7. Of Goddesses and Men

The world of The Innocence of the Devil, like that of The Fall of the Imam, was one of monotheism. A contested monotheism perhaps, but one that structured both the theological arguments and their gender implications. Nawal El Saadawi’s dissections of patriarchy, however, extend from the body of monotheistic religion to that alternate spiritual corpus which can be called polytheism or paganism. Nothing un-Egyptian in this. Modern intellectuals of the Nile have long been aware that behind the dominant and still-living Islamic tradition lies another, that of Pharaonic Egypt. Egyptian artists and intellectuals have varied in their attraction to the Pharaonic past. For the cineaste Shâdî ‘Abd al-Salâm, ancient Egypt was a cultural ideal and a privileged pole of national identity.^[1] For modern Islamists, however, Pharaoh remains a code word for tyranny, defined essentially by his negative role in the Qur’ân. Thus, after Sadat’s assassination, the leader of the action exclaimed: “I am Khalid Islambuli, I have killed Pharaoh and I do not fear death.”^[2] In certain periods of modern Egyptian history (as between the wars), a cultural and aesthetic Pharaonism has been especially prominent.^[3] Nevertheless, for the overwhelming majority of educated Egyptians the Pharaonic past remains a permanent part of the cultural landscape, and for artists an always available bag of artifacts.^[4]

Ancient Egyptian religion featured a rich pantheon, and, as in most polytheistic systems, the female was an integral part of the divine: goddesses meet both gods and men. Nawal El Saadawi, however, avoids the facile juxtaposition of an oppressive patriarchal monotheism with a liberating polytheism (as has been done by some contemporary European opponents of monotheism).^[5] For the Egyptian feminist, the world of Pharaonic religion is one of struggle between patriarchal and liberating, antipatriarchal forces. Little wonder, then, that familiar concerns surface in this largely new environment, from the physical realities of rape and clitoridectomy to the long shadow of the frame of The Thousand and One Nights.

How fortunate for us that the Egyptian writer and intellectual Tawfîq al-Hakîm should decide to write a play, Izîs, based on the Isis legend.^[6] Al-Hakîm, whom we saw as the author of the theological short story “The Martyr,” is far more famous as a playwright. Indeed, he is probably still the best known dramatist in the Arabic tradition. And El Saadawi had already isolated him elsewhere for special treatment.^[7]

Nawal El Saadawi responded to her compatriot’s dramatic production by writing her own Izîs.^[8] In an impassioned introduction to her play, El Saadawi takes Tawfîq al-Hakîm to task, at the same time defending her right to present her own interpretation of the ancient Egyptian goddess.^[9] El Saadawi strongly objects to al-Hakîm’s argument that Isis^[10] is the model of the faithful wife, who learned all she knew from her husband. She is much more than this, argues the contemporary feminist, for whom al-Hakîm’s patriarchal thinking blocks his abilities to see Isis as more than a shadow of her husband:

The Isis of Tawfîq al-Hakîm is not the ancient Egyptian Isis. She is not the goddess Isis whose philosophy and worship spread in Egypt and crossed the seas and the continents, to the east and west, to the north and south.^[11]

Nawal El Saadawi’s Izîs was, then, written in response to another Izîs. Who is this other Isis, and how does she differ from the Saadawian one? Both plays are, of course, based on the same legend, a legend that, though complex, can be reduced to the following elements: The deities Isis and Osiris, brother and sister, are destined to wed each other. Their marriage has one offspring, Horus. Osiris is murdered by the pair’s brother, Seth. His body is thrown into the Nile and drifts out to sea, where it is discovered by Isis. Seth, however, retrieves the body and dismembers it, disposing of its parts in the Egyptian countryside. Not to be outdone, Isis finds the body parts and buries them once again. Horus wishes to kill his uncle but is dissuaded from doing so by Isis.^[12]

El Saadawi, in her introduction to her play, calls for a rewriting not only of Isis but also of other female figures, such as Eve and the Virgin Mary. Isis has always had great appeal for feminist thinkers, some of whom even link her to the Virgin Mary.^[13] El Saadawi’s title notwithstanding, her text does more than create a new Isis. Patriarchy, religion, sexuality, violence—these and other issues dear to Nawal El Saadawi invade the play and help to redefine this ancient Egyptian goddess.

Tawfîq al-Hakîm’s drama unfolds on the banks of the Nile. A group of women bemoans the exploitative nature of the Village Headman (Shaykh al-Balad): he robs them. Helpless against him, they plan to go and complain to the scribe Thoth^[14] in the hope of receiving magical amulets for protection. Isis, in disguise, informs Thoth that her husband, the ruler Osiris, is missing. He attended a dinner at the home of his brother, Tîfûn,^[15] who, however, disclaims any knowledge of his disappearance. Thoth’s hands are tied: he is merely a scribe and can do nothing but register matters. Isis will undertake the search for Osiris herself.

