Everyone wants to know what she makes of Isis and the radicalised girls who join it of the veil, against which she has campaigned all her life of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Later this month, for instance, she will be in the UK, promoting new English editions of several of her most important books, among them the novel Woman at Point Zero, which tells the story of Firdaus, a victim of sexual abuse who now awaits execution in a Cairo prison cell, and The Hidden Face of Eve, her classic analysis of female oppression in the Arab world (among its pages is a taboo-breaking description of El Saadawi’s circumcision at the age of six, an operation that was performed on the floor of the family bathroom while her mother looked on, laughing and smiling). The international awards continue to pile up – at this point there are too many to count – and so, too, do the invitations to speak. In Egypt, her supporters have established a Nawal El Saadawi forum, which holds regular meetings in Cairo and elsewhere at which her books – she has published more than 50 titles in Arabic – are discussed at some length. Nawal El Saadawi in 2011: ‘The revolution will win.’ GuardianĪnd counter-revolution or not, her profile has never been higher. The people decide whether he works for them or not, and if he behaves like Mubarak, he is out.” As for Sisi, how he does now depends on the people. We found him and his followers to be mad. But I am happy that the Egyptian people, with the help of the army, got him out. “No, I am not happy that Morsi is in prison,” she says.
#The hidden face of eve women in the arab world free#
But she did not regard the elections that followed his spectacular fall as free and fair: in her view, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood bribed and deceived their way to power encouraged, she insists, by Washington and London (an unreconstructed Marxist, El Saadawi views pretty much everything through the prism of imperialism). He has got rid of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that never happened with Mubarak, or with Sadat before him.” “There is a world of difference between Mubarak and Sisi. The government is afraid of the young, and they won’t touch me because they know I have the power of the young people behind me.” Like many of the older leftists and intellectuals who joined the crowds in Tahrir Square in 2011, she simply can’t agree that General Sisi, who came to power on the back of a coup in 2013, is ruling as a counter-revolutionary, just as Mohamed Morsi did before him (it is an awkward fact that state killings and the numbers of government opponents languishing in prison are both dramatically on the rise). “I’m surrounded by young people, day and night. The revolution has, she believes, protected writers like her, who in 2011 found themselves a focus for opposition. She feels safe for the first time in many years. She has a view, her two children live close by, and here in Shubra, her neighbours are mostly Copts, a community she adores. Some don’t even have a grave.”īesides, she has come to love this spot. Some people in Egypt live in graves, and they’re the lucky ones. I have an apartment and air conditioning. “But still, I am privileged even though I’m poor. But then, since when were dissident writers in it for the money, especially in Eygpt, where copyright is, to put it mildly, tricky to enforce? “Publishers have always taken from me!” she says, her voice rising indignantly. “No, I am not rich,” she notes, waving an arm in the gloom of her book-lined sitting room, which is shuttered against the noonday heat. Built in the 1990s, it seems much older, its forbidding brutalist exterior sprayed with wonky satellite dishes and precarious air conditioning units, its stifling lift threatening at every floor to judder permanently to a halt. Urn:isbn:1842778757 Republisher_date 20161027145615 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 542 Scandate 20161027022448 Scanner awal El Saadawi, the great Egyptian feminist and writer, lives on the 26th floor of a biscuit-coloured Cairo tower block about half an hour by car from Tahrir Square. Urn:oclc:record:1035598022 Extramarc University of North Carolina Foldoutcount 0 Identifier hiddenfaceofeve00sada Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7kq21t1n Invoice 1213 Isbn 0905762509Ġ905762517 Lccn 81458636 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 Openlibrary O元896707M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 13:45:22.630307 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA1145608 City London Donorīurlingamepubliclibrary Edition 3.
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