Search results for ""Author Nawal El Saadawi""

In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world's greatest writers, tells the story of the formative years which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. In poignant and moving prose we learn about her relationships with her family, her traumatic experience of female genital mutilation at seven years old and escaping suitors at ten and her journey from the rural Egyptian village of her birth to metropolitan Cairo to study medicine. Filled with warmth as well as critical reflection, this book reveals the early years of a remarkable life dedicated to the fight for justice and equality.

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Bodour, a distinguished literary critic, carries with her a dark secret. As a young university student, she fell in love with a political activist and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Zeina, whom she abandoned on the streets of Cairo. Zeina grows up to become one of Egypt's most beloved entertainers, despite being deprived of a family name and a home. Bodour in turn remains trapped in a loveless marriage, pining for her daughter and lost love. In an attempt to find solace, she writes a fictionalised account of her life, which then mysteriously gets stolen. Set against the backdrop of revolution in Cairo, Zeina is a tale about regret, loss and the courage it takes for a mother to face up to the mistakes of her past.

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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. After years of denying her own desires, the doctor begins a series of love affairs that allow her to explore her sexuality - on her own terms.

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Surrounded by a coterie of ministers, the Imam rules over an imaginary earthly kingdom. Bint Allah is the Daughter of God, a beautiful illegitimate girl. She is falsely accused by the Imam of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. Then, during the annual Victory Holiday, the Imam himself is killed. The story of each of these deaths is told repeatedly, as this powerful and poetic novel reveals the underlying hypocrisy of any male-dominated religious state, and the insufferable predicament of women in a society that must ultimately self-destruct.

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Well beyond the Arab world, El Saadawi's fiction and non-fiction work, from Woman at Point Zero to The Fall of the Imam to her prison memoirs, have earned her a reputation as a refreshing voice of feminism in the Arab World. This series of essays form a selection of El Saadawi's most recent musings, memories and reflections, considering the role of women in Egyptian and wider Islamic society, the inextricability of imperialism from the patriarchy, the meeting point of East and West, and the image and body politic of the woman in the intersections of those cultures. These musings leave no stone unturned and no view unchallenged, and offer the interested reader new insight into El Saadawi's thoughts and reflections.

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Bint Allah knows herself only as the Daughter of God. Born in a stifling male-dominated state, ruled by the Imam and his coterie of ministers, she dreams of one day reaching the top of a distant hill visible through the bars of the orphanage window. But Bint Allah's ambitions do not escape the attention of the Imam, who never feels secure no matter how well he protects himself. When the Imam falsely accuses Bint Allah of adultery and sentences her to death by stoning, he is not prepared for what happens next. A postmodern fantasia, this powerful and poetic novel is a call to arms against those who use religion as a weapon against women.

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In Walking through Fire, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world's greatest writers, tells the story of the later years of a life which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. Covering her life in Nasser's then Sadat's and Mubarak's Egypt, we learn about Saadawi's experience of marriage and motherhood, and we travel with her into exile after her life was threatened by religious extremists. Filled with warmth as well as critical reflection, this book reveals the later years of a remarkable life dedicated to the fight for justice and equality.

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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 most beloved entertainers. Pining for her estranged daughter, she writes a fictional account of her life in an attempt to find solace. But as the revolution in Cairo begins to gain fire, the novel goes missing and Bodour must find who has stolen it. Will her hunt for the thief bring mother and daughter together? Or is Bodour destined to lose her daughter to Cairo forever?

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Three classic novels by renowned feminist writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi.A peasant family is torn apart by a village mayor and his lackeys in God Dies by the Nile, Saadawi's dark parable of poverty, female exploitation, injustice and religious hypocrisy in rural Egypt.In Searching the disappearance of her lover causes Fouda to question everything.Circling Song is a hypnotic meditation on gender, class and state violence told through the story of two mysterious twins.

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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 men. When the woman finally reappears, there is a blurring between the men in her life, as she leaves one to join another, then returns to her first husband who has since taken a new wife. She is trapped in a man-made web, unable to escape from a male figure who continually fills urns that she must carry. Surreal and satirical, Love in the Kingdom of Oil is a startling reflection on the limits of female freedom in a patriarchal society.

