SOURCE: Werner, Louis. “Arab Feminist Pens Powerful Prose.” Christian Science Monitor 82, no. 146 (25 June 1990): 14.

In the following essay, Werner evaluates El Saadawi's She Has No Place in Paradise, The Fall of the Imam, and Death of an Ex-Minister, asserting that integral to these works is a recurring theme of power abuse and oppression, especially in male/female relationships.

The Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi is a remarkable and courageous woman. Successfully balancing vocations in literature, social criticism, and medicine, she has broken a path that most of her countrywomen can only hope one day to follow.

And for taking as her primary subject the injustices of patriarchal Arab society and the neo-imperialist West, she has been jailed under President Sadat's “Law of Shame,” dropped by her Egyptian publisher, fired from her position in the ministry of health, and labeled as a radical feminist whose blind ideology too often gets...