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Doubt is the first step towards knowledge, not faith.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Nawal El Saadawi
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 27
Died: 2021
Died: March 21
Feminist
Gynaecologist
Novelist
Physician
Physician Writer
Politician
Psychiatrist
Writer
Nawal el-Saadaoui
Nawal al Sadaawi
Nawal Saadawi
Nawal as-Saadawi
Nawäl as-Saʿdāwi
Faith
Firsts
First
Towards
Step
Steps
Doubt
Knowledge
More quotes by Nawal El Saadawi
During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.
Nawal El Saadawi
Something I tried to hold onto, to touch if only for a moment, but it slipped away from me like the air, like an illusion, or a dream that floats away and is lost. I wept in my sleep as though it was something I was losing now a loss I was experiencing for the first time, and not something I had lost a long time ago.
Nawal El Saadawi
People like [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor], whether young people, young women, even critics - male critics - they were not shocked by it. Of course, some parts were cut.
Nawal El Saadawi
Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.
Nawal El Saadawi
When you are intelligent and beautiful you face a lot of problems. If you are beautiful and stupid then it's easy.
Nawal El Saadawi
You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.
Nawal El Saadawi
The parts in which I elaborated on the sexual life of the doctor herself, the personal life, her relation with men [in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor]. All this. They left only some very, very minute parts. And also the political, the political element in it. So in a way, they cut pieces that to my mind were very important.
Nawal El Saadawi
If you do not love yourself, well, you cannot do anything well, that's my philosophy.
Nawal El Saadawi
We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us -- its size, motion and meaning.
Nawal El Saadawi
Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.
Nawal El Saadawi
Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.
Nawal El Saadawi
Fearing servility, people become servile.
Nawal El Saadawi
Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can't have anything without women.
Nawal El Saadawi
I've lived here [in Egypt] among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia. The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular.
Nawal El Saadawi
The tracing of a child's lineage and its name with reference to the father, though it has lasted for many thousands of years, has not become any the more natural or reasonable as a result.
Nawal El Saadawi
We see our homeland more clearly when we are away from it than when we are in it.
Nawal El Saadawi
Language, journalism, food, sex. All is politics. Even innocent love stories are politics. ... There is no such thing as neutrality.
Nawal El Saadawi
Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.
Nawal El Saadawi
Women were everywhere in the revolution. Women participated in it, and many women were killed. Then we had the right to speak up and gain some more rights, but what happened was there was a backlash. Why? Because we have the Salafists, Muslim Brothers, religious groups.
Nawal El Saadawi
I've lived in Egypt among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia.
Nawal El Saadawi
