Nawal El Saadawi (1931–2021)

Another fantastic, revolutionary book by this incredibly courageous woman. It ranges over so many themes I need to acknowledge them all at least by listing them:

* Part I - The Mutilated Half * The Question that No One Would Answer * Sexual Agression Against the Female Child * The Grandfather with Bad Manners * The Injustice of Justice * The Very Fine Membrane Called 'Honour' * Circumcision of Girls * Obscurantism and Contradiction * The Illegitimate Child and the Prostitute * Abortion and show more Fertility * Distorted Notions about Femininity, Beauty and Love * Part II - Women in History * The Thirteenth Rib of Adam * Man the God, Woman the Sinful * Woman at the Time of the Pharaohs * Liberty to the Slave, But Not for the Woman * Part III - The Arab Woman * The Role of Women in Arab History * Love and Sex in the Life of the Arabs * The Heroine in Arab Literature * Part IV - Breaking Through * Arab Pioneers of Women's Liberation * Work and Women * Marriage and Divorce *

As you can see, she didn't baulk at tackling the most taboo, incendiary themes, such as female circumcision, rampant sexual abuse of female children by family and strangers, virginity, the whole complex of loathsome beliefs and practices surrounding it, prostitution, sex and women in general; all the way to calling out and rejecting the reactionary interpretations of Islam.

I must begin with what may look like a contradiction--first, to note that we must keep in mind that the audience addressed is that of Arab women and men in the 1970s, i.e. no polemical comparison with the West is intended. But then to stress immediately that we should not think of the text as foreign, dealing with problems mostly outside our own experience, but as in fact applying to us, to women everywhere, because the principles of oppression are at the root the same. So, while Western ideas and situations may serve as a reference point, to elucidate some problem or serve as an example, we must fight the all-too-frequent tendency to interpret processes outside the West as subordinate to and tending to some ideal specifically Western status. Loving freedom and fighting for it is neither of the West or the East, it's of human nature.

Saadawi rightly observes that patriarchal systems are everywhere, that the subjugation of women is generally attempted if not the rule, and that this is related to the class war.

Her outlook is emancipatory not only in relation to the gender but class as well, which is unsurprising given that poor women are the most numerous of women, and that economic deprivation and inequality is the pre-condition of every oppression of women. And yet this insight is still neglected in the West in particular.

But, what were the specific problems of the women in the Arab world in 1977, and why were they?

Answering the second part first: practically, Arab women had problems because the society elevated and favoured the male and men at the expense of women. And, returning to the first part, nowhere is this clearer or faster seen than in the laws regulating marriage and divorce. Men can do everything; women can do nothing--women must suffer everything that men can do.

First, marriage is an institution in which the woman's (or, usually, the girl's) will is of no importance--it's a deal made by the prospective husband with the girl's parents, usually simply the father, or other male relatives acting as guardians. A woman can't offer or demand marriage on her own behalf.

Once married, the woman is easily divorced, but she cannot initiate divorce. Moreover, all kind of arrangements exist to make already loose marriage contract even looser and less onerous for the man, such as marrying without a written contract, or divorcing a woman temporarily in order to acquire more wives over the limit of four, then divorcing those and remarrying etc.

" ...it is probably not accurate to use the term 'rights of the woman' since a woman under the Islamic system of marriage has no human rights unless we consider that a slave has rights under a slave system.

(...)

Among the most serious obstacles that confront Arab women in so far as their employment and work is concerned are the laws related to marriage and civil rights. These laws still give the husband an absolute right to prevent his wife from taking a job, travelling abroad, or even going out of her home whenever she desires."

Poor female workers, representing more than 80% of the female workforce, that in agriculture and domestic service, worked for no pay at all--they worked for their husbands or families or, if in service to strangers, for their upkeep (this is a situation I saw first hand when my mother's cleaning woman in Syria showed up once with eight children of varying ages, her relatives, saying they'd all work just for food and shelter).

Women working in factories were so mercilessly exploited in conditions worse than that of the male workers that few lasted more than a few years--it suited the owners fine to run them down as hard as possible because every year brought a new crop of unskilled poor girls happy to earn peanuts.

