadwi is mentioned at timer 57:42, West Coast Cookbook & Speakeasy (22 March)
Obituary at The Guardian (22 March 2021) Nawal El Saadawi obituary
The Egyptian feminist and writer Nawal El Saadawi, who has died aged 89, was in conflict with tradition from an early age. As a child, she informed her peasant grandmother that she did not intend to marry. When attempts were made to arrange a wedding for her at 10, she ate raw aubergine to discolour her teeth, earning herself a parental thrashing. Later, her fierce independence of thought and her fight against inequality would lead to the loss of her job, a ban on her writings, imprisonment, death threats and exile.
The Hidden Face of Eve (1977), the most influential of the more than 50 books she penned, asserts that patriarchy and poverty – rather than Islam – oppress Arab women. Partly written as a corrective to western feminism’s ignorance of the Arabic world, it highlights some of the religion’s positive aspects.
El Saadawi’s fiction is similarly concerned with social issues. Her best known novel in the west, Woman at Point Zero (1975), gives a horrifying account of childhood and marital abuse leading to prostitution. Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993) uses a dreamscape narrative to examine a world in which, for a woman, husband and boss are interchangeable, and for a man, female self-determination is incomprehensible.
Al Jazeera had a similar athough slightly different emphasis Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian author and women’s rights icon, dies
World-renowned Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi, an outspoken champion of women’s rights in the Arab world, has died at the age of 89, her family said.
El Saadawi passed away in a Cairo hospital after suffering a long illness, her daughter, Mona Helmy, said on Sunday.
The prolific writer was a leading feminist who revolutionised discussions on gender in deeply conservative societies.
Born in the village of Kafir Tahla in 1931, El Saadawi rose to prominence in 1972 with her taboo-breaking book, Women and Sex, but she shot to fame with her widely translated novel Women at Point Zero in 1975.
With more than 55 books to her name, she was briefly jailed by late President Anwar Sadat and also condemned by Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni Muslim authority in Egypt.
Now a collection of personal memories and reflections from people who met/interviewed/worked with Nawal el-Saadawi.
At The Conversation Prof Adele Newton-Horst shares her thoughts from many interviews with el Saadawi in this Nawal El Saadawi: Egypt’s grand novelist, physician and global activist
Egyptian novelist, physician, sociologist and global activist Nawal El Saadawi died on 21 March 2021 at the age of 89. The author of more than 50 books, she told me in one of our many interviews, in 2007, that she self-identified as
an African from Egypt, not from the Middle East … I am not from the third world. There is one world, that is a racist, capitalist economic world. I became a feminist when I was a child – when I started to ask questions to become aware that women are oppressed and feel discrimination.
Although her autobiography A Daughter of Isis (1986) is among the best known of her publications world-wide, she identified her vocation as that of a novelist: “I am mainly a novelist. Most of my books are novels.”
BBC World News Service is scheduled to broadcast from its archives on 10th April. 23 minute long episode Nawal El Saadawi - Part One imagine... First shown in 2017 when Nawal El Saadawi was 85. In the first episode of two, Alan Yentob visits her home in Cairo.
The Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi was a global legend, as outspoken, hilarious and totally un-self-censored into her 80s as she ever was, always a force of nature. Following her recent death, another chance to see the documentary Imagine..., first shown in 2017 when she was 85. In this first episode, presenter Alan Yentob visits Nawal El Saadwi at her home in Cairo and travels with her to the rural village where she was born. A writer of over 50 books and a winner of numerous international awards, El Saadawi is famed as a pioneer in the fight against female genital mutilation, to which she herself was subjected. In this two-part documentary, she addresses some of the world's biggest challenges in a surprising and personal way.
With contributions from writers Margaret Atwood and Mona Eltahawy and from filmmaker Deeyah Khan, on the immense impact of her work.
At Counter Punch B. Nimri Aziz shares her memories of el Saadawi and thoughts in Nawal El-Saadawi and the Barriers of Patriarchy
I often quote one simple statement by Nawal El-Saadawi– a bold and brilliant retort to a question put to her by an NPR radio host many years ago. A lesson for me, but for many others too.
