Nawal El Saadawi: 12 books

The writings of Nawal El Saadawi are essential to anyone wishing to understand the contemporary Arab world. Her dissident voice has stayed as consistent in its critique of neo.imperialist international politics as it has in its denunciation of women's oppression, both in her native Egypt and in the...

Nawal El Saadawi's most recent play, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, created an uproar in her native Egypt. On the basis of the title alone, officials declared the work heretical and charged El Saadawi with insulting the "Almighty God", not just Islam. Her prosecutors requested that all...

'Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.' Nawal El Saadawi is one of the greatest writers to come out of the Arab...

Volume one of the autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi, the Arab world's leading feminist. Paints a beautifully textured portrait of the childhood that moulded Saadawi into a novelist and fearless campaigner for freedom and the rights of women Combines Saadawi’s love of the Arabic...

This powerful non-fiction account of the oppression of women in the Muslim world remains as shocking today as when it was first published, more than a quarter of a century ago. Nawal El Saadawi writes out of a powerful sense of the violence and injustice which permeated her society. Her experiences...

A new edition of the most seminal feminist novel from the Arab world, set to inspire a new generation Inspired by the true, tragic and defiant story of Firdaus – whom El Saadawi met whilst working as a doctor in a women's prison El Saadawi is considered one of the world's most...

God Dies by the Nile is Saadawi’s attempt to square religion with a society in which women are respected as equals; Searching expresses the poignancy of loss and doubt with the hypnotic intensity of a remembered dream; while in The Circling Song, Saadawi pursues the conflicts of sex, class, gender and military violence deep into the psyche.

Who will overthrow the Imam? Who will defeat the oppression, the tyranny, the injustice and the killings? ... Then, who is the Imam? Is he the man, the male, the father, the husband, the ruler, the leader? Bint Allah (the Daughter of God), a beautiful illegitimate girl, a child of sin, looked down...

A young Egyptian woman clashes with her traditional family when she chooses a career in medicine. Rather than submit to an arranged marriage and motherhood, she cuts her hair short and works fiercely to realise her dreams. At medical school, she begins to understand the mysteries of the human body....

Bahiah Shaheen, an eighteen-year-old medical student and daughter of a prominent Egyptian public official, finds the male students in her class coarse and alien. Her father, too, seems to belong to a race apart. Frustrated by her hard-working, well-behaved, middle-class public persona, her meeting...

Distinguished literary critic Bodour is trapped in a loveless marriage and carries with her a dark secret. She fell in love in her youth and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Zeina, whom she abandoned on the streets of Cairo. Bodour doesn't know that Zeina has blossomed into one of Egypt's...

A woman disappears without trace. Nobody, including the police commissioner investigating the case, can understand how a woman could simply walk away, leaving husband and home behind. After all, in the Kingdom of Oil where His Majesty reigns supreme, no woman has ever dared disobey the command of...