We next watch as Tîfûn and the Village Headman dispose of a trunk, carried by four men, in a place in the river from which the current will carry it. Though we are not told, we understand that the trunk holds Osiris. Two boys observe this event, and one tries to retrieve the trunk.

The Village Headman, who is clearly working with Tîfûn, announces to the villagers the ascendance of the new king. He also warns them that a crazy woman will come looking for her husband. True to his words, Isis appears, requesting the villagers’ aid. In the process of helping her, one of the village women uncovers the disappearance and death of the young man who had gone after the trunk. Isis, blamed for this incident, is expelled. The young man who watched his friend disappear after the trunk, however, takes pity on her and tells her what he saw. Isis sits and moans on the shore. A sailor then appears and reveals that he heard other sailors, whose ship was heading north to Byblos, speak of the trunk. The first act of al-Hakîm’s play ends on an optimistic note as Isis cries out: “Byblos…Osiris!”^[16]

Isis is now in Byblos beseeching the king’s guards to let her speak to him. No sooner, however, does she hear about a “man from the west”^[17] who has appeared at the court than she decides she would rather see him. It is Osiris. A happy reunion follows. Osiris tells of his brother’s vile act of attempted murder, and the couple decides to return to their homeland—not, however, before they reveal their identities to the king of Byblos.

Three years later, Isis and Osiris (now called the “Green Man”) are living in an isolated house on the banks of the Nile. They have a child, Horus. Two old supporters, the scribes Thoth and Mistât, arrive and talk to Isis. They wish to have Osiris regain the throne. Isis, however, reveals that someone has apparently been watching Osiris, and she is concerned. Her worries are not unfounded, for just then a messenger arrives bearing the news of Osiris’s death. His body has been dismembered and its parts put on a ship headed south.

As the third act opens, it is fifteen years later. The Village Headman has changed allegiances and is now working with Isis; Horus is in training to fight Tîfûn. Mistât and Thoth are surprised to see Isis working with the Village Headman, given his utter lack of principles. Isis, however, is concerned only about the safety of her son and his success. Mistât is unsatisfied; his loyalty to Osiris’s ideals keeps him from joining her struggle.

A fight takes place between Horus and his uncle, who has discovered the young man’s identity. But just as Tîfûn is about to plunge an arrow into his nephew, the Village Headman suggests that, instead, the young man should be taken prisoner and tried in front of the populace. A tribunal convenes. Horus is challenged to describe his father, which he cannot do. Accusations fly back and forth between Tîfûn and his brother’s family. Fortunately, the king of Byblos arrives and vouches for the sincerity of Isis’s accusations. What is more, he himself kept the trunk in which Osiris was placed. Horus is proclaimed king and wishes to kill Tîfûn, but Isis restrains him. She has the last words in the play: she hopes that her husband, Osiris, is pleased with what they have done.

The reader of Tawfîq al-Hakîm’s text is further directed to a certain vision of Isis. The dramatic text is surrounded by extratextual material that at once redefines it and recasts it. On the one hand, a book cover advertises Isis’s virtues, the first of which is said to be her fidelity to her husband.^[18] On the other, closing arguments and questions seal the drama that has just unfolded. A comparison is made between Isis and Shahrazâd, each of whom performed an important action for her spouse; Penelope is also mentioned, though she was more passive than Isis, sitting patiently awaiting her husband Odysseus’s return. Al-Hakîm also muses about the writer and his role: Should he be committed to the principle, as Mistât clearly was, or to the problem, as Thoth was?

The Saadawian Izîs is more complicated. The first act opens on the god Ra talking to Seth. Patriarchy is firmly entrenched, and no one questions it but Isis and Osiris. Ra promises Seth that he will inherit the throne of the earth from his father, Keb, and should any problems arise, Isis and Osiris will be handled appropriately. Seth, because of his love for Isis, asks the deity to spare her. Presently Keb, the earth ruler, dies. But no sooner is Osiris declared to be his replacement than he is killed and Seth takes his place.

In the marketplace, soldiers spot a young girl wearing an image of Isis. They tear it from her and, despite the mother’s pleadings, take the girl away, to have her raped by the Military Leader (Ra’îs al-Jaysh). The mother calls out to Isis for help. Isis, in mourning, is sitting with Maat, goddess of truth and justice. She hears a voice calling to her and thinks it is Osiris. She seems to be incapable of accepting his death. The woman who lost her daughter comes seeking their help. Maat promises an amulet, and Isis promises that she will deliver the young girl.

We now see Seth with the Military Leader discussing various matters, including Osiris and Isis. Seth’s obsession with his sister, Isis, leads to a debate on male-female relations, in which the Military Leader reveals his aggressive attitudes. Seth should rape Isis, he advises the leader: “Women love rape.” Seth is not convinced; this is man’s fancy. He loves Isis precisely because she is stronger than he is.

