“I am against classism, racism, against all kinds of discrimination, and if God is unjust I am against him too. I cannot abide by injustice.†~ Nawal el-Saadawi Bikya recently reported on Dr. Nawal el-Saadawi’s criticism of a coalition of opposition movements seeking to prevent the nepotistic succession of Gamal Mubarak to Egyptian presidency (Nawal Saadawi Says No To Muslim Brotherhood). The adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,†apparently does not suit Saadawi’s uncompromising commitment to her cause. Although Saadawi is also an outspoken opponent of the Mubarak regime, she worries that if fundamentalist religious movements take power, they will reshape, but not lift, the grip of decades of oppression and injustice in her native land – hence her reluctance to collaborate in opposition. Though most readers are probably familiar with Saadawi’s long career as a spokesperson for women’s rights, fewer probably realize the scope of her vision of relieving injustice. The rest of this piece will introduce Dr. Saadawi, her arguments and her underlying concerns. Saadawi was born in 1931 in the village of Kafr Tahla. This setting, on the banks of the Nile and in the shadow of British colonial rule, has remained a major point of reference throughout her career. There, she witnessed relatively indiscriminate poverty and discriminatory restrictions on women, the underlying causes of which she has spent a lifetime investigating and exposing. Growing up, she had the support and encouragement of relatively progressive parents. Both her mother and father encouraged an inquisitive and adventurous personality that emerged early on and that ultimately enabled her to leave her village and complete studies in medicine at Cairo University. This was by all accounts an extraordinary achievement for a woman of this period and this rural backdrop. However, she shared the fate of the majority of women of her generation in Egypt when at the age of six these same parents oversaw her “circumcision.†Through this experience, which she has vividly described in her writing, Saadawi came to understand something about the intersection of medical and psychological aspects of women’s oppression. Saadawi was only twenty-four when she graduated and returned home to practice medicine. Her career as a health care professional continued to expand, and for a time she served as Egypt’s Director of Public Health. Her focus had been on psychiatry, which provided a close-up look at the impacts of political, social and economic oppression on the mental lives of women. Although she sought to use her medical expertise to treat the suffering of her patients, Saadawi discovered that medicine was sufficient only to treat the symptoms – not the broad, structural causes – of what ultimately ailed her patients. She writes, “The diseases of the peasants could only be cured by curing poverty.†This diagnosis turned her attention to writing, which she describes as “a stronger weapon than medicine in the fight against poverty and ignorance.†Her writing career began with fiction, which has remained her preferred genre of expression. Even her non-fiction work is strewn with small narratives – case studies and anecdotes drawing on her years of experience as a psychiatrist. In the background of her work and represented in her stories are the stark details of the lives of rural women and the poor. However, Saadawi has also explored the factors contributing to the conditions of the oppressed through allegorical and sometimes satirical narratives. In some places, she targets religion, going straight to the core of the symbolic and mythical tales that shape monotheistic cultures. For example, both God and Satan have played starring roles in her work. Her writings are widely translated and available to an international audience, making her more well-known than others who feature among these profiles. Still, Saadawi has been firmly centered in Egypt and focused on the issues of her people. She spent four years in the US at Duke University, largely because she faced a wave of intense threats against her; additionally, the government used these threats as a basis to further restrict her and curtail her activities. Saadawi has described this period abroad as one of exile. She returned in 1996 and has remained since, with the exception of shorter periods of travel and teaching abroad. The attention Saadawi has drawn – both from enemies and from fans – has focused on her feminism and her role as a spokesperson for women’s rights. She has been a tireless advocate for women’s rights, especially focusing on elimination of the practice of female “circumcision†(or genital mutilation). She has also joined in the debates on women’s head garments. There is, she claims, a paradox underlying the increased prevalence of the hijab among Muslim women. She says this is like wearing a veil imported from abroad and calling this resistance to foreign powers. Meanwhile, the Western nations, those dominating the world market, give superficial praise to superficial protest, embracing the veil as a mark of multiculturalism and evidence that Muslim women have their own distinctive identity. Saadawi’s response to such attitudes conveys the sense of absurdity that she finds to be a basic feature of the contemporary world order: “but the veil is just a piece of clothing. How can an authentic identity be reduced to a piece of clothing? How can multiculturalism depend on confining women or hiding their faces?†The veil, she has argued, is the other side of the coin of nakedness or displaying the body. Both consider women as sex objects, denying them their full humanity. In this cluster of issues centered on the lives of women, it is this diminution of humanity that she has devoted her life to combating. As the quotation that opens this piece illustrates, Saadawi’s advocacy of women does not correspond to a neglect of other groups. She believes that all types and levels of injustice are components of one complex: the dominant political-economic system that she calls “patriarchal capitalism.