1. Theorizing an Iconoclast

From a modest family background in an Egyptian village, Nawal El Saadawi went on to become a leading figure on the international feminist stage.^[1] Her saga, both biographical and intellectual, is dramatic, traversing continents and propelled by some of the central theoretical issues of our age. Few other Arab intellectuals, and in particular women intellectuals, have had the dubious honor of being negatively singularized at once in the West and in the Middle East by writers of varying political allegiances. On the one hand is the distinguished scholar and Palestinian leftist activist Edward W. Said, who, writing in English in the Nation, calls El Saadawi “overexposed (and overcited).”^[2] On the other hand is Dr. ‘Abd al-Wadûd Shalabî, the Islamist thinker and activist, who, in his book on the contemporary Muslim world, blasts Nawal El Saadawi in Arabic.^[3] Neither Shalabî nor Said stands alone. Many voices have been raised against the Egyptian feminist. Hisham Sharabi puts it most honestly: “It is difficult to explain to the non-Arab reader the effect…[El Saadawi’s writings] can have on the Arab Muslim male.”^[4]

Despite such negative publicity, Dr. El Saadawi boasts an enormous readership both inside and outside the Arab world. As an important player on the contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern intellectual scene, her work always appears first in her native Arabic. Thereafter, Western advocates of cultural studies and women’s studies devour El Saadawi’s books in translation with seeming insatiability. Rare is the publication dealing with modern Arab letters, women’s writing, or general intellectual trends in the region that omits the name of the Egyptian feminist.^[5] She has even been the subject of doctoral study.^[6]

Nevertheless, the first book written about El Saadawi in her native Arabic is not a book about her. It is a book against her: a Freudian-based argument that her writings contradict true womanhood. Its Arabic title, Unthâ Didd al-Unûtha (A female against femininity), accurately reflects its politics. In its English translation as Woman Against Her Sex, the book is the only extended work on El Saadawi in a European language.^[7] Such a situation is most extraordinary for a Middle Eastern intellectual.

The wide familiarity of El Saadawi’s name has its disadvantages, however. There is perhaps no other writer about whom so much misinformation has been propagated by critics, some of whom no doubt consider themselves favorably disposed to the Egyptian feminist.

To err is human, of course, but that is not the point. The point is that this controversial figure seems to have attracted more than her fair share of misrepresentation, and often of a sort that tends to have a marginalizing effect. It is almost as if critics felt the need to create an alternate biography of El Saadawi. Her year of birth has been changed.^[8] Her medical specialization has been transformed into the one most closely attached to women’s bodies and the one that befits the physician’s own gender: gynecology. This speciality—which, oddly enough, El Saadawi never practiced—is then used to explain some of her work on sexuality and gender.^[9] The translation of the feminist’s works has been misattributed.^[10] Finally, her own relationship to the Egyptian publishing industry—a not insignificant fact for an Arab intellectual—has been misrepresented. The publication of her prison memoirs, undertaken by the well-known Nasserite Muhammad Fâ’iq and his Cairo publishing house, Dâr al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabî, was transposed from Cairo to Beirut, an error that casts an undue shadow of censorship (and foreignness) over the work.^[11]

Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931 in the village of Kafr Tahla in the Egyptian Delta, and “grew up in a large family of nine brothers and sisters.”^[12] Her father believed strongly in education, which helped him to become a high official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education. El Saadawi, for her part, attended public schools before going on to study in the faculty of medicine at the University of Cairo. In other words, El Saadawi’s formal education took place in native Egyptian Arabic-language schools.^[13] This is hardly a given for Arab intellectuals, many of whom received substantial amounts of their education either outside the region or in foreign (and generally foreign-language) schools in the Middle East. Nor was Nawal the only child in her family to attend college: all her siblings did as well. But El Saadawi did not choose to pursue medicine for its own sake. Rather, as she puts it, “the Faculty of Medicine takes the best students, those with the highest grades.” One of approximately fifty women among hundreds of men,^[14] she graduated in 1955.^[15] As a physician, El Saadawi practiced in the areas of thoracic medicine and psychiatry. She was appointed to the Ministry of Health in 1958, but in August 1972 she was dismissed from the ministry and from her post as Egypt’s national public health director owing to her frank writings on sexuality, specifically in Woman and Sex.^[16]

