Courtesy of Lynn Parramore of The New Deal 2.0
Egyptian feminist leader electrifies New York well-wishers.
She is nearly 80 years old, her white hair pulled back from a face at once radiant and arresting.
She has been censored, persecuted, threatened, exiled, fatwahed, and jailed.
Her clitoris was cut off at the age of 6, and she wrote her memoirs on a role of toilet paper while imprisoned for daring to write openly about female sexuality.
Most recently, she stood her ground nearly every day at Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising, cheering the protesters and hosting them in her home.
Last night on New York City’s west side, feminist legend Gloria Steinem hosted a reception for a woman whose work has left a giant mark on the global quest for freedom and equality. Nawal El Saadawi, the honoree, is the indomitable feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist whose work has focused on the relationship between women and Islam — a relationship that is complicated, to put it mildly. “Islamic feminism is alive and well!” she announced to vigorous applause in a room filled by journalists and activists who had gathered to pay homage to a pivotal figure on the world stage. Lively and full of humor, Dr. Saadawi mesmerized the room with the same energy and charisma that bolstered the Egyptian protesters fighting for democracy.
I first learned about the amazing Dr. Saadawi in the late 1990s, while researching the shocking extent of female genital mutilation. Hundreds of millions of women across north Africa and the Middle East, I learned, have had their genitals cut, maimed, and ravaged by a variety of practices that result in horrific health problems, not to mention psychological trauma, and even death. This is a cultural problem, and it is also an economic one. Women who do the bulk of the agricultural work in many of the regions where FGM is practiced are so weakened physically by health complications that they cannot do the work required to produce and nurture the food crops needed for the community’s survival. Over her long career, Dr. Saadawi has worked tirelessly to explain the economic devastation that results from the subjugation of women.
At the New York gathering, Dr. Saadawi discussed the historic work of Islamic feminists across the globe, surprising me with the fact that Tunisian women had secured abortion rights 8 years before Americans had Roe v. Wade. She reminded us that you can’t have a democracy in an Islamic country without the full participation of women, just as you can’t have democracy in a capitalist society where there is a huge gap between rich and poor. She made it clear that the connections between feminism, global politics and economics are crucial to understanding how the human race can move forward. Defiant after decades of challenging some of the most pernicious defenders of patriarchy on the face of the earth, she appears to be getting, if anything, more radical with age.
Watch Dr. Saadawi discuss women, fundamentalism, and genital mutilation, explaining how ‘religion is all politics’:
