Women in feminist writing: Reading in the book The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El Saadawi

; RESEARCH ; ARTICLE z z Women in feminist writing: Reading in the book The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El Saadawi Hameurlaine Zhor Dr. Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, Laboratory of Philosophical Studies and Human and Social Issues in Algeria, Ibn Khaldoun University Tiaret Algeria Email: Doi Serial Keywords Writing, woman, man, religion, imam.

" He says: I am sick of writing, and writing is like love, it kills, and I say: Writing doesn't kill

And does not kill, unless Absence of awareness, love does not kill, Nothing kills except the absence of love.

He looks at me with eyes full of jealousy, wishing he could regain consciousness so he could write again1.

Writing is a conscious, influential act, capable of changing the mental makeup of societies, which can give its author a presence, as Manifested that In writing feminism; However, differences in ideologies lead to differences in visions and thus differences in the degree of influence and ability to change.

Arab society, like other peoples of the world, has known the political and cultural women's movement, which, through self-expression, sought to be viewed as human beings with rights and duties. However, Arab feminism, in its infancy, was unable to touch on religion, as Arab and Muslim women know for certain the status that has beenDIt is established in Islam - and this distinction is a natural distinction - in our view, based on the Almighty’s saying:O mankind, fear your Lord, who created you from one soul and created from it its mate and dispersed from both of them many men and women. And fear Allah, through whom you ask one another, and the wombs. ﴾ (Surat An-Nisa, verse 1)And his saying:O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and

Nawal El Saadawi, The Fall of the Imam, p. 143 ¹

Acquainted. ^ (Surat Al-Hujurat, verse 13)And he also said:So their Lord responded to them, “Never will I allow to be lost the work of any worker among you, whether male or female. You are of one another.” ( (Surah Al Imran, verse 195)And he also said:And they (women) have rights similar to those of their husbands over them, according to what is equitable. ^ (Surat Al-Baqarah, verse 228).

Indeed, women are gentle and kindwhatThe Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, recommended treating them well, and God Almighty commanded that we treat them kindly. This status granted to Muslim women prevented them from harboring any hostility toward religion. However, their hostility was toward customs, traditions, and the stereotype that places women under men, which makes them feel inferior, and considers their authority to lie in their masculinity.What is said aboutHer deficiency in religion and reason deprives her of what she enjoyed in Islam.This is whatDistorted religion andled toOppression, subjugation, and domination of women have driven Arab women like Huda Shaarawi and Nawal El Saadawi to follow the example of Western women in their hostility to religion.

Perhaps in this research, we seek to demonstrate, through the book "The Fall of the Imam," this hostility. At the same time, we discover the situation that Arab women experienced, sometimes in the name of customs and traditions, and most of it in this novel, in the name of religion. Through it, she wanted to show the situation in which they live, calling for changing this image and consequently changing the social, cultural, and religious structures in which they live, which are within the normal in men's writings.

Our approach to studying this novel is the critical approach, but we want to begin by valuing any feminist writing. Zahra Karam says: “Women constitute a controversial topic at the level of social change in any society, given that changing the fixed image around them is likely to liberate memory and prepare thought to accept unfamiliar images. If the recipient is accustomed to women as a subject that is addressed in creativity, myths and tales, then when women write and produce writing, they lend their position within the forms of expression from subject to self, and thus push thought to consider their existence as an agent.

Nawal El Saadawi is part of the second generation of Arab feminists who have sought to change the stereotypical image of the Arab woman, and even to alter mental constructs so that they become prepared to accept her new image, her free thought, her equality with men, and even to recognize her fertile thought, viewing her as a complete and virtuous human being.

• 2.    Biography of Nawal El Saadawi:

She was born in 1931 and her family is conservative. Her father worked in a government position in the Ministry of Education and Teachings. He expressed his opinion against the British colonizer and was one of the revolutionaries against him, which led to... o Th O He instilled in his daughter a strong personality and freedom of expression. Her father's position made her lucky because he insisted on educating her and all her siblings. Because women at that time were often restricted to teaching or medicine, and to excel, she was a surgeon, chest doctor, and psychiatrist. She married three times, only to be divorced. The most important marriage, in my opinion, for her was her husband, Hatata Sharif III. Firstly, because it lasted for forty-three years, and secondly, because her husband shared her ideas and wrote about gender equality, only for this principle to be undermined by his betrayal of his wife. This was a common case of illness that Nawal El Saadawi treated, which centered around marital infidelity, male authority, and domestic violence.

