Title: The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World Author: Nawal El Saadawi Creation Date: 1977 Location: Cairo, Egypt Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
Nawal El Saadawi published The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World in Arabic in 1977, when she was forty-six years old and already a physician who had spent two decades treating women in Egyptian rural clinics. The English translation, rendered by El Saadawi and her husband Sherif Hetata, appeared through Zed Books in London in 1980, bringing the work to the international feminist and human rights audience that would sustain her for four decades. The book is a hybrid of memoir, medical testimony, sociological analysis, and political argument — categories El Saadawi refused to keep separate on the grounds that keeping them separate was itself a political act.
The book opens with El Saadawi's account of her own genital cutting at the age of six, then moves outward through a systematic anatomy of the legal, religious, and economic structures governing women's lives across the Arab world. Marriage contracts, honour killing, prostitution, the veil, female sexuality, women's economic subordination — each subject is treated with the clinical directness of a physician who finds euphemism complicit and the autobiographical authority of a woman who has lived inside the systems she describes. She had already lost her position as Director of Public Health at the Ministry of Health after publishing Women and Sex in 1972, the first Arabic-language book by a medical professional to discuss female sexuality and genital cutting in explicit clinical terms.
Egypt banned The Hidden Face of Eve on publication. Most Arab-majority states followed. El Saadawi was arrested in 1981, placed on Islamist death lists in the 1990s, and subjected to a hisba apostasy case in 2002. She continued writing until her death in March 2021 at eighty-nine. The book remains her most widely read work — and the author most read about Arab women outside the Arab world was, for decades, the author least available to Arab women themselves.
The Banning
The suppression began before the book itself. In 1972, El Saadawi published Women and Sex, and the Sadat government dismissed her from the Ministry of Health, removed her editorship of a health journal, and stripped her medical association position — administrative punishment demonstrating what happened to a woman who named what the state preferred unnamed. The machinery was already warmed up when The Hidden Face of Eve appeared five years later.
Egypt banned the book on publication through interlinked mechanisms of state control. Egyptian publishers would not print it. Bookshops could not stock it. Copies printed abroad were seized at customs. Censorship was enforced jointly by the Ministry of Culture and Al-Azhar's religious authorities, who classified the book as offensive to Islamic teaching and public morals. The ban operated not through a single decree but through the capillary pressure of institutions that understood what was expected of them without needing to be told.
The prohibition extended across most Arab-majority states. Saudi Arabia banned it categorically. Kuwait, Libya, and several Gulf states followed, the grounds converging on the same points: the discussion of female sexuality was obscene, the criticism of religiously sanctioned practices blasphemous, the analysis of marriage and prostitution as structurally related an offence to public morality. The English translation through Zed Books in London in 1980 ensured global circulation — but global circulation meant the book was available to everyone except the women whose lives it described. The paradox was precise and deliberate: the author most consulted by the World Health Organisation and international feminist organisations on Arab women's lives was the author whose Arab women readers had to smuggle her work past customs officials.
The Fallout
El Saadawi's dismissal from the Ministry in 1972 cost her the institutional platform for her most effective work — the clinical research and government data informing her writing. She rebuilt outside the state apparatus, founding the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1982, which operated across the Arab world until the Egyptian government dissolved it in 1991 and transferred its assets to a state-aligned religious women's organisation. The dissolution was itself a demonstration of the mechanism her book had described: a woman's independent organisation, replaced by an organisation answering to the authorities whose practices the woman had criticised.
The Islamist death threats of the 1990s were the most dangerous consequence. Her name appeared on assassination lists alongside Naguib Mahfouz, who was stabbed in 1994, and Farag Foda, who was assassinated in 1992. El Saadawi lived under armed police protection for years while continuing to write and travel. In 2002, an Islamist lawyer filed a hisba case seeking to have her declared an apostate and her marriage forcibly dissolved — a private citizen using religious law to dissolve a woman's marriage as punishment for her public statements, illustrating exactly the mechanisms of control the book had described. The case was dismissed, but the spectacle had achieved its purpose as intimidation.
The book's influence on international policy was substantial. The WHO's campaigns against female genital cutting drew directly on El Saadawi's medical testimony. The term "female genital mutilation," adopted as the WHO's official designation, reflected her insistence that the practice be named as medical harm rather than euphemised as tradition. Her work influenced the Maputo Protocol of 2003, which explicitly prohibited FGM. El Saadawi died in Cairo in March 2021. Thousands attended her funeral. The Egyptian state that had dismissed her, arrested her, and permitted the banning of her books eulogised her as a national figure — a contradiction she would have recognised and named.
