Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi was born on the twenty-seventh of October 1931 at Kafr Tahla, a Nile Delta village north of Cairo, the second of nine children of El Sayed El Saadawi — a teacher of Arabic and a low-ranking official of the Egyptian Ministry of Education — and Zaynab Shoukry, a homemaker of an Alexandrian Turco-Egyptian family. She was subjected at six to the genital mutilation customary in the village.

She was placed at the Helwan Secondary School for Girls at Cairo on her father’s insistence — over the village expectation that an eldest daughter would not be educated past primary — and completed the secondary certificate there in 1949.

She enrolled in 1949 at the Faculty of Medicine of Cairo University and completed the Bachelor of Medicine in 1955. She served the rural-medicine programme of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Health at her natal village of Kafr Tahla and at the Tahrir Province between 1955 and 1958, and the Cairo University Hospital from 1958 to 1972.

She was appointed in 1966 director general of public health education at the Egyptian Ministry of Health, the post she held until her dismissal in 1972 for her publication of the non-fiction Women and Sex — the first published Arabic-language work on the medical and legal status of women in modern Egypt.

She published in 1975 the novel Imra’a ʿinda Nuqtat al-Sifr (Woman at Point Zero) — the testimony of the prostitute Firdaus on the night before her execution at the Qanatir Women’s Prison north of Cairo, taken down across a single interview-night by the prison psychiatrist — at the Beirut house Dar al-Adab.

She was imprisoned by the Sadat regime from September to November 1981 at the Qanatir Women’s Prison itself — the prison of her novel — for her opposition to the Camp David Accords and the regime’s arrests of dissident intellectuals.

She founded in 1982 the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association at Cairo — the first regional Pan-Arab feminist organisation — and served as its president until its closure by the Mubarak regime in 1991.

She published across the following forty-five years over forty further novels, memoirs and non-fiction works — among them Mudhakkirat fi Sijn al-Nisa (Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, 1984), Suqut al-Imam (The Fall of the Imam, 1987), and The Hidden Face of Eve (1977).

She died at Cairo on the twenty-first of March 2021 of complications of a respiratory illness, at eighty-nine.

She is honored here as the author of Woman at Point Zero.