(Prostitution, otoh, was criminalized in Egypt in 1951--and the ones going to prison were the prostitutes, not the johns. In fact the latter would testify against the women.)

The way the conditions of marriage and divorce are so essential in creating the women's miserable state isn't due just to the upper hand it gives men regarding family life, but also the status of children. Just as easily as unmarried men (but not unmarried women) can confer legitimacy on their children, if they wish to do so, the married man can withdraw legitimacy from the children he fathered in legal marriage, even with the woman still his wife. This places not just the woman but her children in limbo.

Given that the options for work for women are so few, most divorced women see themselves obliged to go back to their parents or other family--if those will have them.

Given all of this, it's not hard to see how women existed in a perennially precarious situation, always in the shadow of a threat, always potentially on the brink of ruin.

Polygamy and repudiation can be seen as the basic mechanisms that bring about women's dehumanization and disenfranchisement. From that basis other myriad forms of discrimination follow.

"There are no laws in Egypt at present that discriminate between the sexes as far as education or employment are concerned. Yet, in actual practice, discrimination is a frequent occurrence. One example of this discrimination is what happens in the appointment of judges. The men who dominate the judicial system in Egypt have been able to prevent women from becoming judges on the assumption that a woman, by her very nature, is unfit to shoulder the responsibilities related to a court of law. This assumption is built on the fact that Islam considers the testimony of one man equivalent to that of two women. (...)... in the daily newspaper, El Akhbar, on 12 January 1976 ... the author maintains that the post of a judge is forbidden to women by Islam: 'It is superfluous to explain, that according to Islam, ten conditions must be fulfilled for a person to judge. Without these ten conditions, the very essence of "judging" is non-existent, and the right or even possibility to be accorded this high function is lost. These ten conditions are: Islamic belief, reason, masculinity, freedom, maturity, justice, knowledge and to be a complete individual with a normal capacity to hear, to see and to speak.'
in addition, women are not allowed to hold posts of an executive nature, such as that of a Governor, or the Mayor of a town, or the Head of a village."

The remarks on the (in)capacity of women to be judges and the justification for this found "in Islam", brings us to the question of the use of religion, Koranic verses and the hadith, in upholding the oppression of women.

Saadawi, like Mernissi in the previous book, posits that Islam in "essence" does not preclude women's equality with the men. In Saadawi's view the oppression of women in the name of the faith stems from a false and reactionary interpretation of Islam--ergo, a progressive interpretation would not only do away with oppression but also represent the authentic faith. show less

Well, that was a well-timed read. The Stolen Novel is an absolutely furious attack on the patriarchy, to use the 2018 term, whatever reasons (political, cultural, religious) its proponents defend it with, and not a rose-coloured one either. El-Saadawi bases the novel around a few decisive moments over the course of two generations, repeats them, reexamines them from different perspectives, tells the story back and forth through absolute righteous anger and disgust but never just that. A show more system reproducing itself and creating its own monsters. I gotta go shower now. show less

I admired this book, although I didn't necessarily enjoy the experience of reading it. It tells the story of a group of Egyptian women who struggle with the social and religious constraints placed on them. The story of this struggle is heartbreaking and infuriating. The narrative style is challenging; reality and dreams often merge into one, and characters from novels seem to come alive. It's a dreamy, murky world where the perspective shifts and finding firm ground is difficult. El Saadawi show more captures the nightmarish quality of her characters' lives extremely well. show less

This is a short work, a creative non-fiction, and so powerful. The author's story is a story as well. The author published this book in 1975 but starting work on it after she lost her position as the Director of Health Education and the Editor-in-Chief of Health magazine after the publication of Women and Sex. The author was researching neurosis in Eygptian women and learned about Firdaus, a women accused of murder and sentenced to die. The setting is the Qanatir Prison where the author is show more interviewing the prisoner and the story is Firdaus' first person account of her story just before her execution in 1974. It is a story of the 1. subjugation of women and 2. Women's freedom in a patriarchal society. What it was to me, was the story of the process of how Firdaus became a strong woman, who freed herself but dependency on men. It was a slow and painful process and this is a hard but still optimistic story. The author, herself, was imprisoned in 1981 for political offenses.

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"I knew that [prostitution] had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another. " Firdaus. show less