Why It Was Feared
The book's power lay in its refusal to separate the personal from the political, the medical from the moral. El Saadawi opened with the memory of her genital cutting — the cold dawn, the blade, the blood, the trusted adults who had arranged it — then pivoted to a physician's clinical analysis of what had been removed and why. The juxtaposition was the argument: this is what was done to a body; this is what it means medically; these are the people who authorised it. The reader could not retreat into abstraction because the body belonged to the author.
The discussion of female sexuality was the most immediately threatening element. El Saadawi wrote about female orgasm — its physiology, its suppression through cutting, its political significance — treating women's capacity for pleasure as a political fact rather than a private matter. Her argument was that the denial of sexual autonomy was not incidental to patriarchal systems but constitutive of them: a woman who understood her body as a source of pleasure was, by that understanding alone, a challenge to the order depending on her ignorance.
The chapter equating marriage and prostitution as structurally analogous — both involving exchange of sexual access for economic support, differing only in social legitimacy — most directly threatened the religious establishment. What censors in Cairo, Riyadh, and Kuwait understood was that the book's danger was cumulative. A book discussing genital cutting alone might have been suppressed as medical controversy. A book connecting it to marriage law, sexuality, honour killing, and political economy — in the first person, from a woman who had survived both the cutting and the system — was something the apparatus of control could not accommodate without examining itself. And self-examination was the one thing the apparatus was designed to prevent.
The Reading
The Cold Dawn
The body remembers what the mind has been told to forget. A girl of six, woken in the dark, led to the bathroom by women she trusts — her mother, her grandmother, the women of the household whose hands have always meant safety. The cold tiles. The figure waiting with a blade. Hands holding her down, hands she has known all her life, pressing her thighs apart with the efficient tenderness of women performing a duty they believe protects the child from something worse. The cutting is quick. The pain is not.
What remains afterward is not a single memory but a series of sensations that return across a lifetime: the wetness of blood, the burning, the shame that arrives before understanding, the way the body closes around the wound as though privacy could undo what has been done. The adults resume their day. The girl is expected to resume hers. She does, because she is six and does not know what has been taken from her, because the adults who arranged it have arranged it for every girl they know, because the practice is as ordinary as breakfast and as invisible as air.
Years later, the girl becomes a physician. She studies anatomy in university lecture halls where none of the textbooks mention what was done to her, where the practice that has shaped the bodies of millions of women does not appear in the curriculum because the curriculum was written by men who consider it unremarkable. She learns the names of the parts that were cut. She understands, now, the neurology of what was severed — the nerve endings, the capacity for sensation, the architecture of pleasure that was dismantled with a blade in a bathroom on a cold morning when she was too young to know what pleasure was. The child's account and the physician's account sit beside each other like two witnesses to the same crime, one who was there but did not understand and one who understands but was not there — except they are the same person, and the gap between the two is the space this account inhabits.
The Unnamed Practice
The survey begins in rural clinics where the physician has spent years treating women who present with symptoms — chronic pain, inability to experience pleasure, psychological distress — that the medical establishment attributes to hysteria or to marital dysfunction rather than to the physical mutilation performed on them as children. The women do not have the language for what has happened to them because the language has been deliberately withheld. To say "circumcision" is to invoke a medical parallel that does not hold. To say "tradition" is to place the blade inside a framework that makes it acceptable. The physician says: a piece of a child's body was cut off. She says what piece. She says what the removal does to sensation, to sexual function, to the capacity for pleasure. The refusal of euphemism is her primary weapon.
The statistics are assembled from years of fieldwork — the range of forms the practice takes, from the mildest excision to the most radical infibulation, the rationalisations offered by those who perform and defend it. She writes against a medical establishment that has certified these practices as hygienic or traditional, lending them the authority of science when they deserve only its scrutiny. She writes against a cultural establishment that categorises questioning them as Western interference — as though the pain inflicted on Egyptian girls' bodies were a matter of cultural identity rather than physical harm. Both positions she finds dishonest. She names the dishonesty with the same clinical precision she brings to the anatomy.