Nawal El Saadawi wasn't content with medicine. She was also a novelist, and among her writings was "Women and Sex," in which she recounted the tragedies of women, beginning with female circumcision, which she herself had been subjected to at the age of six. This book was published in 1972, and brought about a radical change in Nawal El Saadawi's life. She was fired from her job at the Ministry of Health.And I stoppedHer duties as editor-in-chief of Health Magazine and securing an assistant at the Doctors' Syndicate were the foundations for the feminist movement in its second generation. This stance on the condition of Arab women and how to confront it became a source of danger for her, as she was imprisoned several times. This led her to become aware of the conditions of many women and the oppression they were subjected to, which led to her book "Woman at Point Zero" in 1995.,"Memoirs from a Women's Prison" "The Fall of the Imam" is a book under study. Regarding this danger, she says, "Danger has become a part of my life ever since I picked up the pen and wrote. There is nothing more dangerous than the truth in a world filled with lies." A lawyer even filed a lawsuit against her to strip her of her Egyptian citizenship, but he lost. (Kram, 2010, p. 97)

Her other writings include "A Doctor's Diary 1958" and "I Learned Love in 1957." El Saadawi)

Text division:

The text is divided into several texts that separate and then meet, narrating events that keep diverging until they meet, and they all meet with a word from the Imam, or an action from him, or an order from him, despite their intertwining and complexity. They are different chapters, and despite their differences, they do not contain summer or spring. They are cold winter nights without rain, because of the gloom they carry in the hearts of women, whether in the “house of happiness” or with their legitimate wives, or even while they are still children.

The feminine taa could have been a gain for women, as they were given something in the language that gave them more power than men. However, it was the cause of their misfortunes, as Fadhila Farouk says: “How miserable it is for an individual to be a woman among us, as all of a woman’s ambitions falter at the threshold of the feminine taa.” (Farouk, 2000, p. 12)From the beginning, the history of humanity has been stained with blackness by the actions of Eve.AThis is not what Christianity and Judaism narrate about the woman being the one who made the man commit sin and God punished him by expelling him from Paradise and throwing him to Earth. She is inhabited by Satan due to her physical weakness, her slender figure is a sin she committed, her love is a sin and her motherhood is a disgrace (did not Plato say that the most important men are only those who were created by the gods and to whom the soul was given, those who live uprightly, as for the cowards we assume with reason that they were born as a support in the second generation. And this situation may continue unless the scales are tipped and the opposite happens.

Here we canNATMen's righteousnessThey are uniqueComplete human beings who aspire to perfection and selfrealization. As for women, the most they can hope for is to become men.. (Cité in: The woman is not able to discover » the philosophy of women’s secrets, consult him in February 2020)

“This is the first time I was born directly from the living room and the one who left it was don’t know that there was a return visit to the oils, but for those that were there (event of the views sans rectitude), it may be assumed that there is a view on it It accompanies the nature of women in the second generation. This regression can continue with generation successives in the past few years. In this situation this situation will help people with complete health needs and those who may be able to complete it all the time; This woman can eat her home “(platform, time 90).”

Descartes continues this view of women's inferiority to men through the duality of spirit and matter, assigning spirit to men and matter to women, following the same view held by Aristotle. In his interpretation of existence, Aristotle states that everything is dependent on its natural matter, and that women are deficient beings. He says, "Women are naturally flawed."

The women are deficient in nature «they cannot reproduce the sperm that contains the human being when there is a man and a woman in love, the woman realizes the substance of the man (that is, he is the mother), the femme is responsible for this Nourriture (la matière).

A woman is incomplete because she does not have semen, which contains the entire human being. When a man meets a woman, the man carries the essence (i.e. the soul), while the woman carries only the food (matter).

And Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw women as a means of procreation. And that Socrates would be ashamed that a woman gave birth to him in light of this dark image that has accompanied women?I revoltedWomen defended women's rights by demonstrating in the streets, by women's associations, and by writing, which was a collection of words, a plural of a word and a masculine word ordes mots and le mot is masculine, so even the word seeks its existence in the masculine, excluding the feminine taa so as not to stumble there. However, just as "In the beginning was the word," women tried to establish their existence, their entity in writing. The question we would like to pose is: How have feminist writings contributed to expressing women's tragedy? A more precise question pertains to our study.

How did Nawal El Saadawi express the inferiority of women in the Arab world?

