Nawal El Saadawi began her fight against female genital mutilation (FGM), after experiencing it when she turned six in 1937. She said of her experience in her first autobiography, ‘A Daughter of Isis': "Since I was a child that deep wound in my body never healed." "I lay in a pool of blood. After a few days, the bleeding stopped, and the daya [midwife] peered between my thighs and said, 'All is well. The wound has healed, thanks be to God.' But the pain was there, like an abscess in my flesh." Ever since then, she strove all her life to prevent such practice, becoming an internationally recognized Egyptian feminist, writer and activist, as well as physician and psychiatrist. She reached new heights in 1982 and 1988, as she founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founded the Arab Association for Human Rights, respectively. She defended and advocated women and human rights throughout her illustrious career as a writer, as she wrote 47 books, including fiction and non-fiction, short stories and plays. Her ‘Women and Sex' book in 1972 cost her job as director of public health for the Egyptian Ministry of Health. Moreover, she was put under further oppression and injustice, as she was sentenced to three months in prison by late president, Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, after she helped publish a feminist magazine called ‘Confrontation'. She was charged with committing "crimes against the state". However, that did not prevent her from continuing her struggle against injustice and oppression, as she wrote ‘Memoirs from the Women's Prison' from behind bars. To make matters worse, she received several death threats from extremists and Islamists, as a result of her commitment to the women's cause and rights, which eventually pushed her to leave the country, into exile. While she was living abroad, she held a numerous and important positions in prominent universities, such as Georgetown, Columbia, Yale and Harvard, in addition to many others. Her long struggle against injustice has awarded her honorary prizes in three different continents, as she won the North-South prize in 2004 from the Council of Europe. In 2005, she won the Inana International Prize in Belgium and the International Peace Bureau awarded her with the 2012 Séan MacBride Peace Prize in 2012. She was also nominated for a Nobel Literature Prize in 2012. In 2008, the Egyptian government approved a law restricting FGM, after the death of the 12-year-old Badour Shaker during an operation in June 2007, however, she was still not satisfied, as she said: "When I heard that she died, I wrote an open letter to her parents, saying they should not be silent – they should scream so all the world would hear their voice. They should use the death to educate everybody." Apparently, she has no intention of slowing her pace down, even though she is in her eighties now, but still energetic as ever, as for several women she will remain their voice and defender of their rights against any kind of oppression whatsoever, most importantly FGM.
