“They said, ‘You are a savage and dangerous woman.’ I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.”—Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
“Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven ... That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.”—Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
Dr Nawal El Saadawi—novelist, physician, feminist and dissident—was born on October 27, 1931, in the village of Kafr Tahla in the Nile Delta, Egypt. She was the second of nine children in a family that straddled class and culture. Her father, a schoolteacher, had fought against British colonial rule and was briefly exiled for his activism; her mother was descended from Ottoman Turkish lineage.
From the beginning, Saadawi rebelled against constraint. Family stories tell of her staining her teeth with raw aubergine at age 10 to avoid an arranged marriage—an act that earned her a beating but cancelled the wedding. At six, she endured female genital mutilation, an experience she later wrote about in The Hidden Face of Eve, the book that ignited her lifelong campaign against the practice.
Growing up, she heard her grandmother say, “A boy is worth fifteen girls at least.” That cruelty of hierarchy shaped her early clarity. “From my father,” she wrote, “I learned to read and think; from my mother, to endure.” Her defiance was seeded in both love and pain.
Denied schooling in her village, Saadawi moved to Cairo to study. At Helwan Girls’ School, she wrote a play about an unmarried pregnant woman and nearly faced expulsion. In 1949, she entered Cairo University’s medical college—a compromise between parental caution and her own restless intellect. “They told me there was no future in being a writer,” she recalled. She became a doctor, but writing was her true profession.
Her first novella, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958), was a revelation: a young woman’s awakening to gendered injustice inside the very institution meant to heal. After qualifying in 1955, she was posted to a rural clinic in her home province. There, she saw mutilation, child marriage, and maternal death firsthand. “I treated their wounds,” she said, “but the real disease was obedience.”
When she intervened to protect a woman from her abusive husband, she was accused of “inciting rebellion against God’s law” and transferred back to Cairo in disgrace.
In 1972, El Saadawi published Women and Sex (al-Mar’a wa al-Jins), a radical study condemning the social control of female sexuality. The book was banned under President Anwar Sadat. Saadawi was dismissed from her post as Director of Public Health, her journal Health was shut down, and her name was blacklisted. “I felt alienated in my own country,” she later said. Yet the book became a cornerstone of second-wave Arab feminism—its argument incendiary and straightforward: that women’s bodies are their own.
Barred from medicine, she turned to literature. In 1975, she wrote Woman at Point Zero, based on a real woman she met on death row. The prisoner, Firdaus, survives child abuse, marriage, and prostitution before killing her pimp. “I am speaking the truth,” Firdaus declares. “And the truth is savage and dangerous.” The novel’s fury is unmistakable, its voice unforgettable—and through Firdaus, Saadawi found her double. “The lowest paid body,” Firdaus says, “is that of a wife.”
Saadawi followed with God Dies by the Nile (1974) and The Fall of the Imam (1987), each an allegory of how religion and patriarchy entwine to discipline women. In Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993), she turned satire into a weapon: “For a woman,” one character says, “husband and boss are interchangeable.”
‘They wanted to silence me’
In September 1981, just weeks before Sadat’s assassination, Saadawi was arrested in a mass roundup of dissidents. Accused absurdly of conspiring with “foreign powers”, she was jailed in Qanatir Women’s Prison. There, using an eyebrow pencil and scraps of toilet paper, she wrote Memoirs From The Women’s Prison (1983). “Danger,” she said, “has been part of my life since I picked up a pen.” When Hosni Mubarak released her later that year, she emerged unbroken—her spirit sharpened by confinement.
By 1981, Saadawi had founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA), Egypt’s first legal feminist organisation. Its creed was uncompromising: “We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.” The group’s journal, Noon, was banned; AWSA’s funds were seized. “They wanted to silence me,” Saadawi said, “but I had already learned to speak in exile, in prison, in the street.”
Her global reputation grew. She lectured in England, joined miners’ protests, and marched at Greenham Common against nuclear weapons. She condemned both Arab dictatorships and Western imperialism: “Feminism is not a Western invention—any more than patriarchy was,” she told New Lines Magazine. Her critique of capitalism was equally fierce: “Women can never be liberated under the patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist and military system,” she wrote.
By 1992, she was on an Islamist death list. “I will not live behind guns,” she told the press, and left Egypt to teach at Duke University. In exile, she wrote her autobiographies A Daughter of Isis (1999) and Walking Through Fire (2002). In them, she reimagined her own life as mythic—the girl who turned punishment into prophecy.
She returned to Cairo in 1996, undaunted. “The Government fears the young,” she quipped, “and I have the power of the young behind me.” At seventy-three, she ran, unsuccessfully but symbolically, for President. In 2008, at seventy-seven, she faced another blasphemy case for her play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting. She won—again—in court.
When revolution came to Egypt in 2011, she stood in Tahrir Square among the protestors. “This,” she said, “is a real revolution.” Into her late eighties, she remained defiant, telling the BBC in 2018: “I should be more aggressive… because the world is becoming more aggressive.”
Over 50 years, Nawal El Saadawi wrote fifty-five books—novels, stories, memoirs— translated into more than 20 languages. Each was a wound turned into a witness. Her influence stretched across continents: from Cairo to the Caribbean, Lagos to London. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once said, “You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have anything without women.”
Saadawi died in Cairo on March 21, 2021, at the age of 89. Egypt buried her with official honours. The State that once jailed her now praised her as a pioneer. It was an irony she would have recognised. “If you are creative,” she once said, “you must be dissident.”
Through imprisonment, exile, and threat, she wrote her country’s forbidden truths. She was — as she had been called in accusation and praise — savage and dangerous.
Next week: Part Five of Women Writers Out of Africa will feature Rwandan writer Immaculée Ilibagiza.
IRA MATHUR is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