• - Nawal El Saadawi wonders: Is it possible for a man to deprive a woman of her existence?

Nawal El Saadawi opens her novel with a dedication to a group of women who were with her in prison: Iranian Kasherbanou of Shiraz, Sudanese Fatima Taj Sir, Lebanese Colette Itani, and Egyptian Itidal Mahmoud. She drew inspiration for her novel from them, which had haunted her since childhood, stemming from the tragedy of her school friend Fatima, who feared her father.

Al-Saadawi tried to uncover and lift the curtain on many issues that directly or indirectly affect women in Arab and Islamic society, making them into weak, easily broken slaves, or at least this is how men see them. In their highest perception of them, they do not exceed the limits of their grace, they do not exceed the limits of tenderness, weakness and emotion. They are fragile beings, much less than men. They are nothing but a tool, but the act of writing will reveal that hidden side of them that men’s masculinity refuses to acknowledge. It is the conscious thinking that writing reveals. Al-Saadawi believes that men have long reserved writing for themselves and left the narrative to women, because the narrative remains and the narrator is forgotten, but the writer remains with his writing.

One writes from a pain that has grown in his chest and from memories that haunt him, but this is not the case with Nawal El Saadawi. She mentions that her childhood was surrounded by tenderness, so she borrows the experience of a friend of hers and adapts it to express the tragedy of the Arab woman, and if this is the case, it also includes her. She says, “As a child, I used to see the face of God in my dreams, like the face of my mother, who was very just, and like the face of my father, who was very merciful. But my classmate Fatima Ahmed at school used to see the face of God in her dreams, like the face of her father, who was very cruel, and like the face of her uncle, who was very unjust…” (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 78) But (Here, the letter of exception excludes Fatima. How can we build a ruling and a position and argue for it if it is merely an exception, unless we are saturated with principles that insist on confirming the exception to make it a general rule and to make it the case of every Muslim woman? Indeed, how can we make the experiences of others more credible for our rulings than the experiences we have lived through? This is a matter of paradox and fallacy.

Imam: Nawal El Saadawi's novel is based on a fundamental premise: making religion the basis for women's inferiority and subordination to men, starting with the title of her novel, "The Fall of the Imam." Although she gave men multiple kinship relationships between father, husband, and son, and multiple roles between the cleric (security guard), the legitimate opposition, and the Imam, she made them all subordinate to the Imam. The Imamate is unlike any other role mentioned in the story; it expresses a religious dimension and an image of prestige and spiritual authority that is beloved and respected in the collective imagination. This makes the choice of the "Imam" as a central character in the novel.

Expressing Nawal El Saadawi’s position on religion and her contempt for it and religious rituals, she says, “When I traveled to Mecca…I read the advertisements on the walls: Welcome to the guests of God, and behind the walls there was a man and a girl like a boy and the third one was the devil. (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 78)Perhaps what you describe happens in all countries, but you have specified it in Mecca because of its spiritual connection to it. Religion imposes a shackle that binds the will of women and enslaves them, so women...

Isn't religion what made her dear? Isn't it what saved her life, or was she buried alive?

Something about me was too shy,

Everything about them is a T for shame

Since our names stumble at the last letter,

Since the frown that greets us at birth

Older than this

Since my mother was stuck in a marriage that wasn't quite a marriage

"Since everything I saw in her, she has been dying in silence." (Farouk, 2006, p. 11)

From the beginning, she was an outcast. Whenever a man was told that he would have a daughter, he grieved and turned inward. This is all because of the religion that burdened her with sin from birth. It is an inheritance of sin that did not even occur on the face of the earth. And the imam continues to teach children that women are the cause of humanity’s destruction and its descent into torment. That is why the writer escapes this reality to despise the imam, saying, “I was not able to leave him absolute power in the novel as in this world.” (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 11)

He can't read:

The argumentative mechanism used by the writer in the dialogue of the main character “Bint Allah” with those around her, whose argument was that this is the word of Allah and the word of Allah is written, so they referred to the Imam as the primary source of their knowledge, which is sufficient evidence to install the Imam as a god. She says, “All their thoughts are the words of the Imam.” (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 20)

From the mother's call to the face of the old Pope:In these parts of the novel, Nawal El Saadawi works on protesting with emotion. The reader of her novel, without knowing the writer's ideology and without exploring the blankness of the text and its background, goes to sympathize with the "prostitute" for the maternal emotion she evoked in her after it was translated and remains in her spirit and how she searches for her daughter's face among the attendees. She says, "I removed the bricks and pebbles, covered the ground with soft soil like a mother's chest, and laid me to sleep." Then she goes on to discuss the inferiority of women, which increases if she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, otherwise if it was a child. She makes a comparison between "Jawaher (one of the novel's characters), the prostitute in her novel who works in a brothel" and "the Virgin Mary." (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 10)How can this collective imagination contradict itself by accepting Christ as the Son of God while there is no daughter of God?

