[Marxism] WOMENS LIB/MIDDLE EAST: Exclusive interview with Nawal El Saadawi

["Sukant Chandan" <sukant.chandan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Very balanced article about Saadawi. When I saw her speak at my
University campus (Sussex) back in 2002 (I still have a copy of the
talk on VHS), I think she surprised some of our Palestinian as they
thought she would not mention the big issues of the Palestinian
Intifada, Afghanistan and the looming war on Iraq. Instead, she made a
blistering attack on academics who dont oppose these wars (which made
some of the 'left' academics squirm), and came out in full support of
the liberation struggle in Palestine and fully supported all the means
used in that struggle. She talked of how when she was young in Egypt
it was the desire of her and all her friends to strap themselves with
bombs and attack the British army bases!

I would agree with some of the criticisms of her below. I remember at
the talk back then tha she mentioned her views on the veil, which made
some veiled students uncomfortable, but that issue aside, she did does
not falter when it comes to defending the oppressed against western
domination, which is the main issue.

Sukant

==============================

An exclusive interview conducted by Sara Wajid with the author and
activist Nawal El Saadawi

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/02/13/nawal-el-saadawi-in-conv...

Less than a minute in, Nawal El Saadawi, the ideological godmother of
Muslim feminists, flouts author interview protocol rather fabulously,
by pretending she's not really doing one. I'm at a sunny breakfast
table in Edinburgh on the last day of her UK book tour, to discuss the
republication of her seminal 1970s books, but the 76-year-old Egyptian
psychiatrist and 2005 presidential candidate is, apparently, slightly
baffled by the reissues.

"It was a surprise. Zed (Books) were not paying attention to my books.
They are not really interested in novels or feminism so we had many
quarrels over the years," the white-haired iconoclast cheerfully
informs me. "Then suddenly they were publishing these three books
again and I was astonished. Why they are interested now? Apparently
they are relevant again. They are!" The high priestess of first-wave
feminism shrugs, pulling off a combination of aloof disinterest and
effective book-plugging with panache.

Saadawi wrote these revolutionary, shocking books on the brutal sexual
subjugation of Arab women when in her forties, after working as a
doctor in rural Egypt. The series includes her best-known novel Woman
at Point Zero (1973) about a prostitute who is sentenced to death for
killing her rapist, and The Hidden Face of Eve (1977), which opens on
the unblinking description of the clitorodectomy Saadawi underwent
aged 6.

The books crackle with righteous fury, depicting a world in which
little girls are routinely sexually abused by sex-starved male
relatives and mutilated by their mothers in the name of Allah.
Breaking these taboos in the 1970s made her the internationally
recognised authority on the status of women in the Arab world and
'introduced the word feminist into Egyptian culture'. But how do her
ideas stand up in a world where 'throwing off the veil' has become as
anachronistic as 'burning your bra'?

A new generation outspoken critics of women's status in Muslim
societies have emerged, young challengers for the crown. What does
Saadawi make of the notoriously right-leaning, controversial, Dutch-
Somalian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who campaigns against FGM and cites Saadawi
as an influence? She winces at the mention of her name.

   " It's become fashionable to talk about female circumcision but
divorced from broader politics. I look at you as a whole. If you
support the war in Iraq but you're fighting female circumcision am I
supposed to say 'Oh she's a hero, she's a feminist'? But you're
supporting the war in Iraq and standing next to Condoleeza Rice! I
have to understand your ideology and vision to see if you're really
true or if you're just playing the game."

What about solidarity with another woman who has been threatened by
Muslim extremists for her defence of womens' rights? "No, it would be
ridiculous to make an alliance with her on that basis" she explains
and gives me a pitying look for asking such an obtuse question. She
ends the discussion firmly saying we shouldn't give the already over-
exposed Hirsi Ali any more attention.

She prefers the French feminist and psychiatrist, Julia Kristeva as an
ideological ally and agrees with her that the hijab has no place in
schools and that public space should be secular. "When I was a child
there weren't any veiled students around. Of course, we didn't have
Sadat who encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood, but we had other
oppressions and I don't prefer the past" she says emphatically. "My
daughter is happier and has more freedom than me. There is progress
and backlash, progress and backlash."