The last scene of the first act brings together Isis and Maat on the shore of the Nile. They overhear a sailor singing the praises of the goddess Isis. The two women decide to warn him of the new situation in the country. Isis, however, does not want her identity revealed: “I do not want him to see me in this state. He undoubtedly has in his mind an image of the goddess Isis that is more beautiful than this image.”^[19] Maat is obliging. She informs the sailor, who she discovers is newly arrived from Syria, that Isis is a woman who has just lost her daughter in the market.

No sooner do the two leave Isis than Seth appears. As he approached, however, he overheard a male voice. He insists that he will discover who this individual is and will tear his body to pieces. His conversation with Isis leads to a discussion of male-female relations, during which Seth declares his love to Isis and his desire to marry her. But she loves another. Seth’s eventual departure signals the return of Maat and the sailor. The sailor, having overheard Seth threaten Isis, vows to challenge him. “No,” begs Isis; Seth will “kill you behind your back as he did with Osiris.”^[20] Maat suggests that the two hide from the ruler. The sailor suggests a small house he owns in a village far away.

The second act finds the group in their new environment. Isis and Osiris now have a child, Horus. The only fly in the ointment is an old priest who wishes to live on alms. Osiris enjoins him to work like everyone else. The old priest is not pleased and abandons the village.

Seth is summoned by Ra, who, however, does not appear. The High Priest informs Seth that the deity had found his favorite woman in bed with a black slave. Although she insisted that nothing had transpired between them and that she is carrying Ra’s baby in her belly, the High Priest is skeptical. The truth, he says, will be revealed when the child is born. Ra finally appears. He has ordered the slave killed. First, though, he would like to see him castrated. Seth obliges, carrying out this deed. An extended discussion ensues between Ra, Seth, and the High Priest about women, sexuality, and procreation. How is one to tell the good woman from the bad woman? Should they be dunked in water? Should they be outfitted with a chastity belt? Why not perform a parallel operation to that carried out on the slave, the High Priest suggests. As the power brokers are debating these questions, in comes the old priest from Isis and Osiris’s hide-out. He gives Ra a report on their activities and reveals all he knows. The decision is made: castrating operations will be performed on both women and slaves.

Soldiers appear in Isis and Osiris’s village, accompanied by Seth. Seth examines Isis’s husband and declares that he is not Osiris. Nevertheless, the man is castrated, beheaded, and his body cut into pieces. Maat, Isis, and Horus discuss what to do. Horus wants to avenge his father. Isis, however, proposes a public tribunal. Conditions in the land are now such that castration and clitoridectomy are common procedures. The Military Leader offers his help to Maat, confessing that he has left Seth (probably because of that ruler’s savagery). The state of the country has worsened: it faces economic ruin; Ra’s holy book is being misused; he himself is aging; and his designated successor, his son, does not even look like him. A tribunal it will be. At Isis’s instigation, the head of the tribunal is elected democratically by a show of hands. Seth kills the Military Leader, and Horus castrates Seth, wishing to kill him. He is stopped in his murderous act by Isis. Forgiveness is de rigueur for the more powerful. The populace is joyous, singing the praises of Isis and Horus.

Like Tawfîq al-Hakîm’s drama, that of El Saadawi is prejudged for the reader by the author’s lengthy introduction. The feminist writer explains that she wishes at once to distance herself from her predecessor and to rewrite what she perceives to be his misogynist interpretation of the ancient Egyptian goddess. This she has done, despite some superficial similarities in the story line between the two texts—without which, of course, this would not be a true recasting. Where al-Hakîm, for example, has two male characters discuss the dilemma of the writer, in the Saadawian retelling it is Isis and Maat who undertake this debate.^[21] The two represent two different sorts of women, as seen, for instance, in their response to the woman whose daughter has been stolen: Maat promises an amulet, while Isis promises the return of the girl.^[22] Isis’s response to the bereaved mother is highlighted by the fact that Maat is the goddess of justice and truth; it should be she who is concerned with the recovery of the lost child.

Perhaps the major characteristic of the Saadawian vision of Isis is its all-encompassing nature. The story is extended, the characters developed, new relationships formed—all in such a way as to broaden the scope of the play into a generalized attack on patriarchy and patriarchal religion. Violence becomes but a tool of the male universe that El Saadawi creates.

Let us begin with Isis and Osiris, the major figures in this drama. But to say “Isis and Osiris” is to enter into a complicated game of identity, one in which gender plays a crucial role. Both figures are present in both plays. But each, male and female, is treated by its gender-associated scriptor in such a way as to become the stronger and the more important character for the text in question: the male Osiris for Tawfîq al-Hakîm, and the female Isis for Nawal El Saadawi.

