In this volume, El Saadawi reminds me of everybody's outspoken, irrepressible grandmother or greatauntie, the one who doesn't care who hears her, and occasionally uses cusswords. She has been jailed in her native land, and has had her writings banned. I was pleased to find this book in English, published in the original Arabic in 2018, in our feminist bookstore because it means international feminists still want to hear her. The situations she describes are not unique necessarily to Egypt, but they are unique to women.
She speaks of medicine and history, always factual and in simple language, and gives it a feminist's eye. The labors of Hercules, she finds, are not the heroic acts she was raised to believe, but consist of “murder and ISIS-style beheadings. . . Is Hercules any different from the rulers of the modern or post-modern world who do not cease from running after money and power, assaulting others and leaving bloodshed in their wake?” She talks about her medical doctor training. In the mid 1950s, she says, medical students all wanted to train as surgeons, as did she, enjoying the precision of surgery. “I worked in surgery for a few years, then quit before the scalpel in my hand found its way against the neck of the chief surgeon at the hospital where I worked.” She tried other branches of medicine, but the culture of egoism in those fields was no better, and the work was less precise.
I had not read anything of El Saadawi's for some time, so I was surprised by her interest in pre-Islamic Egyptian belief, particularly goddesses like Nut and Isis and Maat. The European colonialist historians, however, erased the trailblazing philosophy of Nut, who advised her daughter Isis not to draw her authority from divinity but to be wise and merciful. They claimed philosophy began in that newbie upstart, ancient Greece, and substituted a view of Egyptian belief as superstitious and definitely patriarchal. I am reminded that the former European colonies used Western materials to teach several generations of young people, extending European influence into independence, so this was what young Egyptians learned about their own history as well. Even so, she is versed in Islam, too, and tells stories of Prophet Muhammad. She will point out that marriage based on mutual consent was practiced before Islam, then segues into a condemnation of Islamophobia in the West. It might sound incongruous, but she makes the link. She is inspired by thinkers in Islam like Ibn Rushd, Rabi'a of Basra, and Abu Dhar al-Ghifari who believed, “like my peasant grandmother, in the God of justice and love and mercy rather than the God of heaven and hell and holy texts”. Of Ibn Rushd, who fell out of favor at one point for political reasons, she writes “Isn't he just another example of an honest philosopher who is not intimidated by the ruling powers into renouncing his ideas?”
Her favorite philosopher is Socrates, and doesn't shy from making the connection to political systems of today. “He criticised the hypocrisy of the rulers and fake democracy that relies on the votes of the uninformed public...He was accused of blasphemy and of working to destabilise the state – the favoured charges against thinkers who are committed to justice and freedom. These are also charges that are designed to intimidate onlookers, so that they remain silent, give up any ideals they might have and join the chorus of hypocrisy.”