Later, Hirsi Ali's name crops up again when we discuss Saadawi's
critics and I glimpse her infamous temper. Saadawi lets rip, "This
type of woman, like the Dutch woman, Ayaan, their work is weak and
they want to be stars. I'm a hard-working woman; I work and I write
and I deserve respect - these sensationalist women cannot work hard."
She does have over forty books as evidence. The day we met she had a
tennis injury sustained during her daily 6am exercise regime.

Saadawi is on the road again, partly because the Egyptian government
is threatening to revoke her citizenship. She left Cairo earlier this
year in 'irritation' after being interrogated by police in January
along with her daughter, a seditious columnist. She's writing and
teaching at Spellman Women's College in Atlanta ("I am a little
devilish you know. I teach creativity and dissidence,' she bantered
with the audience at her London reading).

Being an enemy of the state is a point of pride and has been all her
life; she spent a month in prison in 1981 for criticizing the one-
party rule of President Sadat and her husband, a political dissident,
did 15 years. In 1988 she made it onto a Muslim extremist death list
and moved to the United States for 8 years. A comical legal case was
brought against her in 2001 by religious conservatives, who invoked an
obscure law against apostates marrying Muslims, and attempted to
forcibly divorce her from her husband. The bitchy joke in Cairo was
that her mild-mannered husband was behind the plot.

But many feel Saadawi no longer deserves to be called the 'leading
spokeswoman on the status of women in the Arab world'? "Absolutely
not," says Ahdaf Soueif, the Egyptian novelist and cultural
commentator.

    "Nor has she been for the last twenty years. I know women who say
she opened their eyes to feminism as we might say about the early
iconic feminists writers in any language. But after she was imprisoned
along with about 1000 other people, her western career began and from
then on her discourse was tailored to the West and she lost touch with
her Arab audience."

Soueif echoes a younger generation of Middle-Eastern and Arab women
who are proud of their modernity and resent the prominence given to
Saadawi's writing in the West. Manal Lotfi, an Egyptian journalist
working in London explains, "She's brave -charismatic but also
aggressive. In such a conservative society she stands up and takes
attacks and criticism from many factions. But she doesn't represent or
understand ordinary women, most of whom are religious. There are more
Egyptian women in higher education than men now."

    "Women who wear the veil and say they choose to do so are either
lying or ignorant." I wondered what the two young Muslim women in the
audience wearing hijab thought of her answer.

At times, she does seem uncomfortably out of step with Muslim women.
In reply to a question about the adoption of the hijab by many young
Muslims in the West, she answered unequivocally "Women who wear the
veil and say they choose to do so are either lying or ignorant." I
wondered what the two young Muslim women in the audience wearing hijab
thought of her answer. But at other times her writing seems uncannily
prescient - she wrote in The Hidden Face of Eve over thirty years ago
of an 'incomplete or biased understanding of Islam and of the role it
has played in social change'.

This is in keeping with her analysis of the 'Qatib girl' case. A rape
victim in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 200 lashes because she
admitted that when she was attacked she was sitting in a car with a
man, to whom she wasn't related - a crime under Sharia law. The story
was widely reported in the western press and the Saudi King has
subsequently pardoned the woman under international pressure. "Of
course I'm very much against punishment for an honour crime," Saadawi
told me a few weeks later on the phone, "but this issue is very
political because Islam is the enemy of the West and supposedly the
only religion which kills women. I disagree with this - killing and
violation of women is to be found in Israel and by the US government
too for instance. But why didn't Clinton take up the killing of Iraqi
people and speak up against the American military machine? Why didn't
he make a big row in the media about that?"

    "This case is horrible but there is also a lot of violation of
human rights in Saudi of people who are fighting against the
exploitation of Saudi oil, which is for the kingdom and for the US
rather than for the Saudi people. Only the sexual problems are
exposed. But the husband of this woman is great - he supported her and
took the criminals to trial - we should also be focusing on this
positive progressive man."

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