Egyptian feminist Saadawi still fighting strong

Andrew Hammond

Bull in a China shop or liberator of Arab women? Nawal el-Saadawi, possibly the most outspoken woman in the Arab world and a woman writer best known abroad, has never been shy of expressing her feminist opinions.

Her writings against oppression of Arab women by ancient traditions, including her very personal account of the pain of female circumcision, has touched a chord with many women.

But in Egypt she is often depicted as an insensitive troublemaker who gained fame by confirming to westerners their own prejudices about Arab and Islamic culture.

Controversy has surfaced again. Police have confiscated some of Saadawi’s books and a lawyer has moved to have her divorced from her Muslim husband on the grounds that she is an apostate.

A local court will decide on June 18 whether to allow a trial, although the Chief public prosecutor after questioning her decided not to prosecute her in a separate action raised by the same lawyer, who she says is ‘‘mentally ill’’.
At 70, the white-haired Saadawi is still a fighter. In her Nile-side Cairo flat, she stresses that she and her husband, novelist Sherif Hetata, will stay put. ‘‘They want to silence me or make me live in exile. There is no power that can separate us or make us leave Egypt...I’m not afraid to be killed. We’re fed up with this,’’ she exclaims.

Some religious scholars say a Muslim found guilty of apostasy should face the death penalty, while Egypt’s mix of secular and Sharia (Islamic) laws are not clear on the issue. Saadawi was one of the hundreds of intellectuals arrested by President Anwar Sadat a month before his assassination in 1981 because of their Opposition to his peace policy with Israel. Her Arab Women’s Solidarity Association and its magazine Nuun were closed in 1991 for opposing Egypt’s role in the US-led Gulf War that ended Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.

Saadawi’s new clash with religious conservatives coincides with increased tension between political Islam and liberals. Last year Egyptian students rioted over a novel that Islamists said insulted the religion. Culture Minister Farouk Hosni banned three novels this year for their sexual content.

‘‘Part of the government is afraid of the religious fundamentalism movement and they are compromising with them,’’ Saadawi says, arguing that the state made only half-hearted attempts to counter fundamentalist religious influence once it had crushed revolutionary Muslim groups.

Saadawi’s views run counter to many religious traditions. ‘‘Thirty per cent of families in Egypt are supported by women and they are now working everywhere, so we have to look now at the inheritance law and give women their equal share,’’ she says.

All Islamic schools stipulate that daughters inherit half as much as sons. Saadawi says that veiling of women ‘‘is pre-Islamic...and has nothing to do with morality’’.

A chest surgeon-turned-psychiatrist, Saadawi approves of human organ transplants as well as adoption and test-tube babies, all opposed by Egypt’s conservative preachers. ‘‘Sometimes social fatherhood or motherhood is much more kind and nurturing than biological. But some of the fanatic religious people don’t understand,’’ she says. ‘‘They say I’m an atheist, but God to me is Justice, freedom and love,’’ she says referring to the attitude of Islamic scholars. (Reuters)