08/04/2026
At age 10, she ruined her own marriage arrangement by chewing raw aubergine until her teeth turned completely black.
At age 6, they held her down and cut her.
At age 50, they threw her in prison.
And from inside her cell, using an eyebrow pencil on toilet paper, she helped birth a feminist movement that would shake the Arab world.
Her name was Nawal El Saadawi.
She was born in 1931 in the small Egyptian village of Kafr Tahla, the second of nine children. In a culture that often saw girls as burdens, her grandmother spoke the harsh truth openly: “A boy is worth at least 15 girls. Girls are a blight.”
Nawal heard it. She never forgot it. And she spent the rest of her life refusing to accept it.
When she was six years old, the women of her family held her down on the floor and performed female ge***al mutilation on her. The pain was searing, unforgettable. She would carry that memory — and the determination to end the practice — for the next eight decades.
But even in that moment of violation, something inside the little girl refused to break.
At ten, her family arranged for her to be married. A husband had been chosen. The suitors were coming to inspect her.
Nawal had other plans.
She slipped into the kitchen, found a raw aubergine, and bit into it fiercely, chewing until the dark purple juice stained her teeth jet black. When the potential groom’s family arrived, she smiled at them as widely as she could.
They took one look at her blackened teeth and left without sealing the match.
The child marriage was sabotaged. Nawal had bought herself time.
She used that time fiercely. Her father — more progressive than many men of his era — believed his daughters deserved education. Nawal read everything she could get her hands on. She wrote her first novel at thirteen. And she set her sights on becoming a doctor.
In 1955, at age 24, she graduated from Cairo University’s medical school.
She returned to rural Egypt as a physician and saw, up close, the devastating toll of patriarchy on women’s bodies: complications from ge***al mutilation, deaths in childbirth, women trapped in violent marriages with no way out.
She could not stay silent.
In 1969, she published Women and S*x, a book that openly attacked female ge***al mutilation and the systematic control of women’s bodies and s*xuality. The backlash was swift and brutal. She was fired from her post as Director of Public Health. The magazine she edited was shut down. Her writings were banned.
The Egyptian authorities wanted her voice extinguished.
Nawal kept writing.
In 1975, she published Woman at Point Zero, a powerful novel based on a real woman she had met while working as a psychiatrist in prison — a s*x worker on death row who had killed her pimp. The book became a landmark of Arab feminist literature.
By 1981, she had become too dangerous to tolerate.
Under President Anwar Sadat — who claimed Egypt was a democracy open to criticism — Nawal was arrested on absurd charges of conspiring with Bulgaria to overthrow the government. The real crime was speaking truth to power.
In September 1981, at age 50, she was thrown into Qanatir Women’s Prison.
She was denied pen and paper.
So she improvised.
A fellow prisoner smuggled her an eyebrow pencil. Nawal wrote on toilet paper — every thought, every story of the women around her, every observation about political imprisonment and patriarchal control.
Those smuggled notes would later become Memoirs from the Women’s Prison.
But she did something even more radical while locked away.
In 1982, still behind bars, Nawal El Saadawi founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association — the first legal, independent feminist organization in Egypt.
She built a movement from inside a prison cell.
After Sadat’s assassination in October 1981, Nawal was released after two months. She walked out of prison and immediately resumed her work.
The threats only intensified.
In the early 1990s, Islamic fundamentalists placed her name on a death list. The government offered her armed protection. She refused it.
Instead, in 1993, she went into exile in the United States, teaching at Duke, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Berkeley. She lectured around the world and wrote more than fifty books, translated into over twenty languages.
She returned to Egypt in 1996, still defiant, still speaking out.
In 2005, at age 74, she did something that seemed impossible: she ran for president of Egypt against longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. She knew she could not win. The point was to declare that women belonged in every space — including the highest office in the land.
Throughout her life, Nawal faced censorship, imprisonment, death threats, exile, and accusations of apostasy. The government repeatedly closed her organizations and banned her books. Religious authorities tried to forcibly divorce her from her husband.
She outlived them all.
Nawal El Saadawi died on March 21, 2021, at age 89, in Cairo.
She became known as “the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world” and the godmother of Arab feminism. Her work reminded generations that feminism in the region is not an imported idea — it is deeply indigenous, rooted in the courage of women like her.
Modern Egyptian feminists, including Mona Eltahawy, have called her a living reminder that women in the Arab world have always fought for their rights.
Nawal’s battle was never only for herself. It was for the six-year-old girls being cut, the ten-year-old girls being married off, and the women suffering in silence.
She spent 89 years refusing to be silent.
It began at age 10, with a raw aubergine and blackened teeth, telling the world: No. I will not accept the life you have chosen for me.
I will choose my own.
