Nawal El Saadawi on Religion, Revolution and Rage

The first letter Nawal el-Sayed El Saadawi ever wrote was to God. In it, the 7-year-old El Saadawi asked why—if God was just and fair—he had not made her mother and father equal. Since she had first learned to write, she had always included her mother’s name, Zaynab, next to her own. But her father said it was his name, Sayed, that she must use, along with that of his father, Saadawi.

Saadawi never got an answer to her letter, and when her mother died—at just 45, having raised nine children—her name died with her. Unlike Saadawi’s father, who could expect 72 virgins upon arriving in heaven, her mother was due no rewards, according to Islam, the faith of her parents. “A woman is without worth,” she wrote in the first part of her autobiography, A Daughter of Isis, “on earth or in the heavens.”

Saadawi, now 86, was not