Saadawi, Nawal El (1931–)

Nawal El Saadawi is a leading Egyptian feminist activist, physician, and writer. She was Director General of Health Education. She was imprisoned by Anwar Sadat's government in 1981, and she organized the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1982. Her numerous works of fiction and nonfiction in Arabic focus on women's oppression. She has received many international awards, has engaged in teaching and speaking on feminist issues internationally, and continues to advocate and organize for women's rights and intellectual freedom.

El Saadawi was born in Kafr Tahla in Lower Egypt's Delta. Her father was a civil servant at the Ministry of Education and her mother came from an upper-class family. El Saadawi was educated at the University of Cairo, receiving her MD in 1955. She received her Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University, New York, in 1966. Her first two marriages ended in divorce. In 1964 she married Sherif Hetata, a physician and novelist who has been imprisoned for his left politics. He has translated several of Saadawi's books into English.

After graduation, she worked as a physician at the university and in rural health. From 1958 to 1972, she was Director General of Public Health Education and editor of Health magazine. In 1972, El Saadawi was dismissed from her post in the ministry for breaking taboos by writing about sexuality, religion, female genital cutting, and women's oppression. Health was closed down and her books were censored.

From 1973 to 1978, El Saadawi was a writer at the High Institute of Literature and Science, a researcher at Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine in Cairo, and worked for the United Nations. She was the director of the African Training and Research Center for Women in Ethiopia from 1978 to 1980, and adviser for the U.N. Economic Commission for West Africa in Lebanon. In 1981, El Saadawi published a criticism of President Anwar Sadat's one-party rule and was arrested and imprisoned for 2 months. In 1982, she established the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, which was banned in 1991. When her name appeared on a fundamentalist death list, she fled with her husband to the United States, where she taught at Duke University and Washington State University in Seattle. In 1996 she returned to Egypt.

El Saadawi has received several national and international literary awards, has lectured in many universities in the United States and Europe, and has organized and participated in many international feminist conferences. She has published numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, all originally in Arabic, many translated into more than 30 languages. Some of her most widely read works include the novels Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, Woman at Point Zero, and The Fall of the Imam and the nonfiction works Memoirs from a Women's Prison and The Hidden Face of Eve.

In December 2004, El Saadawi declared her candidacy in the Egyptian presidential elections, using the campaign to further her criticisms of gender and class oppression in Egypt.