You keep using fallacious arguments like asking when the Imam recites Surah Al-Ikhlas:Say, “He is God, the One. (1) God, the Eternal Refuge. (2) He neither begets nor is born. (3) And there is none comparable to Him.” (4)"The name of 'God's Grace' (one of the characters in the novel) asks: 'Did not God give birth to Christ?' (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 24).

Nawal El Saadawi seeks to promote equality between men and women and to respect them as human beings. Despite her full awareness of the importance of religious symbols in religion, she removes the sanctity of the sacred text when she writes it as a human text, without movement or special brackets...*

Women and Divine Injustice: The feminist movement in its early days in Arab society—since the missions sent by Muhammad Ali to study in Paris, which included Rifa'a al-Tahtawi—expressed the inferiority of women through a social attitude that placed femininity in the hands of women and masculinity and virility in the hands of men. Biological difference was not a necessary prelude to social discrimination, but rather the muscular build of men, which grants physical strength, not mental strength, imposed this hierarchy. The man, the animal—as Nawal El Saadawi puts it—then the woman says: "The price of a buffalo in the market is more expensive than a woman. A man owns four women and only one buffalo." "Only the son of Adam eats the flesh of a living creature." (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 15)Justice presupposes, at the very least, that we call identical similarities by the same names. If it is possible to call the Son of God for Christ, then why not the Daughter of God, whom her mother bore from a relationship with the Imam who visited her in the brothel: “He threatens me, fills my soul with apparent love, and my belly rises with holy love.” (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 15).

Men were raised on this principle and oppressed the weak in a society that neglected the woman's mind and potential, focusing on her physical weakness. She did not demonstrate this only through the Imam, but also through "Fadlallah" who suffered like her in an orphanage for illegitimate children, "the children of God", who are none other than the Imam's children in all his various forms, including ruler, cleric, security chief, and opposition party... Speaking about "Fadlallah" and his closeness to her, she says: "He was trained to kill since childhood. He would kill sparrows while they were standing on a tree...and in the middle of the sparrow's head, he would aim and the sparrow would fall with a single shot." (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 50)She did not use a masculine word, but rather a feminine one, with the repetition of the word to emphasize that it is not a sin because she is only a female and she is socially defiled, and this defilement has been emphasized by religion, as “women are traitors by nature, like their mother Eve... A man’s betrayal is permissible by God’s command, but a woman’s betrayal is from the devil.” (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 59).

Existential alienation of women: Nawal El Saadawi emphasizes the inferiority of women in Arab societies. It is an inferiority imposed by society in the name of God. Therefore, the feminine existence is a material existence and nothing else. The elegance of her body and her charms are for the pleasure of men. This is what Nawal El Saadawi relies on to bombard the bond of marriage and its sanctity as a solemn covenant. The latter is nothing but a way to possess a woman's body and even consider it a burden because, despite her weakness, she expresses the honor of men. In this honor there is a calamity. She says, "Why are there no legitimate wives in heaven? Otherwise, what is the difference between heaven and earth...and if there is, then she is a virgin houri?" (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 59). It is an emphasis on the only dimension of women, which is the physical, bodily dimension, nothing more; in line with what Aristotle said about men owning women’s bodies and thinking as heresy, as she said, “Silence means that she is thinking, and her thinking means the absence of faith.” (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 57).

Women and the spoken word: Nawal El Saadawi evokes the status of women since time immemorial, and the restrictions and derogation practiced against them in the name of their gender, religion, customs, and tyranny. They have not enjoyed...ThreeMen are fortunate enough to write, and so they have taken their share of the narrative. Narratives do not immortalize women, nor are they preserved; rather, their names are forgotten along with the narrative, leaving only them. The influence of narratives is evident in many feminist writings, revealing from their very origins the tyranny that has been attached to women. Writing revealed what was intended to be hidden in the narrative, as you can see in “The Fall of the Imam.”As writing is born from the womb of suffering and becomes a woman's legitimate right, Assia Djebar says in her book The Unburied Woman: "I write to describe horror so that it is not forgotten, so that the younger generations are not tempted by the criminal adventure of reactionaries."(J'écris, j'écris to read the story, for the next jamais for the young generations are soutiennent and ne soient jamais tentées for the criminelle of fondamentalisme adventure) (Assia, 2002, p. 78),But it still expresses thinking, as writing is written thinking. The spoken is a spoken thought and it is necessarythatDon't get confusedfor meThe details express the woman narrator and reveal her thoughts and strength.