But the dangers that El Saadawi would face because of her uncompromising views became even more dramatic. In 1981, she was imprisoned by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat as part of his massive round-up and incarceration of Egyptian intellectuals. This period, though quite brief, had a powerful artistic impact on El Saadawi. Inspired by her carceral experience, she wrote The Fall of the Imam, a novel that helped place her name on the death lists circulated by conservative Islamist groups.^[17]

It was also after her imprisonment that Nawal El Saadawi founded, in 1982, the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA), an international organization dedicated to “lifting the veil from the mind” of the Arab woman. In 1985, the association was granted “consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations as an Arab non-governmental organization.”^[18] The AWSA organized conferences and weekly seminars and functioned as a locus for frank discussions of various topics related to gender analysis and women’s status. In June 1991, however, the Egyptian government closed down the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association and diverted its funds to a religious women’s organization. El Saadawi, with her customary energy and convictions, took the Egyptian government to court, but to no avail. The association’s magazine, Nûn, has also disappeared from public life.^[19] El Saadawi chronicled this final phase of the AWSA’s saga in Ma‘raka Jadîda fî Qadiyyat al-Mar’a (A new battle in woman’s cause), using the occasion as well to demonstrate the world support that her organization received from international groups.^[20]

These activities make Nawal El Saadawi perhaps the most visible woman intellectual in the Arab world. In addition, she is supposedly the only Arab woman whose name has been placed on the Islamist death lists. After the assassination of the Egyptian secularist intellectual Faraj Fûda in 1992, El Saadawi began to take these death threats more seriously. Although many Arab leftist intellectuals, whose names likewise appear on the death lists, have confidently declared to me that no Islamist group would ever kill a woman, this is not a chance that Dr. Nawal El Saadawi seems willing to take. She presently divides her time between Europe and the United States, with frequent but brief visits to her native Egypt.

If there is a single activity that has sustained the Egyptian feminist throughout her years in medical school, government employ, even prison, it is writing. Nawal El Saadawi tells with great pride of how she left her second husband, a lawyer. When his colleagues complimented him on a short story his wife had published, he presented her with an ultimatum: choose between him or her writing. “Well,” she said, “I choose my writing.”^[21] This is a dramatic step for an Arab woman, for whom marriage still fulfills a socially sacred and legitimizing function. But such a step should not surprise anyone who knows Nawal El Saadawi. The demons of writing inhabited her even as a child. In 1944, at age thirteen, she had already penned a novel, Mudhakkirât Tifla Ismuhâ Su‘âd (Memoirs of a female child named Su‘âd).^[22]

In the half-century since she penned that childhood story, El Saadawi has imposed herself on the world literary scene. Her latest novel, al-Hubb fî Zaman al-Naft (Love in the time of oil), appeared in 1993, almost fifty years after Mudhakkirât Tifla.^[23] The corpus of fictional and nonfictional texts that the feminist physician-writer boasts is enormous: medical texts, short stories, novels, plays, prison memoirs, travel texts, critical essays. No other Arab woman (and few Arab men) approaches El Saadawi in the breadth of her writing. Nor has the Egyptian feminist ever shied away from controversial subjects. Her literary obsessions, ranging as they do from male-female relations to physical gender boundaries, make of her a literary iconoclast—in part, perhaps, because in El Saadawi’s discourse the scalpel is never far from the pen.

If medicine is less prominent than art in El Saadawi’s life, both are played out against the backdrop of politics. The Egyptian feminist tells, for example, of how as a secondary-school student she led demonstrations against the British and Egypt’s King Farouk. Her political activities continued when she became a university student. Yet despite her strong and unswerving allegiances to political causes, including that of the Palestinians, Nawal El Saadawi has never joined a political party.^[24]

For a Middle Eastern intellectual, this absence of overt political allegiance might seem inconsistent. In fact, however, El Saadawi’s position simply foregrounds the complicated relationship that exists between politics and women’s liberation in a non-Western and a nondominant cultural context.^[25] In a seminal work now almost twenty years old, Fatima Mernissi argued that since women’s liberation in the contemporary Middle East is associated with westernization, the entire issue becomes entangled in political and cultural debates.^[26] For most Arab intellectuals (both of the Middle East and of North Africa), to be a leftist or a Marxist means to be politically (though not necessarily culturally) anti-Western, specifically anti-American. And while leftist politics in a third world context normally implies support for the general idea of women’s equality, in fact such politics is frequently compatible with hostility to active movements advocating equality for women. Cultural critics are by now only too familiar with the story of women’s active role in the Algerian War against French occupation. It is also clear by now that the expulsion of the foreigner freed Algerian women to move from the battlefield to the kitchen, and this under a leftist, modernizing, anti-imperialist, FLN government. Similar gender dynamics have appeared in the Palestinian struggle, which was until recently a consensus issue among Arabs worldwide. Liana Badr, a prominent Palestinian woman writer, eloquently lays out what she perceives to have been the weaknesses of the Palestine Liberation Organization vis-à-vis women’s issues. Her conclusion? “Like all Arab regimes, the PLO has a cautious, perhaps reactionary attitude towards women.”^[27]

