The Egyptian writer, doctor, and agitator Nawal El Saadawi passed away in Cairo on March 21, 2021, at the age of eighty-nine. Despite decades of threats, lawsuits, censorship, and disregard, she had never been able to leave permanently a city that was, she wrote,
the nightmare of being hunted down, besieged, imprisoned, the pulsations of love, the pain of defeat, the exhilaration of resistance, the falling down then standing up again and again and again in a struggle that has no end.
I interviewed El Saadawi in 2004. I was a twenty-five-year-old journalist who had read a few of her books. She was one of the best-known Arab feminists in the world but a marginalized figure in her own country—banned by the authorities from government posts and media appearances, railed…