Nawal El Saadawi, the great Egyptian feminist and writer, lives on the 26th floor of a biscuit-coloured Cairo tower block about half an hour by car from Tahrir Square.
Built in the 1990s, it seems much older, its forbidding brutalist exterior sprayed with wonky satellite dishes and precarious air conditioning units, its stifling lift threatening at every floor to judder permanently to a halt.
“No, I am not rich,” she notes, waving an arm in the gloom of her book-lined sitting room, which is shuttered against the noonday heat.
But then, since when were dissident writers in it for the money, especially in Eygpt, where copyright is, to put it mildly, tricky to enforce? “Publishers have always taken from me!” she says, her voice rising indignantly.
“But still, I am privileged even though I’m poor. I am in the 5%. I have an apartment and air conditioning. Some people in Egypt live in graves, and they’re the lucky ones. Some don’t even have a grave.”
Besides, she has come to love this spot. She has a view, her two children live close by, and here in Shubra, her neighbours are mostly Copts, a community she adores.
She feels safe for the first time in many years. The revolution has, she believes, protected writers like her, who in 2011 found themselves a focus for opposition.
“I’m surrounded by young people, day and night. Thousands of them. The government is afraid of the young, and they won’t touch me because they know I have the power of the young people behind me.”
Like many of the older leftists and intellectuals who joined the crowds in Tahrir Square in 2011, she simply can’t agree that General Sisi, who came to power on the back of a coup in 2013, is ruling as a counter-revolutionary, just as Mohamed Morsi did before him (it is an awkward fact that state killings and the numbers of government opponents languishing in prison are both dramatically on the rise).
“Not at all,” she says, stubbornly. “There is a world of difference between Mubarak and Sisi. He has got rid of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that never happened with Mubarak, or with Sadat before him.”
Yes, she wanted rid of Mubarak. But she did not regard the elections that followed his spectacular fall as free and fair: in her view, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood bribed and deceived their way to power encouraged, she insists, by Washington and London.
(An unreconstructed Marxist, El Saadawi views pretty much everything through the prism of imperialism).
“No, I am not happy that Morsi is in prison,” she says. “I’m against prison. But I am happy that the Egyptian people, with the help of the army, got him out. We found him and his followers to be mad. As for Sisi, how he does now depends on the people. I don’t believe in individuals. He is only temporary. The people decide whether he works for them or not, and if he behaves like Mubarak, he is out.”
And counter-revolution or not, her profile has never been higher. In Egypt, her supporters have established a Nawal El Saadawi forum, which holds regular meetings in Cairo and elsewhere at which her books – she has published more than 50 titles in Arabic – are discussed at some length.
The international awards continue to pile up – at this point there are too many to count – and so, too, do the invitations to speak.
Later this month, for instance, she will be in the UK, promoting new English editions of several of her most important books, among them the novel Woman at Point Zero, which tells the story of Firdaus, a victim of sexual abuse who now awaits execution in a Cairo prison cell, and The Hidden Face of Eve, her classic analysis of female oppression in the Arab world (among its pages is a taboo-breaking description of El Saadawi’s circumcision at the age of six, an operation that was performed on the floor of the family bathroom while her mother looked on, laughing and smiling).
Her opinion is much in demand. Everyone wants to know what she makes of Isis and the radicalised girls who join it; of the veil, against which she has campaigned all her life; of the Charlie Hebdo attack.
And if she sometimes sounds rather old-fashioned and autocratic – query her obsession with colonialism at your peril – she is also entirely fearless, striding where others still fear to tread.
“This crush (stampede) in Saudia Arabia!” she says, referring to the recent deaths at Mecca. “They talk about changing the way it [the hajj] is administered, about making people travel in smaller groups. What they don’t say is that the crush happened because these people were fighting to stone the devil.”
Her voice is full of disdain. “Why do they need to stone the devil? Why do they need to kiss that black stone? But no one will say this.
The media will not print it. What is it about, this reluctance to criticise religion?” Perhaps, I say, people worry they’ll be seen as racist.
“Well, religion is the embodiment of racism. All gods are jealous. People get killed because they are not praying to the right god.”
She let go of God long ago, and never looked back. “These girls [who join Isis]. There is a lot of misery among young people. They can’t get work, they are poor and unemployed. But the nonsense they read about Islam and all that… I had to get educated, I had to divorce three husbands, and there they are: ignorant, brainwashed, reading about the [so-called] equality between men and women in Islam.”
She waggles a finger at me, today’s representative of the lily-livered media. “This refusal to criticise religion,” she says, sombrely. “This is not liberalism. This is censorship.”
Who is Nawal El Saadawi?
Her story has an epic quality, as if it were one of her own novels or one of those old and overblown Egyptian films.
She was born in 1931, in the village of Kafr Tahla, just north of Cairo, the second of nine children in what she describes as a more than usually “complicated” family. Yes, she was cut as a child.
But she was also encouraged to study. “I was brought up in two different classes: the poor peasant class of my father [a government official] and the upper bourgeois class of my mother, who went to French schools and wanted to ride horses and play the piano. My father came from the village. His mother went hungry to pay for his education, and it was his education and his ambition that enabled him to marry my mother. He was 30, she was 15.
Of course, my parents preferred my older brother. But he was spoilt, and he didn’t study, and was always failing, while I was good in school. So they began to support me. They wanted to marry me when I was 10, but when I rebelled, my mother stood with me.” She was, she thinks now, lucky to be a girl: “It was a handicap that pushed me.”
Her first dream was to be a dancer; she loved music, and she was beautiful.
But her father could not afford to buy a piano, so she turned her attention instead to reading and writing.
“I hated doctors, and didn’t want to be one,” she says. “But I was top of my class at high school, which meant that it was [almost automatic] that I would study medicine. I got a scholarship.”
She graduated from the University of Cairo in 1955, specialising in psychiatry, and returned to Kafr Tahla to work as a doctor, over the years becoming increasingly prominent.
In 1963, she was appointed the director general for public health education. However, her political activities were now beginning to work against her.
In 1972, she published Women and Sex, the first of a series of books in which she attacked the aggressions carried out against women’s bodies: not just female circumcision, but also the brutal rituals associated with society’s fixation with virginity (the same dayas [midwives] who circumcised children were often required to prove a girl’s hymen was intact on her wedding night). Soon after this, she lost her job, and al-Sihha [Health], the magazine she had founded three years previously, was closed down.
Was she allowed to marry for love?
“No, no, that’s the problem. My first husband was a great man, my colleague in the medical college. He was fascinating, and he was the father of my daughter. My father didn’t want me to marry him because he had gone to Suez to fight the British. But then [after Suez] the guerrilla fighters were betrayed, many of them imprisoned. This crisis broke him, and he became an addict. I was told that if I married him, he might stop his addictions, but he didn’t. He tried to kill me, so I left him.”
And husband number two? “He was a man of law, very patriarchal.” A snort. “I’m telling you frankly: I am not really fit for the role of a wife, you must be sure of that.” She divorced again.
“My third husband [Sherif Hatata], the father of my son, was a very free man, a Marxist who’d been imprisoned. I lived with him for 43 years, and I told everyone: this is the only feminist man on earth.
And then I had to divorce him, too. He was a liar. He was having relations with other women.
Oh, the complexity of the patriarchal character. He wrote books about gender equality, and then he betrayed his wife. Ninety-five per cent of men are like that, I’m sure.”
Is it hard to be a divorced woman in Egypt? “If you are an ordinary woman, it is. But I’m very extraordinary. People expect everything of me.” She laughs heartily, her nimbus of white hair bouncing up and down in time to her breath.
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