![]() Female genital mutilation (FGM) was finally banned in Egypt in 2008. Her grandmother’s sexism – “a boy is worth 15 girls at least” – appalled her, and a clitorectomy at the age of six, described in The Hidden Face of Eve, prompted her campaign against the practice. She could not understand why, although academically gifted, she was praised only when she learned to light the kerosene stove. Nawal’s radicalism was shaped by experience. Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993) uses a dreamscape narrative to examine a world in which, for a woman, husband and boss are interchangeable, and for a man, female self-determination is incomprehensible.īorn in Kafr Tahla, north of Cairo, the second of nine children, Nawal was the daughter of Zaynab (nee Shoukry), from an Ottoman Turkish family, and Al-Sayed El Saadawi, a teacher. ![]() ![]() Her best known novel in the west, Woman at Point Zero (1975), gives a horrifying account of childhood and marital abuse leading to prostitution. El Saadawi’s fiction is similarly concerned with social issues. ![]()
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