Nawal El Saadawi (Arabic: نوال السعداوي, ALA-LC: Nawāl as-Saaʻdāwī, 22 October 1931 – 21 March 2021) was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician.

She wrote numerous books on the subject of women in Islam, focusing on the practice of female genital mutilation in her society.

[10] Saadawi was subjected to female genital mutilation[11] at the age of six,[12] though her father believed that both girls and boys should be educated.

[13] Both her parents died at a young age,[14][unreliable source] leaving Saadawi with the sole burden of providing for a large family.

[18] Even as a child she objected to the male-dominated society she lived in, with sons valued far more highly than daughters, reacting angrily to her grandmother who said that "a boy is worth 15 girls at least...

[21][23] While working as a doctor in her birthplace of Kafr Tahla, she observed the hardships and inequalities faced by rural women.

[26] In 1972, she published Woman and Sex (المرأة والجنس), confronting and contextualising various aggressions perpetrated against women's bodies, including female circumcision.

[22] She also lost her positions as chief editor of a health journal, and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt.

[11] Long viewed as controversial and dangerous by the Egyptian government, Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine in 1981 called Confrontation.

She used a "stubby black eyebrow pencil" and "a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper" to record her thoughts.

Her contact with a prisoner at Qanatir, nine years before she was imprisoned there, served as inspiration for an earlier work, a novel titled Woman at Point Zero (Arabic: امرأة عند نقطة الصفر, 1975).

[37][38] Saadawi continued her activism and considered running in the 2005 Egyptian presidential election, before stepping out because of stringent requirements for first-time candidates.

[42] In July 2016, she headlined the Royal African Society's "Africa Writes" literary festival in London, where she spoke "On Being a Woman Writer" in conversation with Margaret Busby.

[43][44] At the Göteborg Book Fair that took place on 27 to 30 September 2018, Saadawi attended a seminar on development in Egypt and the Middle East after the Arab Spring[45] and during her talk at the event stated that "colonial, capitalist, imperialist, racist" global powers, led by the United States, collaborated with the Egyptian government to end the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

She added that she remembered seeing then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Tahrir Square handing out dollar bills to the youth in order to encourage them to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood in the upcoming elections.

Her earliest writings include a selection of short stories entitled I Learned Love (1957) and her first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958).

[49][50] In 1972, she published her first work of non-fiction, Women and Sex,[22] which evoked the antagonism of highly placed political and theological authorities.

[22] Other works include The Hidden Face of Eve,[51] God Dies by the Nile,[52] The Circling Song,[53] Searching,[54] The Fall of the Imam (described as "a powerful and moving exposé of the horrors that women and children can be exposed to by the tenets of faith"),[55] and Woman at Point Zero.

[62] As she wrote in Arabic, she saw the question of translation into English or French as "a big problem" linked to the fact that "the colonial capitalist powers are mainly English- or French-speaking....

I am still ignored by big literary powers in the world, because I write in Arabic, and also because I am critical of the colonial, capitalist, racist, patriarchal mindset of the super-powers.

"[63]Her book Mufakirat Tifla fi Al-Khamisa wa Al-Thamaneen (A Notebook of an 85-year-old Girl), based on excerpts from her journal, was published in 2017.

Did you have to pay with your dear life a price ... for doctors and clerics to learn that the right religion doesn't cut children's organs?

[70] In a 2014 interview, Saadawi said that "the root of the oppression of women lies in the global post-modern capitalist system, which is supported by religious fundamentalism".

[67] She was also critical of the objectification of women and female bodies in patriarchal social structures common in Europe and the US,[74] upsetting fellow feminists by speaking against make-up and revealing clothes.

[76] Saadawi is the subject of the film She Spoke the Unspeakable, directed by Jill Nicholls, broadcast in February 2017 in the BBC One television series Imagine.