When Isis first surfaces in al-Hakîm’s play, she is looking for her missing husband, the ruler Osiris. But she appears in disguise, hiding her face behind a black niqâb or veil. The scribe Thoth, in fact, belittles her by saying to his colleague Mistât that she is undoubtedly missing a duck or has had a goat stolen. When she, her identity still hidden, reveals to them that in fact her husband is missing, Thoth sarcastically comments that this certainly goes beyond “the domain of the duck or the goose or the goat!”^[23] Isis eventually confesses her identity. The later scenario with the villagers is not dissimilar, for again Isis comes looking for her husband, “hiding her face with her black niqâb.”^[24] She likewise eventually reveals herself to the villagers, but not before they accuse her of being a crazy, inauspicious woman. In Byblos, too, Isis is unknown and her identity (like that of Osiris) is not exposed until later. And yet again, before Tîfûn’s palace, Isis, standing with Thoth, wears a robe that hides her face.^[25]

Why all these disguises? Security might play a role: perhaps Isis does not want to reveal who she is for fear of bodily harm. But in the end she does precisely the opposite, disclosing her identity to those from whom she previously concealed it. In most cases, moreover, her name is not divulged until a negative judgment has been made about her character. The disguise, in essence, helps to prejudge the case for the reader, for whom Isis becomes a tiresome figure. Before being recognized as the widowed wife, she is joined to the ranks of women who complain about their missing animals, or, even more telling, she is transformed into an insane person. When the young man disappears, Isis is accused of being a magician and blamed for this event. The women, as a group, scream for her expulsion.

Al-Hakîm’s Osiris, on the other hand, is a positive presence from his first appearance as a missing ruler. No pretense or disguises are needed: he has simply disappeared. He is the wronged individual whose brother tries to murder him and eventually succeeds. He is the mentor figure who trains the inhabitants of Byblos in various skills. He may acquire a new name, the Green Man, but his identity is never in question.

With Nawal El Saadawi, however, quite the reverse is true. For the feminist, the character Isis has much more solidity than her husband. Her sense of self never wavers. Even Seth argues in favor of her intellect. She is strong. She is fair. She is wise.

Instead, Osiris is the one whose identity is called into question. The arrival of the sailor from Syria will be problematic not only for Isis, but for Osiris as well. Osiris, we know, is killed early in the text. Yet he is resurrected to be killed once again. Or is he really? This crisis of identity commences with the sailor’s appearance on the scene. After Isis and her fellow goddess, Maat, overhear the sailor singing to the goddess Isis, Isis decides that she does not want him to see her in this state. “He undoubtedly has in his mind an image of the goddess Isis that is more beautiful than this image,” she tells Maat.^[26] The latter promises not to inform the individual. The sailor persists in saying that Isis’s face is one he has seen before. When he asks why she is sad, however, Maat answers that she has lost her daughter in the market and is looking for her night and day.

Seth’s questioning of Isis after the departure of the sailor and her companion, Maat, is significant. When he asks her if she is alone, she answers in the negative.

—Who was with you?

—Osiris…was with me…

—There was a man with you a few moments ago…I heard his voice from afar…Who is he?

—It is Osiris.

—Who is it, Isis? Who is the man whom you are meeting in the darkness of night, far away from people’s eyes?^[27]

Seth’s suspicions must remain just that. Isis insists that the man she was with is Osiris. In a later confrontation between the two men, Seth rejects the sailor’s assumed identity as Osiris. This Saadawian game of identity with Osiris mirrors al-Hakîm’s game of veils with Isis.

But why is Seth so concerned with the identity of Isis’s male companion? After she repeatedly insists that the stranger is Osiris, Seth finally responds that he will rip his body to pieces. This is more than male jealousy. Isis is his sister, and the motif of his sexual attraction for her reappears throughout the play. In fact, the entire story operates (as does the Isis legend) around a brother-sister sexual nexus.^[28] We are already familiar with the centrality of the brother-sister relationship in Arabo-Islamic culture, a concern strongly reflected in Nawal El Saadawi’s literary corpus. The brother-sister couple in “A Story from a Woman Doctor’s Life” (see Chapter 2) and the Hamîda-Hamîdû duo of The Circling Song are but two such literary manifestations. Even Bint Allâh, in The Fall of the Imam, was chastised for having fought in a trench with her brother, their seclusion there having been clearly linked to sexual transgression.