The Architecture of Marriage
The book moves from genital cutting to a broader anatomy of the institutions controlling women's bodies and lives. Marriage, as practised and legally structured across most Arab-majority societies in the mid-twentieth century, is examined not in the abstract but through specific mechanisms: what the marriage contract actually provides, what property rights it does and does not confer, what the conditions of divorce are for women versus men. The husband who can pronounce divorce with a word. The wife who must petition a court and prove specific grounds. The social consequences of leaving a husband in villages and cities and across class lines.
The map of legal infrastructure is drawn through the lives of specific women encountered in clinics and communities over decades. A woman in a rural clinic whose husband has beaten her and who has nowhere to go because divorce would cost her custody of her children and her access to the family home. A woman in Cairo whose education has given her economic independence but not legal equality. A woman whose marriage contract specifies her obedience as a contractual obligation. A young girl brought to the clinic with complications from early marriage — married at fourteen to a man twenty years her senior, pregnant before her body was ready, presenting with injuries described with the clinical detachment of a physician and the cold anger of a woman who has seen these injuries before and knows she will see them again. The individual cases are not anecdotes. They are evidence, and they are presented as evidence, each one a data point in an argument that builds through accumulation rather than assertion.
The chapter on prostitution makes the argument that most troubles her critics: the distinction between a wife and a prostitute, as legally and economically defined, is one of degree rather than kind. A wife trades sexual and domestic access for financial support and social legitimacy; a prostitute trades the same access for cash without the legitimacy. This is not a romanticisation of prostitution and not an attack on marriage as an institution. It is an observation that the moral outrage directed exclusively at one form of transaction and not the other is a form of class and gender policing that protects the institution from scrutiny rather than the women inside it. The argument is made without qualification, without the diplomatic softening that would make it tolerable to those who disagree. What she has observed, she states. The connection she finds unavoidable, she draws. The chapter is short and devastating, and it has been cited in every fatwa and official denunciation it has generated.
There is also attention to the psychology of the women who perpetuate the practices described — the mothers who arrange their daughters' cutting, the mothers-in-law who enforce the domestic hierarchy, the older women who police younger women's behaviour with an authority derived from having survived the same system. These women are not condemned. They are understood as products of the system, participants in their own oppression not because they are stupid or cruel but because the system has taught them that compliance is survival and that the alternative to compliance is the destruction of everything — family, reputation, economic security — that keeps a woman alive in a society that offers her no independent standing. The grandmother who holds the child down for the cutting held the blade with hands that were themselves cut. The chain is not broken by blaming the women who carry it forward. It is broken by naming the system that makes their participation rational — which is what is done here, with a compassion that does not soften into forgiveness because forgiveness is not hers to offer. It belongs to the children whose bodies are the cost.
Honour and Ownership
Honour killing — the murder of women by male relatives for perceived sexual transgressions — is approached with the same method brought to genital cutting: case studies from clinical practice, statistical data where available, and an analysis of the legal framework that in many jurisdictions reduces the penalty for honour killing to a fraction of the penalty for ordinary murder. The legal distinction is itself the argument: a system that treats the murder of a woman as less serious when committed by a male relative for sexual reasons has embedded in its legal code the principle that women's bodies are the property of their families, and that damage to that property — real or imagined — is a provocation that reduces the murderer's culpability. It is not honour that is being defended but ownership, and the killing is not a crime of passion but a crime of property.
The historical sections survey the position of women in ancient Egyptian civilisation — read as significantly more egalitarian than the medieval Islamic period that followed, citing the legal rights of women under pharaonic law, the presence of female rulers, and evidence from tomb paintings and legal documents suggesting a society in which women had property rights, inheritance rights, and a degree of sexual autonomy that would be unrecognisable in the medieval period. The consolidation of patriarchal legal and theological structures is traced through the spread of Abrahamic religions, with particular attention to the specific traditions and legal schools that codified women's secondary status. The distinction drawn is between those interpretations found textually defensible and those considered politically motivated — adopted to serve the interests of patriarchal authority rather than the requirements of faith. The ground between the religion and the uses to which it has been put is narrow, and her opponents deny its existence, but she occupies it with the confidence of someone who has read the texts in Arabic and trusts her own reading over the readings of men who have never practised medicine in a village where the consequences of those readings are written on women's bodies.
