EGYPT:For decades Nawal El Saadawi has been a thorn in the side of Egypt's political and religious establishment. One of the Arab world's most prominent feminists, her tireless campaigning against the veil, polygamy and female circumcision has led to official opprobrium, a spell in jail and death threats, writes Mary Fitzgerald, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Now in her mid-70s, El Saadawi is facing charges that a play she wrote insults Islam. Clerics at Al Azhar in Cairo, the Sunni world's most prominent seat of learning, filed the lawsuit when the work God Resigns at the Summit Meeting was republished earlier this year.
"The play grew out of my study of the Koran, and the Old and New Testaments," El Saadawi, a psychiatrist by profession, said on a visit this week to Trinity College's Centre for Gender and Women's Studies.
"I found there were a lot of similarities between the three books, a lot of injustices, discrimination against women, racism and a lot of double standards."
Subsequent interviews with the Egyptian press, in which she said that God was a spirit and therefore neither male nor female, served to further incense Al Azhar.
El Saadawi's writings and outspoken views on women's issues, particularly female sexuality, have long riled conservatives in Egypt. In 2001, her critics took a legal case attempting to forcibly divorce the septuagenarian from her husband on the grounds that her beliefs made her an apostate and therefore she could not be married to a Muslim.
"We are going backwards in Egypt," she says. "Politically, we are further into a dictatorship. We have more poverty. We have more oppression of writers and journalists. Corruption is increasing, as is support for religious extremists."
She is careful to distance her play from the Danish cartoons lampooning Muhammad that provoked a violent response in several Muslim countries last year. "Those cartoons were a political provocation to portray Muslims as the enemy, as terrorists," she says. "Freedom of speech means you expose contradictions and paradoxes but you don't simply mock people. We have to question our religion, we have to be critical, but to be critical does not mean to be insulting."
Now teaching at a university in the US, El Saadawi says the Egyptian government may withdraw her nationality if Al Azhar's suit succeeds.
"If they take it, that's OK," she shrugs. "I don't believe in nationalities. I feel at home everywhere."