The dynamics of this brother-sister relationship are, indeed, powerful. But what El Saadawi has done is to reverse them. In the patriarchal world of her play, Isis stands out as a strong and powerful female figure. When Seth and the Military Leader discuss male-female relations, the latter tells his ruler that women love rape and that this is perhaps what Seth should have done with Isis. Seth confesses that he tried but that it was “she who took me.”^[29] Similarly, on more than one occasion he recognizes the superior power of Isis’s intellect.^[30]

It is precisely this strength of intellect that distinguishes the Saadawian Isis. When Tawfîq al-Hakîm was contextualizing his female hero, he placed her alongside Shahrazâd, the medieval narrator of tales who has transcended her modest beginnings in Arabo-Islamic culture to become a major player in world literature. For al-Hakîm, Shahrazâd resembles Isis because both did something honorable for the sake of their husbands.^[31] And, the male playwright is consistent in the vision he presents of his hero. The last words in the play are Isis’s as she declares her hope that her husband Osiris will be “pleased with what we did.”^[32] El Saadawi, in her introduction to her own play, correctly interprets al-Hakîm’s “philosophy” as patriarchal.^[33]

What does this patriarchy really mean? Gender-conscious criticism has made us aware that Shahrazâd herself, despite her narrative role, remains imprisoned in the patriarchal order that gave her literary birth.^[34] Appropriately enough, this teller of tales makes no appearance in El Saadawi’s play. Instead, as in The Fall of the Imam, the frame of the The Thousand and One Nights functions as a backdrop against which some of the most important events of the drama are played out.

El Saadawi’s play opens on a universe in which the goddess Nut has been defeated and the god Ra is now master. The opening words of the drama are his, addressed to Seth: “It has been proven to me from this last battle that you are a courageous, strong horseman.”^[35] Is it accidental that these are the words by which the third-person narrator describes the male ruler, Shâhriyâr?^[36] Seth also resembles the medieval ruler and his royal brother in another way. Like his predecessors, the contemporary Saadawian earth ruler has voyeuristic impulses.^[37] Just as the two brothers watched the royal wives copulating with their black consorts, so Seth confesses to the Military Leader that he watched Isis and Osiris in bed. Unlike the sexually energetic lovers in the Nights, however, Osiris would simply lie in Isis’s arms like a child with his mother and she would give him her breasts to suckle.^[38]

Seth may be courageous and strong, but he is weak when it comes to raping Isis. Is Ra any better? Not much, really. He is a victim, we discover, of the same ailment that affected his literary predecessors, the two royal brothers in the frame of the Nights: jealousy. A member of Ra’s harem was caught in bed with a black slave, and not just any woman, but his favorite, already chosen to be his wife and to give birth to his successor.^[39] Ra, though, does not follow in the footsteps of the younger brother in the Nights, who resorts to instant gratification by murdering the two culprits. Indeed, Ra’s revenge may be sweeter from a male perspective: he orders Seth to castrate the culprit, declaring, “I want to see him in front of me as a body without masculinity and without manliness, just like the body of woman.”^[40] Seth obliges, and the black slave’s sexual organs are duly removed. Ra takes pleasure in this castration and laughs. He wonders out loud about “this strange mutilated creature…Is he a female? Is he a hermaphrodite?”^[41]

The dialogue that ensues between Seth, the High Priest, and Ra is highly charged with sexual politics. The deity compares slaves to women, to which Seth responds that “woman is by her nature perfidious and it is not possible for her to be satisfied with one man, even if he is the great god Ra.” Ra then bemoans the fact that sons are needed to inherit the throne, and sons cannot be had without women. “If man could become pregnant and give birth, we could do completely without women,” he muses. The High Priest replies that Ra indeed can make man capable of pregnancy and childbirth. But Ra thinks that life without women would be boring, and, in any case, it is easier to rule over women and dominate them than it is to have men become pregnant and give birth.^[42]

What an interesting exchange, transporting us as it does from the realm of the Nights into that of male procreation. This dialogue will undoubtedly remind those readers familiar with medieval Islamic philosophy of the story of the king who had such an aversion to women that his sage-physician devised a method by which a son could be begotten from the king’s semen alone.^[43] One wonders what the priest would have suggested had the deity pursued that line of argument. For an instant, one comes perilously close to an all-male society.

So the problem becomes, what, then, does one do with women? Various solutions are proposed. The priest suggests dunking them in the Nile: the one who floats and is carried upstream is innocent. This does not appeal to the deity; he fears that all women will drown. Seth has another idea: locking woman’s body in an iron chest. It can be called a chastity belt. The deity does not like this suggestion either. What if a slave or a servant acquired the key? In the end, only one solution, originally proposed by the priest, is deemed adequate: clitoridectomy.

Once again, The Thousand and One Nights plays a role. Placing a woman in a box is reminiscent of what the ‘ifrît does in the frame of the Nights. There, the demon has kidnapped the woman on her wedding night, and we meet her at the same time the two royal brothers do. Although the kidnapper, having released her momentarily from her captivity, is asleep with his head on her lap, she manages to seduce the royal pair. Clearly, we are to understand from this incident that the perfidy of women is endless.^[44] More to the point, the story from the Nights proves Ra right a posteriori: locking up women will not work.