The Silenced Body
The sections on women's sexuality are the most explicit and were, alongside the opening, the primary grounds for banning. The subject is sexual pleasure — including female orgasm, described in physiological terms — treated as a political subject. Women who had undergone genital cutting present with symptoms the medical establishment attributes to hysteria or marital dysfunction rather than to the physical mutilation performed on them as children. The anatomy is described with a physician's precision because the cultural apparatus surrounding the subject exists to prevent precision — to keep the discussion vague, the terminology euphemistic, the specific physical consequences of the cutting invisible behind a screen of tradition and propriety.
The denial of women's capacity for pleasure is not incidental to patriarchal systems but constitutive of them. A woman who knows her body can be a source of pleasure for herself rather than only for others is harder to manage than one taught that her body's function is primarily reproductive and secondarily accommodating. Knowledge of the body connects to political power not through theory but through what has been observed in practice — in the faces of women who came to a clinic not knowing what had been taken from them because they had never been told it existed. The silence surrounding women's pleasure is not accidental. It is maintained by the same structures that maintain every other form of women's subordination. To break it — in explicit, clinical, unapologetic prose — is to challenge not a single practice but the architecture of control that the practice serves.
The connection extends beyond the physical. Women taught that their bodies are sources of shame rather than of knowledge are women who have been taught that the most fundamental form of self-knowledge — the knowledge that begins in the body — is forbidden to them. The cutting is the beginning of a larger excision — the removal not only of physical sensation but of the confidence that arises from physical self-possession. A woman whose relationship to her own body has been defined by others cannot easily claim authority over her own thought. The suppression of physical autonomy extends into the suppression of intellectual and artistic life, and the connection is not metaphorical. It is physiological and psychological: the blade that severs nerve endings severs also a thread that connects the body's knowledge to the mind's capacity for independent claim.
The Veil and the Question
The chapter on the veil is more nuanced than its placement might suggest. The interest is not in the garment itself but in the conditions under which veiling is a choice and the conditions under which it is a requirement, and in the fact that the same piece of cloth means entirely different things in those two contexts. Educated urban women who chose to veil often did so as a genuine statement of cultural identity or religious commitment — a choice respected even when not shared. Women in rural areas who veiled because not doing so was socially dangerous were in a different position entirely, and their veiling was no more a choice than breathing is a choice for someone held underwater. The collapse of these two populations into a single symbol — whether by Western feminists who saw only oppression or by Islamist ideologues who saw only piety — is found equally dishonest. Both groups prefer the binary because the binary allows them to maintain their respective positions without examining the lives of the actual women wearing the actual cloth. The chapter refuses to cooperate with either side, and in doing so it manages to irritate everyone, which is a reliable indicator that it is telling the truth.
The women's economic position receives the most systematic treatment, demonstrating a researcher's training rather than a polemicist's instinct. Data on women's wages, property ownership, access to education and employment across the Arab world in the 1970s are presented alongside the legal framework that produces them — the inheritance laws that give daughters half of what sons receive, the guardianship laws requiring male permission for travel or employment, the marriage contracts specifying the husband's authority over the wife's movement and social life. The data and the law illuminate each other: the economic position of women is not a natural state but the product of a legal architecture designed to produce exactly this result, defended not as architecture but as tradition, as though tradition were a natural phenomenon like weather rather than a human construction that serves specific interests.
The book ends not with a manifesto but with a question: what would these women's lives look like if the practices described were absent? No utopian programme is offered. Instead, women encountered over decades of practice — doctors, writers, organisers — who found their way through the apparatus of control into something resembling their own lives. These women represent not exceptional cases but suppressed possibilities — the ordinary lives that would exist if the system that prevents them did not. The final tone is not despair but something closer to fury held at sustained intellectual temperature: the fury of someone who has been told, repeatedly, by men who have never examined a patient in a village clinic, that what she is describing does not exist, and who has made it her life's work to insist — with evidence assembled over decades of practice and observation, with the authority of a physician and the anger of a woman and the precision of a writer who knows that precision is the only weapon that cannot be taken away — that it does.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the Banned, Burned & Dangerous canon — works that frightened states and survived them.
The current standard English edition is the Bloomsbury Academic paperback (2024), which updates the earlier Zed Books text with a new foreword and expanded notes. The Zed Books third edition (2016) remains widely available and is the text most commonly cited in academic work.
The Hidden Face of Eve — Bloomsbury Academic, 2024 (paperback)
The current standard edition — updated 2024 Bloomsbury Academic paperback with new prefatory material. Also available as a Kindle edition.
Zed Books third edition (2016) — the edition most used in university courses, with the foreword by Ronak Husni and the complete text of the 2007 revision.
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