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.
Born in Kafr Tahla, north of Cairo, the second of nine children, Nawal was the daughter of Zaynab (nee Shoukry), from an Ottoman Turkish family, and Al-Sayed El Saadawi, a teacher. Nawal’s radicalism was shaped by experience. She could not understand why, although academically gifted, she was praised only when she learned to light the kerosene stove.
Her grandmother’s sexism – “a boy is worth 15 girls at least” – appalled her, and a clitorectomy at the age of six, described in The Hidden Face of Eve, prompted her campaign against the practice. Female genital mutilation (FGM) was finally banned in Egypt in 2008. But she also learned about political protest from her father, who was sent into internal exile for demonstrating against British rule.
Unable to continue her education locally, El Saadawi was sent to Helwan school in Cairo, narrowly avoiding expulsion for writing a play on illegitimacy and for participating in nationalist demonstrations. In 1949 she entered Cairo University’s medical school – she was not interested in medicine, but her parents persuaded her that there was no future in studying literature.
However, she could not abandon writing, nor controversy. Her novel Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958) was followed by a number of short story collections. The Absent One (1969) featured the first female character in Arabic literature to suffer explicit sexual harassment.
After qualifying as a doctor in 1955 she developed a passion for health education, and came into conflict with the authorities. As a village doctor, she was shocked by the unhygienic practices of the local barbers and midwives responsible for basic medical procedures, including circumcision and FGM. Her efforts to teach people about the dangers of these customs angered local practitioners.
Meanwhile, her attempt to rescue a young woman from an abusive husband was frowned upon. She was recalled to Cairo, following a report that she had disrespected moral values and “incited women to rebel against the divine laws of Islam”. This criticism dogged the rest of her career, but El Saadawi always rejected it.
Her outspokenness continued to get El Saadawi into trouble. She believed she was blacklisted from 1962, when her honesty about peasant health alarmed dignitaries at a meeting convened by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Under President Anwar Sadat her criticism of female circumcision in her first non-fiction work, Women and Sex (1969), led to her losing the positions she had risen to as director general of public health and assistant general secretary to the Egyptian Medical Association. In addition, the Association for Health Education, which she had founded, was closed, and Health magazine, which she edited with her third husband, Sherif Hetata, was banned, as were her writings.
Her first marriage had been to Ahmed Helmi, a fellow medical student, in 1955, and they had a daughter, Mona. She was then briefly married to a lawyer, Rashad Bey, but he showed a patriarchal dislike of her writing. In 1964 she married Hetata, who had been a political prisoner and proved a much more durable companion and collaborator, and they had a son, Araf. As with her first two husbands, the marriage ended in divorce, though not till 2010.
Compelled to reshape her career, El Saadawi researched women and neurosis at Ain Shams University, Cairo (1973-76), and concentrated on writing (now published from Beirut). Under Sadat, she said, “I felt alienated in my homeland,” and she began a period of “self-exile”, working from 1978 to 1980 as UN adviser on women’s development in Africa and the Middle East, described in My Travels Round the World (1986).
Her return to Egypt was not auspicious. In September 1981 she was one of more than 1,000 liberals detained under new legislation. The charge against her was conspiring with Bulgaria to overthrow the regime – an odd choice as she “knew nothing about Bulgaria and sometimes even forgot where it was situated on the map”. Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1983), which she wrote on a roll of toilet paper, using an eyebrow pencil that had been smuggled in, gives an ebullient account of the experience.
She was released six weeks after Sadat’s assassination in October. A period of relative stability and freedom followed. Under President Hosni Mubarak, she said, she was on not a black but a grey list.
In 1981 she founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA), combining feminism with pan-Arabism, and with the translation of her work El Saadawi became well-known in the west. In Britain she supported the miners’ strike of 1984-85, demonstrated against NHS cuts and visited Greenham Common in Berkshire.
This determination to be a voice for change worked against her again when she campaigned against the Gulf war (1990-91) and participated in the 1992 commission of inquiry for the international war crimes tribunal. Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, she wrote, was no worse than those supported by the west in Syria and Saudi Arabia. It was this activism, she maintained, that led Mubarak to close the Egyptian branch of AWSA in 1991 and divert its resources to the government-backed organisation, Women of Islam. The association’s magazine, Noon, was also banned.
The next challenge was Islamism. In 1992, El Saadawi’s name appeared on a fundamentalist death list and, unable to face the armed guard that the Egyptian authorities provided for her, she decided in January 1993 to leave. The next period she spent teaching dissidence and creativity at Duke University, North Carolina, and writing her memoirs, published in two volumes in English as A Daughter of Isis (1999) and Walking Through Fire (2002). They give an impressionistic account of some of the key moments in her early life.
Although she returned to Egypt at the end of 1996, she spent much time teaching in the US. A civil case brought by a lawyer in 2001 failed in trying to forcibly divorce her from Hetata after 37 years of marriage, on the grounds of her apostasy – she was alleged to have said in a newspaper interview that the Muslim custom of making an annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia was “a vestige of pagan practices”.
But court cases continued to trouble her: in 2008 she successfully fought an attempt to deprive her of her nationality and ban all her writings, prompted by the controversy stirred by her play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting (2006).
A dissident to the end, in 2009 El Saadawi established the Egyptian chapter of the Global Solidarity for Secular Society. Set up to fight what she termed “religious fanaticism”, the movement petitioned the government to abolish Islam’s status as the state religion and remove the requirement to state religion on ID cards. “I am,” she claimed in 2010, “becoming more radical with age.” True to her word, she joined the anti-Mubarak protesters in Tahrir Square in February 2011, ready, she said, to fight in what she saw as a “real revolution”.
She was glad to see Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood deposed in 2013, though did not believe he should have been imprisoned. Of the former army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who became president in 2014, she told the Observer the following year: “I don’t believe in individuals. He is only temporary. The people decide whether he works for them or not, and if he behaves like Mubarak, he is out.”
When the BBC’s Zeinab Badawi asked her about toning down her criticism in 2018, she retorted: “I should be more aggressive, because the world is becoming more aggressive and we need people to speak loudly against injustices.” In 2020 Time magazine made her one of its 100 most influential women of the past century.
She is survived by her daughter and son.
• Nawal El Saadawi, feminist, writer and doctor, born 27 October 1931; died 21 March 2021