I was accompanying the Egyptian writer to the Manhattan studio of the national radio network, and sat behind her in the glass-walled booth as the interview got underway. It was the early 1990s when the Western public was newly aware of Muslim people—as individual women and men. The interviewer (a well-known radio personality) actually began with a question other guests might stumble over, be outraged by, or possibly be moved to cancel the discussion altogether.
“Are you a good Muslim?”, asked the host.
Nawal’s reply? Cool and succinct, but not unkind– as was her habit: “That’s between God and me.”
Another one at Counter Punch Fawzia Afzal-Khan shares her memories in In Memoriam: Nawal el Saadawi, 1931-2021
“It is very clear that neo-colonialism and religious fundamentalism are two faces of the same coin. You cannot exploit people without some sort of divine power or some sort of religion.”
Rereading this sentence from Nawal’s foreword to my edited collection, Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out, published by the wonderful Palestinian-American press Interlink Books in 2005, I was struck afresh at how clearly she saw the systemically intertwined roots of our world’s injustice, and how unapologetically and unequivocally she framed for us what she saw and knew to be true.
That bold spirit of hers, immortalized in over 50 books she published during her lifetime, and her unwavering commitment through her writing and her activism to debunk our rationalizations of religious and racialized economic and patriarchal ideologies, is what drew me to her as it did countless others across borders north and south. We met on a fateful evening in spring of 1998, when I drove my little red Suzuki car from Ossining NY, 25 miles south to where the Brecht Forum was then located in downtown NYC in Chelsea. That white shock of hair was like a secular halo around her brown, vibrant, mischievous face, her presence at once commanding and welcoming, her gaze as it looked at you, piercing and unforgiving, yet full of curiosity and humanity, her talk that night engaging, warm, full of humor and pulling all of her audience into its seductive embrace—yet deadly serious, and brilliantly scathing in its attack on all manner of pieties. Not least of these was her unmasking of Islamist right-wing movements in Arab and other Muslim countries, as having little to do with religion, and everything to do with power; both a consequence of, as well as handmaiden to, a postmodern neoliberalism that serves the needs of Empire. Her phrase for this historical conjuncture of forces, succinct and electrifying in its clarity, was “the global imperialist class patriarchal system.” As an immigrant from Pakistan, I was acutely aware and troubled by this confluence of factors that had and was continuing to create havoc in my country of birth, an unleashing of extremist Islamism aided and abetted by both the USA as well as Saudi Arabia at the expense of the rights of women and religious minorities back home. Unholy alliances, indeed.
At The Conversation Omnia Amin remembers An Egyptian woman who dared: the Nawal El Saadawi I knew
Throughout the Middle East and beyond, the name Nawal El Saadawi is not one that can be received with indifference. During her lifetime and even after her passing on 21 March 2021, the Egyptian author, physician and activist evokes intense feelings that range from love and respect to hatred and offence.
This comes as no surprise. Nawal was someone who unabashedly crossed all boundaries set by religious, political and societal authorities. When I had the privilege of meeting her, we immediately became friends.
Something in her eyes, manner and voice gripped my attention. She spoke for me and for millions of others who were silenced by layers and layers of falsehoods and banal obligations in the name of honour and duty. She ‘adopted’ me, like she did with many of the young people she met.
Round off with this compilation in The Conversation Amal Amireh looks in Nawal El Saadawi’s intellectual life reflected eight decades of Arab society and culture
Egypt’s Nawal El Saadawi was the foremost Arab feminist thinker of the past 50 years. Her ideas inspired generations of Arab women, but also provoked controversy and criticism.
She was prolific, publishing over 50 books of fiction and non fiction in Arabic, many translated and receiving global attention.
Focusing on sex, politics, and religion, El Saadawi believed that patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism are intertwined systems that oppress Arab women and prevent them from reaching their full potential.
The trajectory of El Saadawi’s intellectual life follows major developments in Arab society and culture from the 1940s to the present. To understand her contribution, it’s important to see her in the context of the historical moment that made her work possible, necessary and provocative.