Nawal El Saadawi

Born on October 27, 1931, in the Nile Delta village of Kafr Tahla, Nawal El Saadawi was the second of nine children of a Ministry of Education official who had marched against the British occupation in the 1919 revolution and, unusually for his time and place, insisted that his daughters be educated alongside his sons. At six she was subjected to female genital cutting, an act carried out by a hired midwife in her family home, a violation she would spend the rest of her life writing and campaigning against. She trained as a physician at Cairo University, qualifying in 1955, and took her first posting in her own home village, where she watched rural women die of illnesses that poverty and silence, not medicine, had made fatal. She rose to become Egypt's Director of Public Health, then lost the post in 1972 after her book Women and Sex named genital cutting and religious hypocrisy directly; the Ministry also shut down the health journal she edited. In 1975 she published Woman at Point Zero, built from her own research among women held at Qanatir Prison, and in 1977 The Hidden Face of Eve carried her arguments to readers well beyond Egypt. In September 1981 Anwar Sadat's government jailed her along with hundreds of other critics; she was freed a month later, after his assassination. She founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1982, which the state banned in 1991, and left Egypt in 1993 after her name appeared on a fundamentalist death list, teaching at universities in the United States before returning home in 1996. She kept writing and organizing into her eighties, publishing more than fifty books translated into over thirty languages. She died in Cairo on March 21, 2021, at the age of eighty-nine.

In September 1981, Egyptian police jailed her along with hundreds of intellectuals critical of president Sadat. Denied pen and paper in her cell at Qanatir prison, she wrote anyway: on a smuggled roll of toilet paper, in a stubby black eyebrow pencil. Sadat was assassinated weeks later; she walked out still holding the pages.