Hence, in the Middle East, to be a supporter of liberation causes does not necessarily indicate effective support for women’s liberation. Nawal El Saadawi has often been questioned about political priorities. Should not the political struggle of oppressed and occupied peoples, like the Palestinians, take precedence over women’s issues? After the expulsion of the foreigner, or after the revolution (or, for some, after the creation of the Islamic society), we will be able to sit down and work out these vestigial problems among ourselves. El Saadawi’s replies have been consistent and categorical: women’s oppression must be fought in the context, and as an integral part, of all other struggles for human liberation in the region, and indeed worldwide.^[28] Her opposition to imperialism and the Western powers has been unvarying throughout her career, as seen most recently in her condemnation of the Gulf War as oil-inspired Western imperialism.^[29]

It is not just that to El Saadawi, the refusal to adjourn women’s issues to some future time is pragmatically essential in a region with so many other national, social, and political claims. The Egyptian writer’s understanding of the relations of gender with class and other forms of oppression (a relationship clearly reflected in her writing) reverses the usual masculine political priorities. Without an attack on gender oppression, she argues, no lasting blows can be delivered against the other citadels of injustice. In a way, nationalist-based arguments against the urgency of women’s concerns are local variants of a more general challenge, elegantly refuted by Mary Daly in her Beyond God the Father. As she puts it, the tactic of asking, “But isn’t the real problem human liberation?” is simply a way to “make the problem [of women’s liberation] disappear by universalization.”^[30]

Westerners like Mary Daly or Joanna Russ in her book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, however, have not imagined all the ways in which an Arab feminist, such as Nawal El Saadawi, can be dismissed.^[31] Nawal El Saadawi’s detractors are made uncomfortable by her writings largely because they threaten many of the existing discourses on women in the Middle East. Discourses on Arab women in both the Middle East and the West are “privileged” (not necessarily a positive factor!) by being entangled with many other discourses, ranging from Orientalism, imperialism, and postcolonialism to world feminism and postfeminism.^[32] To discuss the situation of Arab women today is to be dragged willy-nilly into these debates. The fiery nature of many of these discussions is rendered even more explosive by other political and religious developments in the region, such as the rise of the Islamist movement. Nawal El Saadawi, by inserting religion into many of her recent textual creations, has placed herself in the heart of the fray.^[33]

All these debates have one thing in common: a concern with the problem of the West—as oppressor of the region, as purveyor of negative stereotypes (seen as linked to the first), and, most pointedly, as the source of a foreign movement called feminism, which, because of its foreignness, is either inapplicable or detrimental to Arab-Islamic culture and society. El Saadawi becomes in this view, despite her consistent opposition to Western imperialism (an opposition that her critics usually manage to avoid recalling), objectively a tool of Western imperialism. At the very least she can be labeled an outsider. How convenient it is symbolically to expel from the tribe the person one does not wish to hear. And how ironic, because what is most devastating about the arrows shot by this daughter of the Egyptian countryside is that their points are sharpened by an insider’s knowledge.

Thus, many object that through her writings Nawal El Saadawi is giving the Arabs a bad name (read: in the West). In this view, even critics who discuss the Saadawian corpus are guilty, since they give exposure—and maybe even credence—to her positions.^[34] After all, we all know that the Arabs have a far from favorable press in the West; discussing the likes of Nawal El Saadawi simply feeds that negative fire.^[35]

These arguments seek to force the discussion of Arab women (whether by Arabs or by non-Arabs) into a rigid and politically loaded binarism: on the one hand, positive appreciations that easily turn into apologetics, and on the other, critical assessments that are characterized as attacks. A pernicious label has even begun to be attached to such critical assessments: Orientalist feminism.^[36] Yet a defensive apologetic slides too easily into a defense of those in power—when it does not become a particular form of cultural arrogance which holds that Arabs cannot survive a frank discussion of their own social problems. Dr. El Saadawi has more confidence in the cultural and intellectual vitality of her people than that.