In the feminist’s text, however, the box is linked directly to the chastity belt. This device, along with the technique of dunking women, is associated with the West.^[45] It is no coincidence, for example, that the brilliant Palestinian novelist and politician Emile Habiby evokes the Western chastity belt when defending Arab culture against the charge of oppression of women.^[46] Thus, the Egyptian god’s outright rejection of these remedies seems quite consistent.

The solution to the problem of women’s sexuality? Clitoridectomy. How appropriate that this technique should be suggested by the priest, the highest representative of the religious establishment.^[47] His argument is conclusive: woman’s desire is greater than her intellect, and that desire must be controlled—by removing the organ of desire. When Ra asks, “Do you wish to castrate women as we castrated that slave?” the Priest’s answer is categorical:

Yes, O Great God. With the difference that the operation of castration in the slave will keep him from procreating, whereas the operation of clitoridectomy in woman will deprive her of desire only, and she will remain able to procreate.^[48]

The deity is worried that the disappearance of desire in woman will lead to the same phenomenon in man. No, the High Priest reassures him: “Man’s desire will remain as it is. It may even increase.”^[49]

The brutal cynicism of this dialogue is easy to decode: the patriarchal paradise is populated by desiring men and desireless women. Other points are more subtle. Western forms of control are confronted with non-Western ones, though the linking of the Eastern image of the box with the Western chastity belt argues for a fundamental similarity.

With one brief dialogue, El Saadawi’s Izîs has again transported the reader into a new realm, this time into that of woman’s sexual desire and her sanctioned corporal mutilation through excision.

Female excision is a subject close to the heart of El Saadawi, one she treats in her fictional as well as her programmatic work.^[50] Of course, she is not the first Egyptian writer to deal with this culturally sensitive issue. The female writer, Alîfa Rif‘at, does as well.^[51] The male writer Sulaymân Fayyâd also treats female excision in his powerful novel Aswât (Voices). There, it is a Western woman newly arrived in the village whose life is sacrificed to this form of mutilation.^[52] El Saadawi’s position on clitoridectomy is not far from that of other feminists, like Mary Daly, or even other women writers from the Middle East, like Evelyne Accad.^[53] More recently, the African-American novelist Alice Walker popularized the plight of the genitally mutilated woman in her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, which tells of an African woman who undergoes excision as a child. Two components of her book set Walker’s narrative in context: the first is an annotated bibliography that includes some Middle Eastern material; the second, a set of thanks, in which Nawal El Saadawi’s name appears.^[54] The international feminist world concerned with the physical mutilation of women is a small one indeed.^[55]

There is, however, one crucial difference between El Saadawi and Western, or even non-Western (like Accad), feminists who deal with clitoridectomy: El Saadawi underwent the operation herself as a child. Only much later, after she had met her third husband, Dr. Sherif Hetata, and with his encouragement, was El Saadawi able to articulate her feelings about this mutilation.^[56] Her powerful account of the procedure has appeared not only in scholarly discussions of women in Islam, but also in popular magazines like the American Ms.^[57]

That it should be the priest in Izîs who recommends this radical operation is consistent with the Egyptian feminist’s position on patriarchy and the religious order. That it is an ancient Egyptian who justifies the act is more suggestive. The Islamic tradition on clitoridectomy is a long one; hadîths (traditions of the Prophet) have been produced on the procedure, advising, for example, on precisely how much flesh should be excised. The general stance of Muslim jurisprudence has been to call the act permissible or recommended but not required.^[58] Even today, discussions of clitoridectomy make their appearance in religio-legal materials.^[59] As a social custom, clitoridectomy has been common in some Islamic societies and largely unknown in others. The procedure varies from limited circumcision to complete excision.^[60] It has also (as Walker’s novel attests) been practiced in non-Islamic African societies. Egypt, of course, is both African and Islamic. In this context, it is striking that in the enormous corpus of her imaginative literature, Dr. El Saadawi has reserved the male justification of clitoridectomy to an ancient Egyptian. She thus roots the practice firmly in her native Egypt, while sidestepping the question of its relation to Islam.^[61]

Linking excision to castration redefines both as equivalent mutilations, while suggesting new implications, new politics of both gender and class. On the one hand, this linkage extends the negative (and presently unacceptable) image of male castration to female excision; on the other, it shows men violated along with women. The castration of slaves is a product of social hierarchy. Attaching that practice to excision relates oppressions of class (or caste) to those of gender. And what could be more universal than castration, which has a long history in both Western and Eastern cultures?

The proposed use of excision in Izîs to cut off women’s desire is, to be sure, a response to a specific female act. Like the royal wives in The Thousand and One Nights, Ra’s consort has been caught in bed with a black slave.^[62] But whereas their fate was death, hers is corporal mutilation. The similarity in the narrative situation of the two royal couples with that of the deity and his female favorite redefines the two punishments imposed on the female culprits. Juxtaposing the killing in the Nights with the clitoridectomy in Izîs turns the latter act into a sort of death of the female.

