Dr Saadawi was one of the 1,500 activists sent to prison by President Sadat shortly before his assassination in October 1981. She was released three months later and published ‘Memoirs From the Women’s Prison’ in Arabic in 1983.
Her message and manner drew unequivocal judgments in the West.
After the first of Dr. Saadawi’s books translated into English, ‘The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World’ was published in the United States in 1982 by Beacon Press’s Vivian Gornick, who reviewed it in The New York. Times Book Review wrote: “For an American feminist, it’s a curious job.”
‘Written by a Marxist who read Freud’, she went on to say, ‘in a country and for a people who need an educated introduction to the idea of equality for women, the book seems disoriented by the inorganic nature of his understanding. ‘
The American author Bharati Mukherjee, who was born in India, had a discussion four days later of dr. Saadawi’s novel ‘God Dies by the Nile’ was written and written that the author brings about ‘social issues with directness and passion’ and the systematic brutalization of farmers and women transforms powerful allegory. ”
She added: “This straightforwardness can deter American readers.”
Under President Mubarak, Sadat’s successor, Dr. Saadawi placed under police guard to protect her from Islamic threats. Her name was included in a so-called death list published in Saudi Arabia.
After fleeing to Duke, where she taught from 1993 to 1996, dr. Saadawi wrote two more volumes of autobiography. When she returned to Egypt, she continued to face fundamentalist accusations of apostasy and heresy. She announced in 2004 that she would be running against President Mubarak, but decided to boycott the election when her followers were threatened.
In her 80s, she seemed to suggest that her struggle was far from over.
“Do you feel liberated?” she asked a woman for The Guardian, a woman, in an interview in 2015. When the author nodded her head, dr. Saadawi said, “Well, I feel like I’m not.”