Imam al-Hakim: In television interviews, Nawal El Saadawi mentioned that by "Imam" she meant the tyrannical and arrogant ruler, referring to "Anwar Sadat", as she was imprisoned during his rule. However, we believe that the matter is not as she stated, as she did not choose from among the positions other than the Imam, as he represents a symbol of the Islamic religion. She also cites the Quranic text without any respect for the sanctity of this text, and even if she is not a Muslim, out of religious tolerance, it is necessary to respect the feelings of others who profess this religion. As long as a woman does not revolt against a man, she will not believe in the existence of God. She says on page 82, "If you had resisted injustice once, if you had defended your rights, perhaps I would have known justice; and if you knew justice, you would have known God." (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 82).

Victory of Thinking Identity: Writing is the jewel of the emotional mind, and its author rushes to write it down. It is creativity, but not all moments of our lives are creative. Writing is what expresses this momentary distinction. Assia Djebar says, “When a woman’s creativity expresses itself with the magic of the word, it disturbs and disturbs.”(As women's creativity increases when moving to the magic of mots, it is inquiète and different) (Assia, 2002, p. 76) At the end of her novel, Nawal El Saadawi confirms her identity, which is represented by her thought, which is a common denominator between her and the man, and this is what he cannot possess, and this is what makes the man afraid, afraid that she will exploit it and show her superiority over her. This is evident in her saying: “He says I am a woman unlike other women, and he says how? He says you are a woman who does not feel her body while always feeling her mind. He yawns as if sleep suddenly overtakes him, then opens his eyes full of jealousy, jealous of her mind more than anything else.” (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 153)... She also says: “She saw them standing in front of her in a long line, clapping their hands together and being extremely amazed. They said: She is neither a witch nor a madman, but rather sane and her words are the epitome of reason. Her mind became more dangerous than her madness, so they sentenced her to death by a method faster than stoning, and not to give her any other chance. They did not publish the trial in the newspapers, and they closed the file and buried it in the ground forever.” (Al-Saadawi, 2000, p. 11)It is the fear of women’s thinking, this strength hidden behind this weakness, this beauty, this grace, and perhapsYHe carried something with himYesFrom the malice of tyranny. She can be imprisoned, she can be broken, she can be humiliated, but she thinks, for she thinks like him too. planning, You infer, You realize, She concludes. So what could her executioner, society and religion do to her to...AShe thinks, she thinks even against her will, for thinking is her identity, and no one can take it away from her, as she says in the introduction to her novel, “The Naked Face of the Arab Woman”: “We are free, We spin as we please, About ourselves or others, Or we don't revolve, but my mind revolves, Although notYCome in sleep as in wakefulness(Al-Saadawi, 2017, p. 7).

Conclusion

Feminist writing has captured the suffering of Arab women and presented their image as it appears in the imagination of the female writer. Because this suffering was the result of an extreme religiosity, we sense in The Fall of the Imam a hostility to religion, and perhaps it is also an ideology that seeped in with Arab women's openness to Western feminism, embracing it with all its cultural and social heritage.

The novel The Fall of the Imam, with its hostility to religion, which we consider an example of extreme feminism that began to reject its inferiority by directly accusing religion. However, the act of writing as an act of advocacy was able to bring out women as subjects and make them narrate and write about themselves, a side that would not have been revealed to men, and societies would not have abandoned that traditional stereotype in their view of women as inferior human beings. The new portrayal of women in her writings lifted them out of their existential crisis, moving this existence - only material in the eyes of men - from power to action. Although we differ from Nawal El Saadawi in her ideologies, we agree with her on the importance of feminist writing and its role in highlighting aspects ofFrom lifethe societyAt, as the woman sees it herself, and thus becomes able toChanging the social, cultural and historical structure.

Women in feminist writing: Reading in the book The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El Saadawi

Hameurlaine Zhor