As with the Nights, all these corporal games revolve around desire. In the medieval text, it was homosocial desire between two men that set the entire narrative in motion. And of course, woman’s perfidious acts there were the result of her misplaced sexual urges.^[63] In the twentieth-century drama, desire is exclusively heterosexual. On the one hand, there is the desire of the deity for his female favorite, a desire that comes upon him suddenly in the middle of the day as he is immersed in the affairs of the kingdom. On the other hand, there is woman’s desire, once again illustrated by her perfidious act. The physical mutilation will be put into effect precisely to combat woman’s heterosexual longing. After all, does the priest not argue that “desire in woman is greater than her intellect?”^[64]

To say that the Nights operates as a subtext in Izîs is not to negate any differences between the two constructions of patriarchy, medieval and contemporary. The same situation, after all, obtained in The Fall of the Imam. In El Saadawi’s drama, the slave is endowed with a voice, unlike his medieval counterpart. He proclaims his innocence, but to no avail.^[65] Endowing this victim with a voice personalizes him, provides him with an identity. His entreaties also cast doubt on the whole question of his guilt. The act of castration becomes that much more heinous.

In the Nights, there is no discussion of any offspring from the ill-fated couple that was the ruler’s wife and her black consort. Neither royal brother seems concerned about this progeny. In fact, only with Shahrazâd’s entry into the narrative is the procreative process restored and the continuation of the line guaranteed.^[66] This is not the case in Nawal El Saadawi’s play. There, the female favorite is chosen by the deity to bear him an heir.^[67] Later, in a discussion between the High Priest and Seth over the woman’s alleged liaison, the priest notes that the truth will be manifest after the pregnant woman gives birth: the newborn will have either black skin or white skin.^[68] As it turns out, the child’s nose decides the matter: it is not like that of the deity but rather closer to those of slaves.^[69] The use of the nose rather than the more obvious skin color of the infant casts doubt on the woman’s guilt.

This concern for clearly identifying a child’s paternity is patriarchal.^[70] Since we know that patriarchy has just ousted matriarchy in Izîs, Ra’s obsession is but a visible manifestation of this man-made system. Interestingly enough, it is the children who are most tragically caught in the web of matriarchy and patriarchy. The young girl who is taken from her mother and raped by the Military Leader meets her fate because she wears an image of Isis, a clear sign of defiance against the patriarchal order.

What kind of a patriarchy is this? It is at once social, political, and religious. In this it is not unlike the dominating patriarchy of the Imam’s world or of the universe of Jannât and Iblîs. In Izîs, the religious aspect of patriarchy is most suggestive, the play being first and foremost a commentary on patriarchal religion. Ra is, after all, a deity. His advisors include a high priest. What, then, is the inspiration for the religious intertext? The compelling religious references are ones that allude directly to the monotheistic religions. In typical Saadawian fashion, the play, though it gives preference to Islam, is quite comfortable mixing religions. This tendency to attach patriarchy to religious systems in general, rather than to any particular creed, is a hallmark of El Saadawi’s literary corpus.

Izîs is replete with monotheistic references—to the unity of the deity, to a Holy Book. In the first scene of the first act, allusions are made to the fact that Ra is the only deity, and Keb, the only earthly ruler.^[71] Ra himself declares his unity: “Anâ…anâ…. al-Wahîd…al-Wahîd…” (I…I…. am the One…the One…).^[72] When Seth is later appointed earth ruler, much the same declarations are repeated.^[73] These professions of the unity of the deity, using a word from the Arabic root w-h-d, automatically call up in the mind of the reader the Islamic concept of tawhîd (transcendence and unity of God), derived from the same root. And sure enough, the term tawhîd itself appears, with Seth arguing that Ra in fact ordered its implementation.^[74] The reader should by now be aware of that notion’s significance in the Egyptian feminist’s writings: Bint Allâh, after all, defied the doctrine of tawhîd in her very name.

When Seth presents his argument, reinforcing it with the assertion that the deity eliminated all types of multiplicities, Maat responds: “Except the multiplicity of wives [ta‘addud al-zawjât],”^[75] a clear allusion to polygamy. In Islamic law, a Muslim man can have up to four wives.^[76] Maat’s quip connects to another discourse in the contemporary Islamic world: that on “multiplicity of wives.” In the streets of the Arab world and North Africa today, religious pamphlets abound on this topic. Some of these works are even distributed for free in religious bookstores and at stands in cities from Cairo to Fez.^[77] By raising this issue, El Saadawi has once again inserted herself into an important twentieth-century religious debate.