The message behind these arguments is a simple one: feminists like El Saadawi should be silenced lest they reveal dark secrets about the Arab world to non-Arab readers. I have talked about the implications of this silencing, an act that is nothing short of censorship, elsewhere.^[37] Suffice it to say here that this silencing occurs when questions of gender are at stake, but it is rarely deemed necessary when class or other forms of oppression are called into question. No one accuses the leftist writer who denounces the upper classes or political despotism of giving the Arabs a bad name. Of course, none of this is meant to suggest that El Saadawi skirts issues of class. Far from it. As we shall see, class perspectives dynamically inform her gender analyses. Rather, the point is that El Saadawi treats gender problematics with a directness that is rare, not only in Arabic letters but in mainstream media throughout the world. It is this directness that makes her so threatening. The image-of-the-Arabs-in-the-West argument is but a smokescreen. What really matters is the attack she is waging on values long cherished—and not only in the Middle East.

The accusation of stoking anti-Arab fires, however, almost always carries other charges in its wake. Is not Nawal El Saadawi writing for a Western audience? Does this not make her a “Western” feminist? It would then follow that El Saadawi’s writings do not provide their reader with an “authentic” vision of Arab women and the Arab world.

Any reasonable discussion of the applicability of an intellectual or political ideology in a non-Western context must consider not only feminism but other ideologies and movements as well. The most obvious of these is Marxism. While many Middle Easterners, notably neotraditionalists, reject Marxism as foreign and irrelevant, most of those, both inside and outside the region, who question the applicability of feminism have no objections to applying concepts like class, imperialism, capitalism, and exploitation to Middle Eastern societies.^[38] Advocates of the “shouldn’t be used there because not invented there” school of thought most often direct their objections not to ideologies that they themselves embrace but to ideologies that they find distasteful. Gender analyses seem to generate much more intellectual squeamishness than arguments derived from other social problematics.^[39]

Yet gender consciousness is hardly new to Middle Eastern society. Social, cultural, historical, and legal questions relating to male-female roles, equality of women, and so forth have been part and parcel of Arabo-Islamic discourse for centuries.^[40] This is one area where the culture had no need of a Western import.

Nawal El Saadawi has locked her powerful pen on many of the gender obsessions in her own culture and has woven memorable narratives around them. Her work demonstrates that it is possible to denounce women’s oppression without taking a pro-Western stance and without forgetting the reality that class differences make in the varying patterns of that oppression.

But to seek to exclude feminist perspectives (that is, the reality that as groups males dominate females across the planet) from particular geopolitical zones—in this case the Arab world, the Middle East, or the world of Islam—is automatically to privilege patriarchal discourses within these zones. Anti-imperialism can easily become a trap through which nationalism, while seeking to defend the native against the outsider, really defends those in power in the native society. A feminism that is not internationalist will find itself powerless because it will allow nationalisms to be used against the empowerment of women in each separate society.

Can we dismiss as “Western feminism” the entire intellectual and artistic venture that examines these gender constructs? El Saadawi’s very concrete discussions, her often sociological novels based on her personal observations of the lives of women in the city and the country, in the upper classes and the lower classes, stand as an eloquent refutation of this position.

The problem, however, lies deeper than the sociological specificity of Dr. El Saadawi’s work. Rather, it goes to the very heart of the problematic notions of East-versus-West and authenticity. In 1991, the University of Texas Press advertised a translated novel by a Moroccan woman, maintaining that this work was “uniquely Moroccan,” as opposed to “most novels by women of the Middle East that have been translated[, which] reflect Western views, values, and education.”^[41] At the time, the largest number of “novels by women of the Middle East” available in English translation were, indeed, by El Saadawi. But it is not important whether she was intended in this depiction. For this advertising copy simply articulates in writing what many voices utter in corridors or in closed gatherings: novels that present problematic images of the Middle Eastern woman “reflect Western views.” The phrase “uniquely Moroccan” in the University of Texas Press advertising copy also implies that the reader will receive a more intimate and authentic look at the lives of Middle Eastern women.