†Her work unabashedly confronts the brutality that too many women have faced, both in the home and in public and social life, as a result of pervasive sexism. Unsurprisingly, her most blatant and piercing criticisms receive the most boisterous response. However, she also exhibits a keen awareness that violence and domination do not always operate in overt forms of militarism and abuse. Thus, she tries to evoke in her readers a suspicion of the rhetoric of apparently “ethical†discourses circulating even among her apparent allies. For example, she has attacked the “development†discourse as part of a neo-colonial project whereby the flow of resources and moneys remains controlled by foreign powers and global institutions, rather than the local people themselves. The idea that the “north†(rich colonial powers) gives “aid†to the “south†(the poorer, previously colonize lands) is an offense to the dignity of people there because it masks the historical realities of exploitation whereby those peoples were systematically denied or drained of their wealth and independence in the first place. She has written, “charity and injustice are two faces of the same coin.†Prolific writers all too easily provide the straw men of their critics: the more they write, the more vast is the proper context for understanding their claims, and the less likely are readers to take care in interpreting the excerpts and sound bites. In Saadawi’s case, she has been charged with being an enemy of Islam, an enemy of the state of Egypt, and a critic of democracy. Some groups have even called for a formal charge of blasphemy against her. Critics claim that she blames Islam for women’s oppression. However, Saadawi has struggled to repel this misperception. To be sure, she has taken aim at beliefs and practices close to the hearts of Muslims, including the hijab and not even stopping at the hajj pilgrimage, which she has described as pagan. However, she more consistently argues that oppression tends to be part of the consolidation of power undertaken by fundamentalist movements. This, she claims, is neither essential to, nor distinctive of Islam – it is an impulse, she claims equally present in Muslim, Christian and Jewish groups who turn down the fundamentalist path. The rise of these movements must also be understood in the context of recent stages in the life of this beast she calls patriarchal capitalism. Saadawi claims that what she sees as a recent increase in “traditionalism†and women’s oppression, although it appears to be local and culturally specific, must be traced to the forces of globalization and the efforts to resist its universalizing impulse. These fundamentalist movements, she claims, often begin as protest movements, but take on “reactionary, retrograde, anti-women, and anti-progressive characteristics thus leading to division and discord.†Moreover, it is not only women who are the victims of these forces – equally tragic is the reality that this pattern divides those societies most needing unity to resist. As Saadawi sees it, the impulse of traditionalist, local movements is an important one, but it becomes self-defeating when it serves to exclude and oppress women. Similarly, Saadawi has raised the eyebrows of those who simply peruse some of her statements about democracy. For, she has voiced doubts about whether the “democracy†that is called for and that is supposed to characterize modern institutions in the Arab world is genuine democracy. And it is indeed genuine democracy that she is after. Her concern is that we fail to recognize how deep and subtle are some of the anti-democratic strands of past, feudal Arab life, especially in rural areas. Democracy at the level of the centralized government (i.e. elections to public office) does not constitute genuine democracy, for it fails to account for the ways in which whole groups of people – and women in particular – are systematically excluded from the kind of participation in public life that would count as democratic. Thus, as an activist and organizer, Saadawi has struggled to bring both women and men together to educate and advocate for expanded opportunities, in both education and work, as well as for legal protection and recourse that would diminish abuses locally and in the home. Saadawi’s efforts have seen some reward, even at the level of the Egyptian legal system. Her contribution to the campaigns to end female circumcision (or FGM) has been enormous and she has witnessed the passing, first, of a law to restrict those allowed to perform the surgery, and ultimately a complete ban issued only recently. The same set of decisions was successfully invoked on behalf of her own daughter’s battle with a patriarchal legal system. Saadawi’s daughter sought the right to take her mother’s (rather than her father’s) as her legal name. As a result of her legal battle, women born out of wedlock may now take the name of their mother. She has not been deterred by numerous obstacles, which cannot go unmentioned. Saadawi has not only been assaulted with criticism, she has also been fired from her government post, she was jailed by then-president Sadat, she hass received threats on her life, and seen her publications and organizations restricted or shut down. These incidents, and the recurring attempts to undermine her efforts, also include attacks on her character. This is not, however, a woman whose motivation and determination depend on simple consolations or praise. We will no doubt continue to hear from Nawal el-Saadawi. BM
