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![]() ![]() ![]() In the early 1980s Nawal set out to form an Arab feminist association to be headquartered in Cairo. Nawal herself was a woman of multiple solidarities. ![]() ![]() "The Emancipation of Arab women," Nawal (1980: 211) wrote, "can only result from the struggle of the Arab women themselves." She insisted that political mobilizing was necessary to overcome gender oppression in its multiple global locations with their diverse histories and lived experiences. With The Hidden Face of Eve she issued a rallying cry for feminist political organizing. In 1972 she had exposed often-hidden sexual injuries and injustices in her book Al-marʾa wa al-jins (Woman and Sex). Nawal the physician had already spoken the language of feminism in fiction and autobiography. I was mesmerized by how she combined personal experience-breaking the silence around sexuality and the female body-with historical accounts of outspoken, independent-minded Arab and Muslim women from the early days of Islam to first-wave feminism of the twentieth century. It was a translation of Al-wajh al-ʿari lil-marʾ a al-ʿarabiyya, published in Beirut in 1977. I came to know Nawal El Saadawi through The Hidden Face of Eve, published in London in 1980. ![]()
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