But in fact both our Moroccan author and Nawal El Saadawi are circulating in an international world, one in which the East-West dichotomy is often misleading. To be sure, both writers begin in a regional context that is linguistically defined. They do this by deciding to write in Arabic. At the same time, they are swiftly drawn, more willingly than not, into a transnational circulation of cultural products.^[42] Most successful Arab writers and scholars become part of an international market. I know of no Arabic author who does not wish to see his or her work translated and integrated into the world literary scene. Anyone who thinks this phenomenon is limited to the secularists—or the leftists, or the Westernized intellectuals—needs but walk into the Islamist bookstores of Paris and London, where one can find loving translations (into the languages of the colonizers) of the works of the most anti-Western Islamic neotraditionalists. And this is to say nothing of the Middle Eastern intellectuals whose lives are spent in exile in Western countries, hence partaking of at least two cultures. It is difficult to walk through the corridors of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris without bumping into some of the Arab world’s most beloved thinkers and artists. And what of the many literary genres, such as the novel and the short story, in which non-Western writers (like our Moroccan friend) indulge—and which likewise are originally Western?^[43] Universities around the globe are also sites of such cultural hybridization…but there is no need to belabor the obvious.

To speak of authenticity in this context is as vain as the tourist search for the authentic, unspoiled site, which ceases to be authentic as soon as the tourist sets foot in it. For there is no authentic modern Arab world (or discourse) if that means one untainted by Western culture.^[44] Modern Arab culture, from its most secular to its most religious manifestations, from its most elite to its most popular products, bears the inescapable imprint of Western cultural exports. More important, there is no contemporary intellectual figure, be he or she the most neotraditionalist of Islamic revivalists, whose thought has not been powerfully affected by modern European ideas.

Furthermore, the discourse of authenticity plays two related political roles in the region. The first is the attempt to discredit as foreign one’s ideological opponent. The second is a plea for recognition on the part of the budding artist or intellectual who has yet to gain access to the more lucrative international markets.

When El Saadawi writes, she does not speak for all Arab women. Hers is one voice. That does not mean that on a certain level of generality some of her fictional situations do not speak about all Arab women, indeed potentially about all women. Yet El Saadawi’s texts, whatever their potential implications, are always firmly grounded and have as their first referents the realities of the condition of Arab women (and men, of course, in the process) in her own society. Though not all of her work is realistic in the literary sense, her texts are overwhelmingly based on her own direct knowledge and experience.

By the same token, to call attention to the transnational role played by many of El Saadawi’s writings is not to deny their linguistic specificity. Nawal El Saadawi’s narratives are intricately woven tapestries in which the choice of a word, like the color of a thread, becomes a vital marker. The rich linguistic specificity of these narratives can suffer when they are transposed into another language, such as English. A translation is a new cultural product, one that speaks to new audiences and new cultural concerns. Hence, translations can never be a truly adequate guide to the subtleties of El Saadawi’s art.

But what about the Middle Eastern specialists, those able to read El Saadawi in her original Arabic? Too often, rather than analyzing this feminist literature, they have acted as if they wished to isolate it from the mainstream of Arabic letters. Consider, for example, this recent assessment by a Middle East specialist:

The Egyptian physician, polemicist and authoress [sic] Nawal al-Saadawi has several works in English translation: some of these are extended in length and partly imaginative and are therefore considered to be novels. These include Woman at Point Zero…; God Dies by the Nile…; Two Women in One…; Memoirs of a Woman Doctor…; The Fall of the Imam…; and The Circling Song. In each case these works combine autobiographical references and personal opinions with fictional representations of persons either real or imagined in a radical feminist context with heavily emotional, anti-establishmentarian and anti-Islamic overtones. They are highly controversial in the Arab world.^[45]

The implication here that snippets of autobiography and polemical journalism have been spread out with some imaginative material to the length of virtual novels is both methodologically questionable and factually inaccurate. Yet this assessment is not isolated. Sabry Hafez, speaking of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor and The Fall of the Imam, writes: “I hesitate to call them novels.”^[46] One could ask: if they are not novels, what are they? What the critic is really trying to do, of course, is to call into question their literary worth. Are we seeing in the begrudging attribution of the designation “novel” to a corpus that in fact is dominated by that genre a form of condescension not unknown to other women writers?^[47]

But still more is at issue. Does the frankly polemical force of so much of the Saadawian corpus mean that the feminist’s work is somehow not fully literary? The debate over art and political engagement is an old one. Nawal El Saadawi is clearly an engagé writer. But her writing is not limited to her political engagement. Indeed, its artfulness supports its politics. It is as complex as the Arabo-Islamic heritage that gave it birth.

Notes