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Date: Saturday, 1 November, 2008, 4:47 AM
Nawal El Saadawi -- in Dialogue
by Sara Wajid
Less than a minute in, Nawal El Saadawi, the ideological godmother of Muslim
feminists, flouts author interview protocol rather fabulously, by pretending
she's not really doing one. I'm at a sunny breakfast table in Edinburgh on the
last day of her UK book tour, to discuss the republication of her seminal 1970s
books, but the 76-year-old Egyptian psychiatrist and 2005 presidential
candidate is, apparently, slightly baffled by the reissues.
"It was a surprise. Zed (Books) were not paying attention to my books.. They
are not really interested in novels or feminism so we had many quarrels over
the years," the white-haired iconoclast cheerfully informs me. "Then suddenly
they were publishing these three books again and I was astonished. Why they
are interested now? Apparently they are relevant again. They are!" The high
priestess of first-wave feminism shrugs, pulling off a combination of aloof
disinterest and effective book-plugging with panache.
Saadawi wrote these revolutionary, shocking books on the brutal sexual
subjugation of Arab women when in her forties, after working as a doctor in
rural Egypt. The series includes her best-known novel Woman at Point Zero
(1973) about a prostitute who is sentenced to death for killing her rapist, and
The Hidden Face of Eve (1977), which opens on the unblinking description of the
clitorodectomy Saadawi underwent aged 6.
The books crackle with righteous fury, depicting a world in which little girls
are routinely sexually abused by sex-starved male relatives and mutilated by
their mothers in the name of Allah. Breaking these taboos in the 1970s made
her the internationally recognised authority on the status of women in the Arab
world and 'introduced the word feminist into Egyptian culture'. But how do her
ideas stand up in a world where 'throwing off the veil' has become as
anachronistic as 'burning your bra'?
A new generation outspoken critics of women's status in Muslim societies have
emerged, young challengers for the crown. What does Saadawi make of the
notoriously right-leaning, controversial, Dutch-Somalian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who
campaigns against FGM and cites Saadawi as an influence? She winces at the
mention of her name.
It's become fashionable to talk about female circumcision but divorced from
broader politics. I look at you as a whole. If you support the war in Iraq
but you're fighting female circumcision am I supposed to say 'Oh she's a hero,
she's a feminist'? But you're supporting the war in Iraq and standing next to
Condoleeza Rice! I have to understand your ideology and vision to see if
you're really true or if you're just playing the game.
What about solidarity with another woman who has been threatened by Muslim
extremists for her defence of womens' rights? "No, it would be ridiculous to
make an alliance with her on that basis," she explains and gives me a pitying
look for asking such an obtuse question. She ends the discussion firmly saying
we shouldn't give the already over-exposed Hirsi Ali any more attention.
She prefers the French feminist and psychiatrist Julia Kristeva as an
ideological ally and agrees with her that the hijab has no place in schools and
that public space should be secular. "When I was a child there weren't any
veiled students around. Of course, we didn't have Sadat who encouraged the
Muslim Brotherhood, but we had other oppressions and I don't prefer the past,"
she says emphatically. "My daughter is happier and has more freedom than me.
There is progress and backlash, progress and backlash."
Later, Hirsi Ali's name crops up again when we discuss Saadawi's critics and I
glimpse her infamous temper. Saadawi lets rip, "This type of woman, like the
Dutch woman, Ayaan, their work is weak and they want to be stars. I'm a
hard-working woman; I work and I write and I deserve respect -- these
sensationalist women cannot work hard." She does have over forty books as
evidence. The day we met she had a tennis injury sustained during her daily
6am exercise regime.
Saadawi is on the road again, partly because the Egyptian government is
threatening to revoke her citizenship. She left Cairo earlier this year in
'irritation' after being interrogated by police in January along with her
daughter, a seditious columnist. She's writing and teaching at Spellman
Women's College in Atlanta ("I am a little devilish you know. I teach
creativity and dissidence," she bantered with the audience at her London
reading).
Being an enemy of the state is a point of pride and has been all her life; she
spent a month in prison in 1981 for criticizing the one-party rule of President
Sadat and her husband, a political dissident, did 15 years. In 1988 she made
it onto a Muslim extremist death list and moved to the United States for 8
years. A comical legal case was brought against her in 2001 by religious
conservatives, who invoked an obscure law against apostates marrying Muslims,
and attempted to forcibly divorce her from her husband. The bitchy joke in
Cairo was that her mild-mannered husband was behind the plot.
But many feel Saadawi no longer deserves to be called the 'leading spokeswoman
on the status of women in the Arab world'? "Absolutely not," says Ahdaf
Soueif, the Egyptian novelist and cultural commentator.
Nor has she been for the last twenty years. I know women who say she opened
their eyes to feminism as we might say about the early iconic feminist writers
in any language. But after she was imprisoned along with about 1000 other
people, her western career began and from then on her discourse was tailored to
the West and she lost touch with her Arab audience.
Soueif echoes a younger generation of Middle-Eastern and Arab women who are
proud of their modernity and resent the prominence given to Saadawi's writing
in the West. Manal Lotfi, an Egyptian journalist working in London explains,
"She's brave -- charismatic but also aggressive. In such a conservative
society she stands up and takes attacks and criticism from many factions. But
she doesn't represent or understand ordinary women, most of whom are
religious. There are more Egyptian women in higher education than men now."
At times, she does seem uncomfortably out of step with Muslim women. In reply
to a question about the adoption of the hijab by many young Muslims in the
West, she answered unequivocally: "Women who wear the veil and say they choose
to do so are either lying or ignorant." I wondered what the two young Muslim
women in the audience wearing hijab thought of her answer. But at other times
her writing seems uncannily prescient -- she wrote in The Hidden Face of Eve
over thirty years ago of an "incomplete or biased understanding of Islam and of
the role it has played in social change."
This is in keeping with her analysis of the 'Qatib girl' case. A rape victim
in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 200 lashes because she admitted that when she
was attacked she was sitting in a car with a man, to whom she wasn't related --
a crime under Sharia law. The story was widely reported in the western press
and the Saudi King has subsequently pardoned the woman under international
pressure. "Of course I'm very much against punishment for an honour crime,"
Saadawi told me a few weeks later on the phone, "but this issue is very
political because Islam is the enemy of the West and supposedly the only
religion which kills women. I disagree with this -- killing and violation of
women is to be found in Israel and by the US government too for instance. But
why didn't Clinton take up the killing of Iraqi people and speak up against the
American military machine? Why didn't he make a big row in the media about
that?"
This case is horrible but there is also a lot of violation of human rights in
Saudi of people who are fighting against the exploitation of Saudi oil, which
is for the kingdom and for the US rather than for the Saudi people. Only the
sexual problems are exposed. But the husband of this woman is great -- he
supported her and took the criminals to trial -- we should also be focusing on
this positive progressive man.
http://mrzine. monthlyreview. org/wajid271008. html
"Do not judge me by my actions;
Do not judge me from man's point of view"
"Judge me from God's - by the hidden purpose behind my actions.
Regi George wishing you Good Luck. Thanks
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