Egyptian feminist author, rights icon Nawal el-Saadawi dies aged 89

Egypt's pioneering feminist icon Nawal el-Saadawi authored more than 55 books but also got constant death threats from extremists

AFP

Reuters

Published March 21, 2021

Nawal el-Saadawi's family says she passed away after suffering a long illness at a hospital in Egypt's capital, Cairo.
Nawal was briefly jailed by former president Anwar Sadat and also condemned by Al-Azhar, the highest Muslim authority in Egypt.
Though she left Egypt over constant deaths threats, she returned and, in 2005, ran for president but abandoned her bid for not being allowed her to hold rallies.

CAIRO: World-renowned feminist author and pioneering rights icon Nawal el-Saadawi died Sunday in capital Cairo at the age of 89, Egyptian daily Al-Ahram newspaper said, with her family saying she passed away after suffering a long illness.

A champion of women's rights who revolutionised discussions on gender in the Arab world, Nawal el-Saadawi was a fierce advocate for women's empowerment in Egypt's deeply conservative and patriarchal society.

A prolific author who shot to fame with widely translated novel Women at Point Zero (1975), she was briefly jailed by late president Anwar Sadat and also condemned by Al-Azhar, the highest Muslim authority in Egypt.

With over 55 books to her name, Saadawi's outspoken brand of feminism — including campaigning against women wearing the veil, inequality in Muslim inheritance rights between men and women, polygamy, and female genital mutilation (FGM) — gained her as many critics as admirers in the Middle East.

However, her writing and political activism also made her many enemies over the intervening eight decades, upsetting governments, religious authorities, and extremist groups alike.

In 1993, after constant deaths threats from firebrand extremist preachers, Saadawi moved to Duke University in the US state of North Carolina, where she was a writer-in-residence at the Asian and African languages department for three years.

They said, 'You are a savage and dangerous woman.' 'I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.

Sacked from the health ministry in the 1970s, she spent nearly two decades in exile during President Hosni Mubarak’s rule. She returned to Egypt and, in 2005, ran for president but abandoned her bid after accusing security forces of not allowing her to hold rallies.

"When I was in jail, the jailer said, ‘If I find paper and pen in your cell, it’s more dangerous than if I find a gun,’” Saadawi had told Reuters in an interview in London in 2018.

She fell out of favour with many secular progressives later in life for her wholehearted embrace of general-turned-president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's military overthrow of radical president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

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With her shock of white hair, bright eyes, and ready smile, she was seen as a force of nature who never minced her words.

Once, after her travels around the world, she said she had "discovered that girls are brought up in a very similar way — we are all in the same boat. The patriarchal, religious, capitalist system is universal."

Patriarchal oppression is everywhere, she believed, but pushed for women to organise themselves and fight.

Her path-breaking, critical books published in dozens of languages also took aim at Western feminists, including her friend Gloria Steinem and policies espoused by heads of state such as former US president George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As news of her death spread around the world, a quote from her book made rounds on social media websites, such as Twitter. "They said, 'You are a savage and dangerous woman.' 'I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous,'" she wrote in Woman at Point Zero, published in Arabic language in 1975.

Saadawi's death coincides with Mother's Day celebrations in Egypt and across the Arab world. She divorced three times and had two children.