Saadawi Mernissi Women

Similar to Mernissi, Nawal El Saadawi also advocates for women’s rights and equality in Muslim communities. At the age of 82, Saadawi has been known as arguable one of Egypt’s most radical feminists. After working as a doctor in rural Egypt, Saadawi wrote several books that documented the lives of Muslim women during her time. Some of her famous books as Point Zero, about a prostitute who was sentenced to death for killing her rapist, and The Hidden Face of Eve, which recounted the female genital mutilation she experienced at the age of six. With an extensive literary works under her name (some of these includes ten non-fiction books, dozens of novel and short stories), Saadawi is seen to take on Islamic feminism with an anthropological perspective. She collects accounts and anecdotes of several Muslim women, analyzing the ways females are being oppressed and the results of such act, both psychically and psychologically. Her discussions of sexual abuse of young girls and genital mutilations opened the western world to the realities of experiences women have to endure in a predominantly Muslim society.

In her most famous work,

One issue of women’s rights that she is shameless to discussing internationally is the topic of female genital mutilation. As previously mentioned, Saadawi herself had undergone such practice at a young age at her mother’s persuasion before she even started menstruating. This act not only scarred her physically but also mentally. While her physical wounds had healed, the psychological trauma it caused to many girls lingers on and affects the way they think of themselves; an inner sense of shame and guilt would follow the young girls as they grew older. While many Muslim adults justifies this practice as something that the Prophet Muhammad had ordained as seen in many hadiths, the Quran itself seems to oppose such practice. In the Quran, it is