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Internationally acclaimed Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi's landmark novel Woman at Point Zero, published here with a new foreword.Firdaus is on death row. Her crime, the murder of a man. Born into poverty in a rural Egyptian village, her childhood dreams and ambitions had been met with neglect and abuse by the world and the men who rule it. Driven to sex work to support herself, she is faced with the moral outrage of society and the bitter knowledge that for a woman, true freedom comes only when all hope is abandoned. In Woman at Point Zero, Firdaus tells her unforgettable story.Woman at Point Zero is also available in audiobook format from audiobook retailers.

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Nawal El Saadawi was born in a village outside Cairo, Egypt, in 1931. A trained medical doctor, she wrote landmark works on the oppression of Arab women including Woman at Point Zero (1973), God Dies by the Nile (1976) and The Hidden Face of Eve (1977). After being imprisoned by Anwar Sadat's government for criticising the regime, she founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1982, before being forced into exile in later life due to death threats by religious extremists. She returned to Egypt in 1996, running for president in 2005 until government persecution forced her to withdraw. Saadawi died in Egypt in 2021.

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In Nawal El Saadawi's play "God Resigns", the prophets and great women gather for a meeting with God. Satan arrives to tender his resignation, but neither Jesus, Mohammad, nor Moses is willing to replace him. Finally, God himself resigns in disgust. Eygptian officials declared the work heretical because 'God cannot resign' and ordered her publisher to destroy all copies. El Saadawi was charged with insulting Islam and was threatened with arrest on return to Egypt. "Isis" is a critique of the discriminatory rules that control women - the daughters of Isis - in North Africa and the Middle East today. Both plays develop key themes of El Saadawi's work: that religions are inimical to women and the poor; that the oppression of women is reprehensible and not solely characteristic of the Middle East or the Third World; and that free speech is fundamental to any society. This work includes introduction by Adele Newson-Horst, along with introductions to both plays.

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In 1981, the celebrated author and activist Nawal el Saadawi was imprisoned by the Sadat regime in her native Egypt, for ‘crimes against the state’. Through haunting and evocative prose, Saadawi here recounts how she and her fellow prisoners continued to resist even in captivity, and to form a community which transcended divisions between secular and religious activists. She reveals both the harrowing detail and the everyday mundanity of prison life, as well as the bravery and resolve of all women resisting oppression – and of political prisoners around the world. Memoirs from the Women’s Prison is an unforgettable, landmark work of prison writing that offers a rare insight into the indomitable, soaring literary mind of the Arab world’s leading feminist.

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Bahiah Shaheen, an eighteen-year-old medical student and the 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 with a stranger at a gallery one day proves to be the beginning of her road to self-discovery and the start of her realisation that fulfilment in life is indeed possible.

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Hamida and Hamido are twins, grown from a single embryo inside one womb. Violently parted, they search the city in the darkening circles of a dream, only to find, lose and find each other, each time as if it were the first. Their journey - terrifying and exact - leads to an unbroken cycle of corruption and brutality,

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In Unveiling Desire, Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow show that the duality of the fallen/saved woman is as prevalent in Eastern culture as it is in the West, specifically in literature and films. Using examples from the Middle to Far East, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, and China, this anthology challenges the fascination with Eastern women as passive, abject, or sexually exotic, but also resists the temptation to then focus on the veil, geisha, sati, or Muslim women’s oppression without exploring Eastern women’s sexuality beyond these contexts. The chapters cover instead mind/body sexual politics, patriarchal cultural constructs, the anatomy of sex and power in relation to myth and culture, denigration of female anatomy, and gender performativity. From Persepolis to Bollywood, and from fairy tales to crime fiction, the contributors to Unveiling Desire show how the struggle for women’s liberation is truly global.

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In Unveiling Desire, Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow show that the duality of the fallen/saved woman is as prevalent in Eastern culture as it is in the West, specifically in literature and films. Using examples from the Middle to Far East, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, and China, this anthology challenges the fascination with Eastern women as passive, abject, or sexually exotic, but also resists the temptation to then focus on the veil, geisha, sati, or Muslim women’s oppression without exploring Eastern women’s sexuality beyond these contexts. The chapters cover instead mind/body sexual politics, patriarchal cultural constructs, the anatomy of sex and power in relation to myth and culture, denigration of female anatomy, and gender performativity. From Persepolis to Bollywood, and from fairy tales to crime fiction, the contributors to Unveiling Desire show how the struggle for women’s liberation is truly global.

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