Ra speaks of his need for “the Holy Book” (al-Kitâb al-Muqaddas) and of the fact that he (Ra) may appear to Seth in the future to give him messages (rasâ’il) for the people.^[78] “Al-Kitâb al-Muqaddas” is, of course, the Arabic name for the Bible, and the delivery of messages is an allusion to the Prophet Muhammad, the Rasûl or Messenger (a word derived from the same triliteral root), who receives his revelations from God through the Angel Gabriel.^[79] More suggestive still are the formulas used when referring to Ra: bi-Sm Allâh al-A‘zam (In the name of God the great) and al-Hamdu lil-Lâh al-A‘zam (Praise be to God the great).^[80] These formulas, while clearly modeled on those used daily in the Muslim world, are carefully made distinct from them.

But like the onomastic games played in The Fall of the Imam with the names of the two political parties (the Hizb Allâh, the Party of God, and the Hizb al-Shaytân, the Party of Satan), the recasting of these phrases calls attention to the meaning of the original formulation and forces the reader to question it. Here again, El Saadawi is not targeting any specific religious construction. Her vision is more global: ancient Egypt is but a means to speak about both ancient societies and contemporary ones.

The religious aspect of patriarchy becomes all the more powerful when it combines with the social and political dimensions. The religious may be the easiest to isolate, the social and the political being at times coterminous. The world in which the deity Ra operates is a political world, representing in microcosm the universe of a ruler, his court, and subject population. The social is closely tied to this universe, reflecting as it does the gender hierarchies operative in society at large.

Yet these gender hierarchies are complicated and are intimately tied to corporal questions—questions that in turn will redefine the gender boundaries themselves. Sexual violence and physical mutilation are the domain of the male; their victims are initially women and slaves. The Military Leader rapes the young woman sporting an image of Isis. Women and slaves are two categories that seem to have much in common, when they are not turned into identical beings. When Ra orders the slave’s castration, he declares: “I want to see him in front of me as a body without masculinity and without manliness, just like the body of woman.”^[81] Elsewhere, the deity, in speaking about slaves, adds that they are like women.^[82] Is it a surprise that both should have their genitalia mutilated? Man and woman become assimilated to each other, a construct reminiscent of The Circling Song.

The physical violence under patriarchy is not restricted to women and male slaves, however. Osiris, before being dismembered, is castrated, his sexual organs fed to the fish. Seth chops off the head of the Military Leader. Horus castrates Seth. The men become themselves victims of the patriarchal system they created.

It is Isis who stops the violence. After her son has castrated his

uncle, he prepares to cut off his head. Isis tells him: “Enough O Horus…Enough…Do not kill him.”^[83] Isis’s reaction is interesting. Throughout the play her primary attribute has been intellect. Seth himself opposes her mental strength to his own mental weakness. In his discussion with the Military Leader on women, he says that Isis is a woman whom no man can rape. The Military Leader replies, “Her muscles are so strong, my Lord?” Seth answers him sarcastically: “The problem is not muscles! How do I explain it to you? My muscles are stronger than her muscles, but she is stronger than I am. Do you understand this?” The Military Leader admits that he does not.^[84]

Isis, however, clearly fathoms this difference. At one point, Seth tries to convince Isis that woman’s place is in the home and that she was not created for the life of politics and rule. “Woman is delicate, weak of body,” he says. “The bodies of men are stronger.” Isis replies, “If the one who is stronger of body is the one who governs, then why do not mules govern us? There is no doubt that the mule is stronger of body than you, O Seth.”^[85] Corporal strength in men, corporal weakness in women—this is part and parcel of an Islamic religious debate that extends from the body into the realm of law.^[86]

Elsewhere, we were already exposed to the idea that woman is not even human and that under Ra’s rule she has nothing left to do but peel onions and give birth to children in the manner of rabbits and cats.^[87] This is, of course, precisely the state to which women are reduced in dystopias like Burdekin’s Swastika Night and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Seth is more naive in his view of what an ideal wife should be—among other things, an affectionate mother and a meek wife who awaits her husband with a smile. Seth’s “ideal wife” (he even calls her that), whose heart and mind are occupied only by her husband, functions (despite its near-universal applicability) as a perfect transposition of the views widely disseminated in popular Islamic literature throughout the region.^[88]

Yet, how far Isis is from Seth’s view of the “ideal wife”! She is the victorious one at the end. Is this because, as Seth puts it, she is not merely a woman or a female, “she is intellect”?^[89] She even questions Ra’s corporal logic, in an argument that applies as well to Islam (and Judaism): How, she asks, could he have created the body in the most perfect way and then order the removal of parts from this body under the name of castration or excision?^[90]

But Isis does not reinstitute matriarchy. At the end of the play, the people dance and sing the praises of Horus: “Horus our beloved, Horus our king.” Has the cycle of violent patriarchy come to an end? One wonders, since without Isis’s intervention, her son would have certainly killed his uncle after having castrated him. For one brief literary moment, it seemed that matriarchy and the rule of the intellect might triumph. But the pull of patriarchy is stronger. The murder and mutilation, we know, will continue.

Notes

EI² refers to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960–).