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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2001 The Islamic fundamentalist legal attack against Egyptian feminist author and activist Nawal el-Saadawi, to have her forcibly divorced from her husband, was dismissed by a Cairo court on July 30. She was alleged to have made comments about the origins of the pilgrimage (hajj) offensive to the fundamentalists, as well as asserting that inheritance laws favoring men should be abolished. If convicted under religious law, Saadawi would have been forced to separate from her husband for "abandoning" Islam. The attack on Saadawi is part of a wider attack on independent intellectuals in Egypt. In May, sociology professor Saadeddine Ibrahim was sentenced to seven years for discussing electoral fraud and persecution of the Copts. Dramatist Ali Salem was later expelled from the government-controlled Egyptian Writers Union for having published, in 1994, the book MY JOURNEY TO ISRAEL. Salem was defended by Nobel Prize author Naguib Mahfouz, who is also facing expulsion for having his books translated into Hebrew, among many other languages. Nawal el-Saadawi was the first Arab woman to write condemnations of female
genital mutilation, which is still practiced in parts of Egypt. She said the inheritance laws had to be revised since "we have 30% of families in
Egypt where the mother is working and paying for the family and the husband is not working." Saadawi said she and her husband, Sharif Hatata, also an
intellectual activist, had "survived this ordeal through resistance, firmness and refusal to yield to the mentality of the dark ages." She
acknowledged the campaign to support her, both within Egypt and -Mary Holmes |
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